This joint approach was ultimately aimed at creating that most Germanic of things, the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, uniting painting, poetry, music and architecture. The group’s most thoroughgoing attempt was for their Beethoven-themed exhibition of 1902. Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, which was meant to last only for the duration of the 14th Secessionist exhibition but was stored by a patron, is recreated here. A series of panels that covered three walls, it can be read like a strip cartoon revealing the artist’s mishmash of mystical and allegorical ideals and as a chapbook of his painterly motifs. There are floating genii symbolising the yearning for happiness; a kneeling couple signifying suffering humanity; figures of sickness, death, poetry and so on, and a choir of angels singing Schiller’s Ode to Joy. It was the most ambitious scheme Klimt ever attempted.

Most the figures are female for, as he admitted, his real painterly interest was “above all, women”. They were a more visceral interest too. Klimt may have lived with his mother and sisters, and his lifelong companionship with the dress designer Emilie Flöge may not have been physical, but at his death he was facing 14 paternity suits from former models. A look at his Nuda Veritas or Judith II and it is clear that, for this neighbour and exact contemporary of Freud, women — idealised or femmes fatales — were an obsession.

It is, however, his landscapes that are the real delight of the show. He painted them during his regular breaks at Attersee near Salzburg and they show nature rearranged as rhythm and pattern. He cropped his scenes tightly, filling the frame with a mosaic of tree trunks or leaves and often doing without either a horizon or a focal point. What landscapes such as The Park and Fir Forest I show is Klimt clearing his mind of the headiness of Vienna. They will have the same effect on the viewer in culture-laden Liverpool.