I haven't studied Klimt as much as I would like. His gold works don't do much for me. They do make for excellent jigsaw puzzles though, given all the detail.

What I do know about him comes from documentary works, like the three part series A History of Art in Three Colors. In that series, James Fox presents two bits if history which might say a lot about Klimt and his work. For one, electroplating erupted as a manufacturing method for consumer goods in the 19th century, bringing the allure of gold possessions down to the level where common people could afford something a little golden. Two, this era, called the Guilded Age, debased the aesthetic value of gold, because it was so widely available in one form or another.

As Klimt was raised in the midst of all this, it would have influenced his outlook on life, which naturally would have filtered into his work. And since Klimt was so fond of women, Dr. Fox speculates that Klimt might have been trying to use gold in his works in order to make gold as precious again as the love he must have felt for all the women he encountered, or just as precious as love in general; to kind of take gold back to a level beyond hedonistic materialism.