Summer 1977. A rail journey from Athens to Vienna. With all the usual delays, it will take the train about forty hours to reach Vienna. I am sharing a compartment with a young Japanese lecturer at some art college, who is traveling to the same place. He is one of those typical Far Eastern travelers who perfectly fits the standard clich￯﾿ﾽ. He is going to do Europe in six days, with ten hours for Vienna - after an uninterrupted rail journey of two days and one night. He has only two aims in Vienna: to see Otto Wagner's architecture and - Gustav Klimt's paintings. Klimt's worldwide popularity could be illustrated with many similar episodes. It can be seen in the undivided appreciation of a very broad international public as well as those with an academic interest in art and social history. It is likely that no other Modernist artist has ever enjoyed such broad and lasting popularity.