The Neue Galerie is dedicated, with religious single-mindedness, to the cause of Austrian and German modernism. Like any church, it has its patron saints; Gustav Klimt is one. And it has its sacred objects, notably Klimt’s 1907 portrait of the Viennese socialite Adele Bloch-Bauer, a picture with the visual heft and cultish allure of a reliquary.


Painter and portrait alike are the centerpieces of “Gustav Klimt: 150th Anniversary Celebration.” Full-orchestra salutes to the artist’s birthday — Klimt was born in Vienna in 1862 — are happening in Europe. But with 7 paintings, 40 drawings, a couple of posters and some photographs, this New York tribute is on a chamber-music scale, as befits the Neue Galerie’s town house quarters.


Klimt was an interesting guy, zesty, smart and a character, though because he wrote few self-revealing personal statements, what we know of him comes mostly through photographs. In them his face is alert, sweet and wary, like a woodland creature just emerged from sleep. He was, in a hippie-ish way, a dandy, favoring waist sashes and floor-length smocks. And although reputedly a lady’s man, he lived, unmarried, with his mother for much of his life.


As an artist he was a go-getter and, at least initially, a team worker: He gained early professional success as a partner in a three-man interior design firm specializing in narrative mural painting. But he also had ambitions and tastes of his own, and these sent him banging into the wall of Viennese propriety. The art he was making around the turn of the century, at the high point of his fame, was often both blatantly erotic — many of his drawings are sexually explicit — and bizarrely morbid. No wonder die-young-leave-a-beautiful-corpse types like Egon Schiele revered him.


The career trajectory traced by the paintings in the show, all from the Neue Galerie’s collection, starts late. The earliest picture here, of a dark-haired, dark-dressed, closed-eyed woman, is very much in a Symbolist mode and dates from 1903, by which point Klimt had long since abandoned the realist style in which he’d been trained.


Six years earlier, in 1897, he had broken away from the academic art establishment by helping to found the Vienna Secession, a local edition of a progressive modernist movement that had sprung up a few years earlier in Germany. Soon after this change in allegiance, he began to encounter problems. Government censors objected to the poster he designed for the first big Secession show. His image of a nude Theseus slaying the Minotaur had to be reworked to hide the hero’s genitals.


Then the academics exacted revenge for his rebellion. In 1896 Klimt had been commissioned to do three allegorical paintings for the Great Hall of the University of Vienna. But after he joined the Secession, the pictures were rejected by a faculty vote, and when they were grudgingly accepted later, they were assigned to a different location. Klimt felt he had no choice but to take them back and return his fee.


The Neue Galerie has souvenirs of these unnerving censorship incidents. Before-and-after versions of the Secession poster are in the show. So is a highly polished chalk study for the last of the three university pictures to be finished, “Jurisprudence.” By the time Klimt did this drawing, harassment had begun. And it’s hard not to think that his outlandish image, of a giant octopus flanked by vampy nudes, was meant as a deliberate affront to his persecutors.


Defiant though Klimt was, he was also shaken. And partly to keep his mind off art world politics, he got extra-busy. In 1904 he joined the Wiener Werkstätte, the Secession’s crafts and design arm, where art and everything else — furniture, jewelry, dinnerware, couture — met.


And he went on the road, traveling to Italy. He spent time in Venice and loved a lot of what he saw. But it was the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, with its mosaic images of Byzantine rulers set against gold ground, that swept him off his feet, and provided the template for the Adele Bloch-Bauer portrait.