The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  The warrior emperor Marcus Aurelius himself guarded the vineyards of this Roman bulwark from Marcomanni attackers, building the walls higher to fend off the Huns, the Goths, and the Alemanni. Soon it was the eastern bulwark of Christendom, the frontier defender against Slav invaders and Magyar horsemen who thundered across the Hungarian plain. The garrison became a growing citadel known as Wien.

  The discovery of a golden scroll in a child’s grave near Vienna with a Jewish prayer—“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is Our God! The Lord is One!”—placed the Jewish presence at least as far back as the third century, suggesting Jews were co-founders of Roman Austria. But as Christianity replaced paganism, the relationship with Jewish citizens became capricious. They were tolerated, then expelled; allowed to return as merchants, but not to own houses. Literacy set Jews apart, and the Jewish tradition of aiding their widowed, orphaned, and handicapped inspired envy.

  If Jews became too successful, a misfortune—plague, drought, war, famine—transformed peaceful neighbors into howling mobs. Jews were defamed as usurious moneylenders and killers of Christ, then derided as shiftless wanderers when they fled.

  Jeanette Bauer, whose youngest child, Adele, was Klimt’s most famous model, ca. 1862. (Illustration Credit 3.1)

  Gradually, Jewish industry—along with bailouts of spendthrift barons, counts, and princes—won respect, even titles, from Germanic aristocracy. By 1814, diplomats at the Congress of Vienna were flocking to the salon of the Jewish aristocrat Fanny von Arnstein, and they whirled to the beat of a salacious mountain courtship dance, imported by Danubian boatmen, that the Viennese called the waltz.

  When the earliest reforms of the Jewish emancipation came in 1848, Vienna had only two hundred tolerated Jewish families. Now thousands more packed their bags in Galicia, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. As restrictions on Jewish residency loosened, Vienna beckoned.

  In 1857, Emperor Franz Joseph ordered the dismantling of Vienna’s massive stone fortifications. It was a revolutionary decision. The battlements had grown to immense dimensions during the Crusades, financed, according to legend, with ransom for freeing Richard the Lionhearted. The walls had stopped the Turks and sheltered Viennese sensibilities from the crude peasantry. Down came the walls! The imperial city was remaking itself. Johann Strauss II, the merry fiddler, wrote the “Demolition Polka” to celebrate this chaotic reinvention.

  The construction din on the Ringstrasse, the cradle of the city’s rebirth, was as ferocious as the monumental new neoclassical Parliament building architects had crowned with chariots of winged goddesses permanently in battle. The emperor’s War Ministry was adorned with avenging angels and busts of soldiers that celebrated the empire’s ethnic diversity: Serb horsemen with handlebar mustaches, Hungarian Magyars wearing head kerchiefs like Gypsies, Croats with the jaunty cravats that Parisians adopted as the tie, and Bosnians sporting the “blood-red fezzes” that the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth compared to “tiny bonfires lit by Islam in honor of his Apostolic Majesty.” “If you want peace, prepare for war” read the ministry’s inscription.

  The Habsburgs courted wealthy Jewish families to finance railroads and factories, honoring them with aristocratic titles handed out like party favors. Jewish barons—Rothschilds, Gutmanns, and Scheys—could now aspire to marry their daughters to Catholic aristocrats. They could mingle in Vienna’s “second society,” of freshly minted aristocrats and industrialists.

  Between 1860 and 1900, the Jewish population of Vienna exploded, from 6,000 to 147,000, the largest in Western Europe. As the turn of the century neared, nearly one in ten Vienna residents was Jewish. Vienna had gained some of Middle Europe’s most talented minds, like Sigmund Freud, whose family had moved from an Edenic town in Moravia; Gustav Mahler, whose family had relocated from Bohemia; and Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose family had converted to Catholicism generations ago.

  Affluent Viennese Jewish families were instant lovers of Viennese culture. They filled the empire’s new theaters, opera houses, and schools far out of proportion to their share of the population. Less than 10 percent of Viennese children were Jewish, yet Jewish children were 30 percent of high school classes. The Jewish Viennese embraced the newly unrestricted fields of science and medicine. More free to make things up as they went along, they supported new artists, intellectuals, and political trends. They became such crucial patrons of culture that soon, the journalist Stefan Zweig wrote, “whoever wished to put through something in Vienna,” or “sought appreciation as well as an audience, was dependent on the Jewish bourgeoisie.”

  The Jewish elite was, as the Czech writer Milan Kundera put it, the “intellectual cement” of Middle Europe.

  Yet most Jewish families crowding into Vienna lived far from the charmed circle on the Ringstrasse. The Ostjuden, or Eastern Jews, had fled poverty and pogroms in backward corners of Poland and Russia. They arrived desperate and devout, crowding into decrepit warrens that clung to the banks of the Danube Canal in Leopoldstadt, the old Jewish ghetto, now referred to as “Matzoh Island.” This was turn-of-the-century Vienna: a cosmopolitan, wealthy imperial city, a playground of aristocrats and palaces, a magnet for desperately poor refugees.

  Anti-Semitism marched hand in hand with the rising prominence of Jewish families. Georg von Schönerer, an anti-Semitic politician near the German border, was jailed in 1888 for beating Jews. But his sister, the open-minded actress Alexandrine von Schönerer, socialized with Jewish theater patrons, and their father was a friend and business associate of the Rothschilds.

  One of Georg von Schönerer’s disciples, Karl Lueger, would make Vienna the birthplace of anti-Semitism as a mainstream political force. Lueger, who electrified crowds by blaming Jewish entrepreneurs for Vienna’s economic woes, was elected mayor on an anti-Semitic platform and took office in 1897 over the strident opposition of the emperor. “Handsome Karl” introduced electric streetlights, a public marketplace, and municipal gasworks—all the while pleading for assistance from the very Jewish bankers he denounced as an international conspiracy. When it was pointed out that Lueger himself socialized with people of Jewish descent, Lueger snapped: “I decide who is a Jew.”

  For members of the privileged Jewish elites like Moritz Bauer, the crude anti-Semitism of politicians like Lueger was background noise, the tasteless chatter of déclassé demagogues who were best occupied with fixing the streets.

  Moritz and Jeanette Bauer were newcomers to Austria when their Viennese daughter was born, on August 9, 1881, in the heat of the Danubian summer. They named her Adele, Old German for “Noble,” suggesting the family’s aspirations to live the promise of the emancipation.

  The Wounded Creator

  The Greeks thought inspiration was a gift of the gods.

  Freud believed art arose from attempts to resolve psychological conflict, and that for creators, the pain of childhood trauma was a wellspring of inspiration. If so, it didn’t require Freud to identify the demons that haunted the workaholic artist and serial philanderer who was Gustav Klimt.

  Klimt was born the second of seven children on July 14, 1862, in Baumgarten on the outskirts of Vienna, into a Catholic family of the city’s large immigrant underclass. His father, Ernst Klimt, from Bohemia, was a gruff uneducated Czech, isolated by his rudimentary German and frustrated by his meager earnings as a gold engraver. Klimt’s Viennese mother, Anna, had once nurtured unattainable dreams of being an opera singer. Now she struggled with anxiety and depression that deepened after each child’s birth.

  Gustav Klimt grew up miserably poor. His father worked brutal hours, lacking the connections to obtain lucrative commissions. At Christmas, “there wasn’t even any bread in the house, much less presents,” recalled Gustav’s sister Hermine. Instability was constant. The family moved five times before Klimt was two, and in one home, they shared a single room. When he was twelve, his winsome five-year-old sister, Anna, died of a childhood illness. His mother collapsed. His beautiful, emotionally brittle older sister, Klara, had an attac
k of “religious madness” and never really recovered. School was a humiliating daily ordeal. Gustav stayed out one year because he lacked proper pants. Another year a prosperous schoolboy’s watch went missing, and Gustav believed his status as the poorest boy in class made him the prime suspect. He often suffered hurt feelings, rejection, and disappointment. But he loved to draw. When he finished his chores, he sketched the neighbor’s cat, his younger brother Ernst, and his wan mother, slumped in her chair.

  Gustav and Ernst helped their father work with gold. Thanks to the construction boom of the Ringstrasse, gold was a more promising trade. The Midas touch was everywhere on the imperial ministries and monuments going up on the Ringstrasse. All that glittered was gold, or at least gilt. Here, Atlas hoisted his golden globe, the gilt features of Pallas Athena shone in the sun, and gold leaf glowed from ceilings and Corinthian columns.

  Gold symbolized everything that was out of reach for Gustav and Ernst Klimt, who seemed born to live at the sidelines of Vienna’s pageantry, as skilled tradesmen like their father.

  But Gustav had a sense of destiny. At fourteen, he enrolled at the new School of Applied Arts in Vienna. Ernst soon joined him. The talented, good-looking Klimt brothers attracted an important mentor, Professor Ferdinand Laufberger. Impressed by their precocious gifts and relentless work ethic, Laufberger guided them into mosaic and fresco. He recommended them for their first commissions, and soon the brothers were painting the interiors of the Hermes Palace, an imperial retreat for Empress Elisabeth from the Vienna court she despised. The Klimt brothers teamed up with another promising student, Franz Matsch. In 1880, the trio painted the ceilings of the Palais Sturany in Vienna. They began to call themselves the Künstler-Compagnie, or Artists Company.

  Gustav Klimt, then eighteen, was the hope of his desolate family.

  “He was not naturally a man of society but more a loner, and it therefore had to be the duty of his brothers and sisters to eliminate all the small things in his daily life that were inconvenient,” his sister Hermine recalled.

  “Gustl, why don’t you know how to play music?” asked his little brother, Georg, as Gustav sketched. “Because I must paint, you monkey you,” Gustav answered affectionately.

  The Künstler-Compagnie soon had more work than its three young artists had time. They were invited to the Middle European architectural gem of Karlsbad to paint a theater. That led to wall decorations for the silver anniversary of Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth’s lifeless marriage. They painted a lion lying languidly at the feet of a lushly nude heroine, in what seemed a risqué allusion to the bohemian empress.

  Socially, the Klimt brothers cut striking figures. They were well spoken, with the discerning eye of gifted artists, and the rugged physicality of men destined for the fields. Unknown to their admirers, they were under tremendous financial pressure. Only one of their three surviving sisters, Johanna, would ever marry.

  But the Ringstrasse offered opportunity. The Klimts studied ancient vases at the Imperial Museum in search of the Etruscan figures and Egyptian motifs so fashionable for Vienna friezes. They used photographs to achieve a sharply realistic style that was far ahead of its time.

  Even in rigidly hierarchical Vienna, the Klimt brothers’ talent eclipsed their dubious pedigree. At one reception, a society girl cast sultry glances at Gustav, telling him she was pleasantly surprised to discover he was so young. “What seducers you are!” a sculptor friend remarked, laughing.

  Ernst began to court Helene Flöge, the daughter of Hermann August Flöge, a manufacturer and exporter of meerschaum pipes.

  The Flöges were as happy as the Klimts were miserable. One uncle, Friedrich Paulick, a decorative artisan for the emperor, built an enormous handmade castle on Lake Attersee in the Austrian Alps, with a labyrinth of suites for his large extended family. The Villa Paulick was a dreamlike palace that delighted the eye. Sharp-tongued dragons lounged over the massive entryway, and a carved wooden lion reared from a banister. Woven into the ironwork were bare-breasted Valkyries, the mythic winged women who chose which slain warriors rise to Valhalla. Children were captivated by the murals of fairy tales painted above the luminous wood paneling of a small downstairs room. At this idyllic lakeside retreat, built solely for the pleasure of the extended family, the Flöges lived the contented family life denied to the hardscrabble Klimt brothers.

  As Ernst courted Helene, the Künstler-Compagnie painted their most important commission, the decoration of the new Burgtheater. On the stairway, Gustav planned to re-create a conventional classical frieze of an idyllic theater of ancient Italy.

  At the same time, in a related painting, Klimt was asked to portray real-life spectators of Vienna theater, sitting in their curtained boxes. He painted in cameos of progressive Viennese women he knew and admired, like Serena Pulitzer, one of the witty Pulitzer sisters from Budapest, who would someday be recalled as a relative of the American newspaperman Joseph Pulitzer. He painted cultural heroes, like the composer Johannes Brahms and the opera singer Alexander Girardi. Klimt knew that including Katharina Schratt, the emperor’s mistress, was obligatory. But he omitted Vienna’s notoriously anti-Semitic politician, Karl Lueger, from the painting. When the omission was noticed, Klimt reluctantly painted Lueger in. But as someone would remark to Klimt, Lueger was far outnumbered in the painting by Viennese Jews. In a city in which theater was staged drama within the great drama of life, inclusion in Klimt’s painting of the Burgtheater audience was more than prestige; it was public proof of membership in Vienna society. In Klimt’s painting, this society was not a collection of aristocrats, but something approaching a meritocracy.

  The young members of the Künstler-Compagnie agonized over the reception of their murals. But when the new Burgtheater was unveiled in October 1888, Vienna gasped with admiration.

  In a daze of astonishment and relief, Klimt accepted the emperor’s prize, the Golden Service Cross with Crown. Klimt was twenty-six.

  “Is it we who are stupid or them?” Klimt growled to his brother and Matsch, who had spent months worrying the mural wasn’t good enough.

  The Klimt brothers had painted their way out of a precarious childhood and into a warmly approving spotlight. Art was power in Vienna, and the Klimt brothers were now young gods.

  ——

  Armed with this prestige, Ernst asked Helene Flöge’s father for her hand. Ernst had tremendous liabilities: a nervous mother and erratic sisters. But he had the makings of a brilliant career—and dark good looks that quickened the pulse.

  Helene was very much in love with her handsome artist. In 1890, her father gave his blessing.

  It seemed the brothers had finally rescued their fragile family. But in 1892 their father fell ill. He wept on his deathbed, begging his oldest son to swear to take care of his mother and three sisters, and to “put their fate, whatever happens, into my hands and my heart,” Gustav recalled. Later that year, in snowy December, Ernst died suddenly, of pericarditis, leaving a widow and a tiny daughter, Helene.

  Gustav Klimt promised to look after them all. His responsibilities were not trifling. It was cruel to be poor, especially for women. For impoverished men, the army beckoned, a dangerous life as cannon fodder. The fate of desperate women was visible to all. The streets of Vienna were filled with girls who were forced to become prostitutes. They were exposed to cold, tuberculosis, and the rampant syphilis whose slow death was the fear of all Vienna. Klimt remained with his family. His brother and sisters “had to see to it that everyday annoyances were kept away from him,” his sister Hermine recalled. “He came to us every evening, ate without saying much and then went to bed early.”

  He turned to art for solace. With the death of Ernst, Gustav lost interest in painting architectural decorations to please rich people. Art was his salvation. It was the beautiful mask of a strong but scarred soul. Soon Gustav Klimt’s demons would spill from his tumultuous psyche and into his paintings.

  Arranged Marriage

  Adele w
as always different.

  At the height of the season, Therese was thrilled to lead the waltz at the opera balls, whirling around a ballroom in a purplish blue watered-silk gown, a matching corsage of lilacs pinned above her ample décolletage. Adele would be contentedly curled up on a divan, reading Goethe, or discussing the new artists’ movement with its patrons at the palais.

  Witty, poised, and intellectually precocious, Adele longed to study. It was an unlikely ambition. A handful of women had finally been allowed to matriculate at the 532-year-old University of Vienna in 1897, but only in philosophy. Young society girls like Adele were expected to pass the time with needlepoint, reading, or private instruction in language or music, as they awaited their destiny in life—marriage.

  But Adele was bored out of her mind with the rounds of teas and luncheons that filled the days of society girls, who were expected to blush, abstain from strong opinions, and whisper and giggle “as if they were slightly tipsy,” observed Stefan Zweig, a family friend.

  Therese had brimmed with excitement at her coming out, as young ladies arrived in evening gowns, and young men in tails and collapsible top hats called chapeaux claques. Adele showed little interest in making a debut. She only endured the kind of fashions that had young women “laced into a wasp’s shape in a corset of stiff whalebone, blown out like a huge bell from the waist down, the neck closed in up to the chin, legs shrouded to the toes” until women “could no longer move about freely,” Zweig wrote.

  Adele found Vienna society dull and superficial compared to the artistic world unfolding on the effervescent Ringstrasse, which was literally at her doorstep. The Bauers lived in an apartment in a subdivided palais owned by Hermine Wittgenstein, who had persuaded her father, Karl Wittgenstein, to finance a new building for the Secession movement of Gustav Klimt. The Wittgensteins were important patrons, hosting concerts in their mansion by Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, and Pablo Casals. They rented apartments at the Ringstrasse palais to other patrons of the arts scene. It was a heady address.