Immigrant parents like Adele’s were from less cosmopolitan Bavarian cities. Adele grew up a member of a generation that viewed immersion in art as its birthright, and as an essential prism for understanding the world. “You don’t have to become an art expert, but you have to know what is genuine, what style is. You have to learn to see,” Adele believed.
“You have to develop a feeling for quality,” she would muse. “Once you have learned to enjoy the great works of art, the plastic arts and literature, then you will be able to evaluate people, whether they are valuable or worthless.” In the rarefied world of privileged Viennese, a life in the world of art was a noble, near-religious calling, and Adele was already a convert. Her parents, however, had more conventional aspirations for their youngest.
Ferdinand Bloch, a Czech sugar magnate,
shown here ca. 1920, was captivated by the seventeen-year-old Adele Bauer when he was thirty-four. (Illustration Credit 5.1)
Adele’s father was an ambitious man, a modern entrepreneur who was following in the footsteps of the Rothschilds. By the time Adele came of age, Moritz Bauer’s bank was the seventh largest in the empire. Bauer was president of the Orientbahn, or Oriental Railway, the Vienna component of a large-scale scheme, financed by German banks, to create a line from Berlin to Baghdad. Negotiated directly with the Turkish grand vizier and built on old caravan trails, the project was closely watched by Austria’s Crown Prince Rudolf. Moritz fretted constantly that the ethnic tinderbox of the Balkans would sabotage the expensive project. But by 1888, the railroad had reached Belgrade, Sofia, and Constantinople, and was carrying the glamorous luxury cars of the Orient Express. Moritz relished his reputation as a sophisticated man who embraced technological innovation. “Today, I tried to reach you by telephone. You were not there, and in view of your general aversion to it, I decided not to try again,” Moritz would humorously chide a stodgy colleague at Deutsche Bank, a sponsor of the railway. Jewish modernizers were now rewarded: Moritz Bauer received a knighthood—the Order of the Iron Crown, an ornate golden medal with a double-headed eagle, as well as the Imperial Ottoman Order of Medschidie, and the Royal Serbian order of Takowo.
Moritz had successfully steered his eldest daughter, Therese, into marriage with Gustav Bloch, an attorney for the Orientbahn. He would have less luck with his five sons. Raphael left to become a New York banker, and Karl would die of pneumonia. Leopold would succumb to insanity—a common delicate term for syphilis—and David would die in Italy at the age of thirty-two. Eugene, a successful businessman, would succumb to tuberculosis.
It was difficult for Moritz to imagine a more brilliant match for Adele than Gustav’s brother, Ferdinand, captain of an emerging sugar-beet industry that had reduced dependence on sugar imports from the Caribbean. In Vienna, where sugar was not just a condiment but a staple, this was a revolutionary shift.
The Bauers’ ambitions for Adele were the product of an era when “in order to protect young girls, they were not left alone for a single moment,” noted Zweig, and “a female person could have no physical desires as long as they had not been awakened by man” in the sanctity of marriage. This cloistered social world believed “one could distinguish at a distance a young girl from a woman who had already known a man, simply by the way she walked,” Zweig wrote. “In Vienna in particular, the air was full of dangerous erotic infection.” A young woman had to be kept “in a completely sterilized atmosphere . . . until the day when she left the altar on her husband’s arm.” A wealthy girl was like a jewel, to be locked away until her family found a worthy setting.
This was changing. Adele could see it happening, in the lives of the royal family, and even among her own circle. A childhood friend of hers, Alma Schindler, wanted to be a composer. Alma was the daughter of the late Austrian painter Jakob Emil Schindler and the stepdaughter of the artist Carl Moll, a friend of Gustav Klimt. Alma’s family took her artistic ambitions seriously. Unmarried Alma would be allowed to enjoy the thrilling kisses of her music teacher, au courant bachelor Alexander von Zemlinsky, whose sister Mathilde had married a promising young composer named Arnold Schoenberg. Alma would be left unchaperoned for heated assignations on the sofa of the family parlor with the brilliant conductor Gustav Mahler.
The empress Elisabeth, beloved in Austria
as “Sisi.” The empress was an excellent
horsewoman who detested the Vienna court
and found life a challenging search for meaning. (Illustration Credit 5.2)
For sheltered Adele to gain this kind of autonomy, she would have to marry.
Arranged marriage was an institution in upscale Vienna. Men sought love or passionate sex with mistresses. Such extramarital liaisons carried shame and stigma for lonely wives. Yet even this was changing, and the gender shift was being led by Empress Elisabeth, the unhappy defector from the best-known arranged marriage in the empire. Everyone in Vienna knew the story of how Elisabeth had traipsed happily through the woods with her brothers, and grown into an excellent horsewoman who loved art, literature, and Gypsy music. How her ambitious mother presented her older sister to Emperor Franz Joseph in the Austrian resort town of Ischl, but he couldn’t take his eyes off sixteen-year-old Elisabeth. The teenager married the emperor with the muttonchop whiskers, and enchanted Vienna with the little diamond stars she wore in her long, dark hair.
Gustav Klimt, “The King,” in tunic, sittling on a throne, and his fellow artists, spoof the Vienna Establishment with a satire of the solemn photographs of important men, 1902. (Illustration Credit 5.3)
She was pronounced the most beautiful woman in Europe.
Elisabeth was also one of the most unhappy. Locked in the gloomy Hofburg Castle with a mother-in-law who controlled access even to her children, Elisabeth spent her empty hours working out on custom-made wooden gym equipment, developing a notorious aversion to the spiteful Viennese court. She wrote wistful poetry, yearning for a life unfettered, “and when it is time for me to die, lay me down at the ocean’s shore.”
Finally she fled the palace to wander Europe, leaving the Vienna aristocracy to speculate and gossip about her amorous adventures. Instead of being buried in scorn and scandal, this desperate royal housewife inspired popular sympathy. Ordinary Viennese adopted her as their own people’s princess, affectionately referring to her by her nickname, Sisi.
Adele had just turned seventeen in September 1898, when the empress Elisabeth left a gathering at Mathilde Rothschild’s manor at Lake Geneva. Elisabeth was boarding a steamship when a twenty-five-year-old Italian anarchist stabbed her in the chest. “How can you kill a woman who has never hurt anyone,” the emperor kept repeating. “You do not know how much I loved this woman,” he told their daughter.
Even Elisabeth’s messy death failed to turn her into the predictable warning for wayward women. Instead she was enshrined as a symbol of a lonely woman trapped in a loveless marriage.
Elisabeth could have been a cautionary tale for Adele, who still had not committed herself to Ferdinand when he attended Moritz and Jeanette’s anniversary celebration in October.
The occasion required another syrupy poem. “Hand-in-hand to the altar, you stepped through life’s spring,” Adele read, with comic ceremoniousness. “Now you dwell amidst beloved children in a space full of bliss, like a sweet dream.” Ferdinand was charmed. He didn’t mind that bad poetry was a cornerstone of the cozy Bauer Gemütlichkeit. Ferdinand was living an honorable but dull existence. The Bauers lived in the moment, and Ferdinand yearned to marry Adele and live there with them.
The Secession
In November 1898, Gustav Klimt prepared to step into the spotlight.
Klimt and his fellow maverick artists were unveiling their palace dedicated to Art Nouveau on the Ringstrasse. It was a monastic white building crowned by a dome of golden laurels, designed by architect Joseph Maria Olbrich. All of Vienna paused to stare at this temple for those who believed art had the power to change the world. Here, Klimt and eighteen of
Vienna’s most talented artists would break away from the Establishment and fight for their “art of the soul.”
Vienna artists were frustrated. Aesthetic tastes were dictated by a handful of upper-class patrons who had the money to buy and commission art. They preferred historic art, exemplified by Hans Makart’s neo-Renaissance painting of Romeo and Juliet, that endlessly repeated medieval or ancient Greek themes, mirroring the neoclassical architecture on the Ringstrasse. Vienna artists who had defected from the official Kunstlerhaus were electrified by Vincent van Gogh and the French Impressionists. They wanted the freedom of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. In Paris and Munich, the work of new artists hung alongside the old. But the staid Vienna establishment refused to display experimental work in major museums. In Klimt’s view, state sponsors created a “dictatorship of exhibitions” that showed only “weak” and “false” art, and grasped “every opportunity for attacking genuine art and genuine artists.”
Even worse, the incestuous relationship between art dealers and some artists fostered a stale culture of art-for-hire that stifled innovation and had people buying “paintings that go with the furniture,” as the critic Hermann Bahr complained.
The fight was on.
“Business or art, that is the question of our Secession,” Bahr said. “Shall the Viennese painters be damned to remain petty businessmen, or should they attempt to become artists?” Those artists “who are of the opinion that paintings are goods, like trousers or stockings, to be manufactured according to the client’s wishes,” should stay in the state-sponsored Kunstlerhaus, he said. “Those who want to reveal—in painting or drawing—the secrets of their soul, are already in the society.”
At the opening, the patrons walked under a credo, by Ludwig Hevesi, painted over the door: to every age its art; to art its freedom. Throughout the building, the Secessionists repeated their vow to create art that reflected their moment in history. “Let the artist show his world, the beauty that was born with him, that never was before and never will be again,” Bahr urged in a script wall text inside.
As the notoriety grew, Emperor Franz Joseph himself strode in with his entourage for an official appearance. Everyone turned to stare.
The city had provided the land for the building, and the imperial state would pay subsidies. The state wanted to be in on the ground floor, even if this art rebellion was aimed at them.
But the artists had the upper hand.
The emperor and his entourage had to come to them, to the debut exhibit of this Secession, to see what all the fuss was about.
Even the emperor couldn’t upstage the charismatic Klimt.
“How surprised the general public was,” wrote Emil Pirchan, a young designer, “when it actually saw the artist himself: an energetic, large and powerful body with a head like that of an apostle on a strong bull neck—a head reminiscent of Dürer’s Peter . . .
“The eyes, melancholy and unworldly, gazed out from a hard, tanned face, framed by a dark, severe beard. That, and the unruly coronet of hair, sometimes gave him a faun-like appearance,” Pirchan wrote, alluding to the mythic Bacchus, the wine-loving, hedonistic satyr beloved in Vienna.
The empowered artists would later commemorate their triumph with a telling photograph. Carl Moll, Alma’s stepfather, lay on the floor of the Secession great hall, on top of a rolled-up carpet. Gustav Klimt, their president, sat smugly in a thronelike chair wearing a long black artist’s smock, handsome as a king. Koloman Moser sat at his feet, his eyebrows raised and mustache curled, with a picaresque, mocking smile. One artist is smoking. Two ordinary workmen in coveralls appear to be laughing. The photo was a mockery, a send-up of the self-important formal photographs of the bespectacled, graying members of the academy.
It was a provocation. The artists were thumbing their nose at the Establishment.
These artists named their Secession after the Parisian Salon des refusés—“exhibition of rejects”—reflecting their marginalization by pompous art officials. Now the Viennese Expressionist movement would have a home, along with the mad lucidity of the work of Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch, whose Shrik, or Scream, would express the anxiety of his age. “If you cannot please all through your art, please a few,” Klimt wrote. “To please many is immoral.”
Official guardians of propriety did not surrender so easily. In his poster announcing the opening of the Secession, Klimt portrayed Theseus, the warrior, in the nude, slaying the mythic Minotaur, a monster with a man’s body and bull’s head. Theseus represented the innovator, vanquishing the stale Old Guard of the official art world. But when the poster was printed, a Vienna official insisted Theseus’s genitals be covered. Klimt was furious. Censorship already? Ridiculous! There was already a painting of Theseus by Antonio Canova on prominent display, genitals and all, at the staid Kunsthistorisches Museum.
The prudishness seemed absurd in a Vienna in which sexual tensions seemed everywhere, from the notorious affairs of the Habsburgs to the army of prostitutes walking the cobblestones of the Graben. At a time when Freud was exploring repressed sexual urges embedded in the psyche, Klimt was embarking on his own exploration, with erotic drawings of his models, sexually aroused, or even pleasuring themselves. What did women want? Klimt seemed to know.
As Freud penned his Interpretation of Dreams, Klimt was launched on his own psychic interior voyage that would imbue his canvases with desire, childbirth, aging, and death. Both men were finding support among a small coterie of forward-minded Viennese, many of them Jewish.
For Klimt and his confederates, the Secession was more than a place for new artists. It represented a break with an outmoded past, and the creation of a more honest way of experiencing life. It meant opening minds and society. As Klimt made drawings of a nude young woman for his painting of Nuda Veritas, or Naked Truth—a visual manifesto of the Secession—he idly wrote on one sketch: “Truth is fire, and to tell the truth means to glow and burn.”
Klimt the Seducer
By the summer of 1899, Adele was betrothed to Ferdinand. Among those not impressed by Adele’s “hideous fiancé” was her friend Alma Schindler. Like Adele, Alma was still in her teens, and in no mood to be generous.
Alma was struggling with the desire aroused by the kisses and caresses of Gustav Klimt. She had been fantasizing about Klimt for months that spring when her mother mentioned that the sultry genius would be joining the family on a trip to Italy. Her mother pointedly warned that Klimt had “at least three affairs running simultaneously” and was not to be viewed as a prospective suitor.
But when Klimt dined with her family on his first night in Italy, “we devoured each other with our glances,” Alma wrote in her diary. Alone with Klimt in a covered horse-drawn carriage on a rainy afternoon in Florence, Alma let Klimt caress her under a blanket, and couldn’t sleep that night for “sheer physical excitement.” At their hotel, Klimt ran his hands through her waist-length hair, abruptly stopping because “he would have lost control of himself and done something foolish.” At the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, “my heart missed a beat. He wanted to feel my breasts!”
Klimt slipped into Alma’s hotel room in Genoa, “and before I realized it, he’d taken me in his arms and kissed me.” It was “indescribable.” In Verona, Alma volunteered to take Klimt’s ironed shirts to his room, and they kissed until “we were both terribly agitated.” Later, on a stairway, “he stood behind me and said: ‘There’s only one thing for it: complete physical union.’ ” Overwhelmed by desire, Alma “staggered and had to steady myself on the banister.” Klimt insisted: Surely God wouldn’t mind if they physically consummated a union inspired by love.
The heated glances became obvious. Carl Moll ordered Klimt to stop. Klimt got Alma alone for a feverish last kiss, “with such force, such frisson,” that it “fulfilled a physical instinct.” Now, Alma wrote, “I know what a kiss is.”
Then Klimt was gone. As Alma brooded over his absence, her family welcomed a visitor who had shared a train compartment
with Klimt on his way to Italy. In dark tunnels, this woman told them, Klimt slid toward her, his “eyes aglow.” Alma was furious. “Animal lust,” she wrote, “on the way to see me!”
But she continued to burn for Klimt.
As Alma pined, Klimt’s personal life erupted in crisis. Klimt was entering his most creative period, and the intensity coincided with an increasingly complicated love life. When Klimt returned from Italy, he wrote a long emotional letter to one of his young models, Maria Zimmermann, known as Mizzi. Mizzi’s parents lived far from the magnetic world on the Ringstrasse. Her stepfather was a stern, low-paid officer in the royal guard of Emperor Franz Joseph. Her family was poor and Catholic, with many children. Her mother had high hopes for Mizzi, who spent hours in museums and dreamed of being an artist. Her mother mistakenly saw Klimt as a conspicuously eligible bachelor. She encouraged Mizzi to stroll the leafy street in the Josefstadt district where Klimt had his studio.
The future Alma Mahler, the daughter of Vienna painter Jakob Emil Schindler, ca. 1898. She was tempted to surrender to Klimt at the start of her famous love life with brilliant men. (Illustration Credit 7.1)
Klimt opened the garden door one day and noticed the teenager with golden braids lingering under the chestnut blooms. He invited Mizzi in.
As Mizzi told her mother breathlessly, Klimt delicately arranged her heavy red-gold hair, gently turning head and shoulders with his large hands as he sketched her. Klimt told Mizzi he would like her to be in a painting of Franz Schubert playing piano by candlelight. A wealthy Klimt patron, Serena Lederer, lent Mizzi a whispery silk gown to model for the painting, and Mizzi eagerly shed her unfashionable street clothes.
The Lady in Gold Page 4