The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  Once they recovered from their shock, nearly a hundred university professors protested. The university rector, Wilhelm Neumann, said Klimt’s mural was too vague. Philosophy should not be “portrayed in a puzzling painting; as a puzzling sphinx,” he said, “at a time when it sought to find its source in the exact sciences.” The Vienna writer Karl Kraus found the mural solipsistic: “Who is really interested in how Herr Klimt imagines Philosophy?” he asked.

  “He must allegorize her as the philosophical minds of the times see her,” jibed Kraus, who was gaining increasing influence with his critical essays in his magazine, Die Fackel—The Torch—and was a member, with Felix Salten and the Vienna playwright Arthur Schnitzler, of an intellectual salon at Café Griensteidl that had earned the writers’ hangout its nickname, Café Megalomania.

  Philosophy “not only provoked a fierce debate in the world of journalists but among all circles that thought of themselves as intellectual,” Serena’s daughter Elisabeth recalled. “They gave their pros and cons, but spent most of their time with ugly irrational yelling. The government was on the same side as the howling mob.” Klimt was angry. “You must not become a creature like them, like those who creep and slither around,” he told Elisabeth.

  Vienna officials hoped Klimt would turn in more acceptable illustrations of the second and third murals, Medicine and Jurisprudence. But “while the war of the pens was raging,” Elisabeth recalled, Klimt told his friends he would paint the next two murals exactly as he had planned. “Klimt didn’t think of delivering them. Klimt said he would keep his paintings ‘even if I have to throw out this mob with my own hands,’ ” Elisabeth wrote. “Whoever saw the gestures he made, and the glowing of his eyes, which usually were so gentle, had to find him fearsome. Since, by the way, there was probably no professional boxer at that time who would have wished to take him on.”

  Serena and August Lederer offered to buy the ridiculed murals, if necessary, to free Klimt from the financial obligation of the commission. The close relationship between Klimt and the house of Lederer did not go unnoticed. “Herr Klimt initiates Frau Lederer into the art of Secessionist painting,” wrote Karl Kraus in November 1900. “Just as every aristocrat used to keep his Jew-in-residence, so today every stockbroker has a Secessionist in the house.

  “This rapport between modern art and idle-rich Jewry, this rise in the art of design, capable of transforming ghettos into mansions, occasions the fondest of hopes,” wrote Kraus, who had renounced Judaism in 1899 and now treated his readers to anti-Semitic barbs, like a derisive new expression for the work of Klimt and the Secession: “le goût juif”—Jewish taste.

  Gustav Klimt, tired of painting state commissions, shocked his state patrons with art some found pornographic. (Illustration Credit 9.1)

  Yet Kraus was perceptive in his observation that Jewish families were assimilating in Vienna through art and culture. Perhaps these families dreamed of leaving behind a history of ghettos, physical or social. Or perhaps their history as outsiders made them unfettered visionaries who were more willing to embrace the avant-garde. Whatever the reason, forward-minded Jewish patrons like the Lederers were now liberating Klimt, and helping him build a path to his future—as he was burning all bridges to his past.

  Klimt unveiled his next Faculty mural, Medicine, at the Secession in March 1901. It sealed his exile. In the foreground stood an exotic Hygeia, uncoiling the golden snake of medicine. Another nude swayed supine over the crowd as naked figures, representing the infinite chain of mortality, trudged toward a grinning skeleton dressed in a robe. Death.

  Officials were irate. The Ministry of Culture rejected Klimt for a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts, and a displeased Emperor Franz Joseph was said to be behind the decision. Austria canceled plans to make Klimt works the centerpiece of a Secession pavilion at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

  The modern art Klimt hoped to be remembered for was being openly ridiculed as self-indulgent by the Establishment. “I would prefer to bypass Klimt’s personality, if only because I feel sympathy for his quiet, suffering nature, and because I consider him to be deluded rather than guilty,” jeered the humorist Eduard Potz.

  The scorn did not abate.

  In 1902, Klimt prepared to exhibit his next modernist mural, the Beethoven Frieze, at the Secession. A few days before the opening, Felix Salten was watching Klimt finish the fresco when a prominent count strode in and glared at the Frieze. “Hideous!” the count shrieked, and stormed out. To Salten, the irreverent look on Klimt’s face was “marvelous.”

  “His eyes were shining,” Salten wrote, “a flush had darkened his brown cheeks, his hair and beard were a little ruffled and untidy. His gaze followed his laconic critic as if he were ashamed of him and at the same time made fun of him.”

  Klimt cast a bemused glance at everyone there, and resumed his painting.

  The opening of the frieze at the Secession building was a Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total artwork,” combining music, art, and architecture—a fin de siècle Vienna equivalent of a 1960s “happening.” Secessionist architect Josef Hoffmann designed the exhibition to create the “feeling of a temple for one who has become God.” As guests entered, Gustav Mahler directed musicians playing the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

  This was art as a religious conversion experience.

  Guests strolled under the first panel, a painting of soulful, yearning women, Longing for Happiness. Next was Hostile Powers, a giant ape representing the menace Typhoeus, and the three Gorgons: Sickness, Insanity, and Death. A crowd of gaunt figures seemed to beg for salvation, and a knight in armor was on the way, as Longing for Happiness Finds Repose in Poetry. Finally, a man as muscular as Klimt himself wrapped a woman in his nude embrace: Klimt’s Kiss to the Whole World, inspired by Schiller’s Ode to Joy.

  This was art as deliverance, leading humanity from mortal terror and uncertainty “into the ideal realm, where we find only pure happiness, pure joy, and pure love,” the catalogue said.

  The journalist Berta Zuckerkandl would bring the French sculptor Auguste Rodin to see the frieze on a summery day, when “slim and lovely vamps came buzzing around Klimt and Rodin, those two fiery lovers.”

  “I have never before experienced such an atmosphere—your tragic and magnificent Beethoven fresco; your unforgettable, temple-like exhibition,” Rodin marveled. “What is the reason for it all? And Klimt slowly nodded his beautiful head and answered only one word: ‘Austria.’ ”

  The press was less appreciative. Klimt’s friend Emil Pirchan recoiled at their slights: “orgies of the nude,” “obscene art,” “painted pornography,” “pathological fantasies.” Robert Hirschfield called it “among the most extreme examples in the realm of obscene art.” To another it was “revolting and obnoxious to all conventional notions of beauty.” The outraged count demanded “all possible measures to inhibit this tendency.”

  Klimt unveiled Jurisprudence in 1903. By then he was prepared for rejection. Klimt had painted an octopus whose tentacles were threatening to engulf humanity. Some Austrians took this as a criticism of the police, which were nicknamed “polyps.” A battered naked man bent his head, as if he were about to receive an unjust sentence. Was this an assault on the empire itself? “Those of us who are modern will react in different ways: according to character and mood some will mock, others will be moved to pity at the sight of this man, drunk with color, reeling through our modern lives,” wrote Karl Kraus. “The despicable ones are those who have curried favor with him as companions and supporters.”

  Now even Klimt’s patrons were being attacked! Why such “hatred”? the art critic Hermann Bahr asked in his diary. Because Klimt refused to create more “kitsch”?

  Bahr tried to cheer Klimt up by collecting the negative press in a little book he titled Against Klimt.

  “One can tell Klimt is a Viennese from the fact that he is honored around the world and attacked only in Vienna,” Felix Salten observed wryly.

&nbs
p; “Forget the censorship,” Klint told Berta Zuckerkandl defiantly. “I want to liberate myself. I want to break away from all these unpleasant, ridiculous aspects that restrict my work. I want to get out. I want my freedom. I refuse all official support. I will do without everything.”

  Without the financial support of “princely households,” Klimt faced a difficult future, his little brother Georg feared. “Gustav is following the arduous, uncomfortable path of one who is looking for his own way,” Georg said. “Destiny has forced him to take up the fight of his life.”

  Klimt retreated to the seclusion of his studio and his walled garden. He sported a simple Arab burnous, or long caftan, as he strolled through his leafy urban retreat, posing for mystical photographs that portrayed him as a prophet. People said that underneath his burnous he wore nothing at all.

  But it hardly mattered what people said now. Klimt had made himself the bête noire of the Austrian culture establishment. He had bitten the hand that fed him. He had answered Austria’s most prestigious state art commission with imagery so erotic and deviant that it would startle people even years later.

  Yet his courage had endeared him to Vienna’s emerging intellectual class. Klimt’s livelihood now depended on his private patrons, and his patrons thought him a genius. August Lederer paid to release Klimt from his Faculty Paintings commission. He took home Philosophy, even though he considered it too controversial to hang in his own parlor.

  Klimt had found a refuge.

  At peace in his studio, Klimt explored erotic themes. He drew a couple making love, women masturbating and reveling in sexual arousal. He made a self-mocking drawing of himself as a penis, making light of his rash libido. His critics called these drawings pornography. Censors wanted to confiscate and destroy a published edition of his sketches for Medicine. But the Crown Prosecution Service scrutinized his drawings and concluded that they were “undoubtedly only of aesthetic interest for the viewer and the scholar” and “cannot be called improper and prohibited.”

  Klimt cast sensual desire as a universal life force, behind love and creativity itself. Paintings might last forever. In Klimt’s work, the power of sex, though as fleeting as a pirouette, a promise, or a poem, was no less transcendent. His paintings portrayed sexual passion as an ascension to immortality as glorious as the angels rushing to the ceilings of Habsburg palaces. Klimt began to burnish his sensual paintings with the gold used in religious art to signal the divine.

  Some critics would later suggest that Klimt exploited women, casting them as femme fatales, sirens, or passive dolls, but always as objects of male sexual fantasies. At the time, however, women were his biggest defenders. In an age hostile to female sexuality, Klimt’s erotic drawings were a rare acknowledgment of female sexual desire. His drawings made it clear that Klimt would never be a subscriber to Freud’s theory of vaginal orgasm. Klimt’s erotic art added to his roguish reputation, as people gossiped about the models lounging around his studio in various states of undress.

  Klimt would not become rich with his new work. He called the accumulation of wealth “a nasty thing,” and said if people spent their money freely, there would be “an absolute end to all the economic misery on earth.”

  He needed support, and he remained in the orbit of the patrons who made his artistic freedom possible. In the summer of 1903, Klimt dropped in on the Lederers’ country home in the mountain lake district known as the Salzkammergut for its ancient salt mines. He wore an elegant tuxedo with a cummerbund, telling his hosts’ wealthy guests that in this getup, “a guy can hide a belly like a market woman.” As the evening wore on, the adults at dinner bored him, and he wandered into the children’s room. Using his hands and a sheet, he acted out shadow caricatures of the adults in the dining room, mocking their affectations and pretensions—triggering gales of laughter from Elisabeth Lederer and the other children. Serena peeked in and was amused by his satire, but worried that her guests would discover they had been the butt of Klimt’s incorrigible irreverence.

  Adele’s “Bohemian Home”

  On August 22, 1903, Adele wrote her friend and confidant Julius Bauer, the librettist of the song welcoming Mark Twain, to tell him Klimt had agreed to paint her portrait. Her teasing letter suggested Adele already knew Klimt. Adele wanted Julius to compose a poem for her parents’ wedding anniversary.

  Julius was notorious: a “dreaded dramatic critic, witty librettist, and jovial fighting cock,” a music reviewer wrote, “whose every jest pleased Brahms, with several of his victims spared for the future.” One victim was fellow writer-librettist Theodor Herzl. Julius lampooned Herzl’s Zionism—the proposal of a Jewish homeland—in a poem, and Herzl was furious. He retaliated by fictionalizing Julius as a frivolous society gadfly. He told Stefan Zweig he might never have developed Zionism if he hadn’t been living in Paris, away from the withering mockery of Vienna.

  In Vienna café society, verbal swordplay only elevated the prominence of the combatants. Julius himself was a regular target, drawing the caustic disdain of Karl Kraus, now Vienna’s leading commentator. “As truly as an itching of the head is not an activity of the brain, I have never considered Mr. Julius Bauer a poet,” Kraus wrote.

  But Julius was the poet of the Bauer family. He wrote the “bachelor jokes” for the wedding of Adele’s cousin August von Wassermann, whose research would lead to the Wassermann test for the early detection of syphilis, and composed the purple prose Adele read at celebrations.

  Adele wrote Julius:

  I am sure you thought that at least in Ischl you would be left alone. But nuisance that I am, I even persecute you into your countryside idyll. Please forgive my intrusiveness. But it is a little bit your fault, too. In Vienna you allowed me to appeal to your kindness and poetic talents, and as compensation I can only offer you my wonderful voice and my talent for acting.

  It is not the intention of my parents to celebrate their wedding anniversary ostentatiously. But you will understand that we, the children, do not want to let this day pass without ado.

  I, too, am against any exaggerated festivity but on the other hand I do want to benefit from your great kindness. Originally, we children wanted to give them a joint present, but we have abandoned this idea completely. My husband has then decided to have me portrayed by Klimt who, however, is not able to start to work before winter. So my parents will have to have patience.

  I would be incredibly grateful to you, dear Herr Bauer, if you told me your intentions . . . Should you call upon my weak forces, I would be more than happy to be at your disposal.

  My husband sends you a thousand regards, and would be very happy to greet you at our bohemian home.

  A portrait by Gustav Klimt was no small gift. Klimt was the painter of the moment. A Klimt commission at the time cost 4,000 crowns, a quarter of the price of a well-appointed country villa.

  Commissioned portraits of women were often unctuous affairs, reflecting the wealth and stature of their men. Klimt portrayed women as individuals, without the presence of a husband, father, or children to suggest their domestic role. Yet a portrait by Klimt was acquiring an air of the risqué. As Bahr the critic observed, “It was sometimes not ‘safe’ for society women, and their good name, to have their portrait painted by Klimt. They soon gained the reputation of having an affair with the master who was so infamous with his amours.”

  Yet Klimt had painted some Vienna maidens. His latest was the ethereal painting of Gertrud Loew, the daughter of Dr. Anton Loew, the owner of the famous Sanatorium Loew, a baptized Jew who socialized with Klimt. Gertrud had been raised Catholic. Klimt painted Gertrud in whispery whites, blue washes, and translucent flesh tones so pale they appeared to be watercolors. He softened the tilt of Gertrud’s almond eyes and her thick, curly hair, which her family attributed to her mother’s indiscretion with a handsome Hungarian general. Ludwig Hevesi called this picture of virginal youth “the most sweet-scented poetry the palette is able to create.” When it was exhibited at the Secessi
on in November 1903, Neue Freie Presse critic Franz Servaes pronounced it “the still half-closed bud of a girl’s chaste soul.”

  If the reputation of a woman in Vienna was not entirely untouched by her sitting for a portrait with the controversial Gustav Klimt, the Jewish elite seemed less inclined to care. To Felix Salten, the quintessential Klimt subject was a “beautiful Jewish Jourdame.”

  When Adele Bloch-Bauer finally swept downstairs from her elegantly appointed apartment to board the horse-drawn fiacre waiting to take her to Klimt’s studio, her reputation was the last thing on her mind.

  Adele had waited months. As she stepped out into the crisp weather in December 1903, she had the breathless anticipation of a bride. Her husband didn’t care if some men didn’t allow their unmarried daughters to model for Klimt, or that Klimt reputedly tried to seduce his models. He wanted his wife immortalized. Adele was a married woman now, and a commitment from Klimt was a rare prize.

  As the driver flicked the reins and the horse drew forward, Adele looked eagerly onto the Schwarzenbergplatz, the home to the palace of a dynasty of Czech princes who were friends of Ferdinand. Nearby, the gilded dome of the Secession shone in the sun. When the horse drew up to Klimt’s studio, Adele stepped out of the closed carriage. Her warm white breath hung in the cold air. She wore a high-necked dress and overcoat, and she pulled off her gloves as Klimt opened the door. We do not know if he greeted her formally, as a new patron, or if he was welcoming a woman he already knew, perhaps quite well. Whatever their previous acquaintance, Adele would now enter into one of the most intimate relationships Klimt was capable of. While he was working on the portrait, they would spend long periods of time completely alone together. This was not entirely proper, even with a man with a different kind of reputation. But times were changing.