Soon Klimt was silently sketching Adele, his dark eyes caressing her form as his pencil traced the lines of her hair, her face, her lips, the curves of her body. When he looked up, his bold stare met her eyes. Adele was a sensitive young woman, being drawn by one of Vienna’s most famous men. She would now be in regular contact with one of Vienna’s most famous seducers, a celebrity even seasoned society women found difficult to resist.
The Adele sketched by Klimt in 1903 was a much-changed woman from the teenage bride of Ferdinand. Adele and her husband divided their time between a smart palais off the elegant Schwarzenbergplatz and a parklike summer castle Ferdinand bought that year in Brezany, outside Prague, where he hunted deer. They socialized with interesting men, like Prince Adolph Schwarzenberg, the composer Richard Strauss, and Czech intellectual Tomas Masaryk, who would someday be president of a republic of Czechoslovakia.
But the comfortable façade of Adele’s marriage concealed a growing vulnerability. Adele’s sister, Therese, had already given birth to a robust little bruiser, Karl. Adele was plagued by miscarriages. One child was stillborn. Finally, a baby boy, Fritzl, was born alive, to the relief of all. But little Fritzl lived just a few days, then weakly sighed his last breaths.
The possibility of childlessness was a crushing setback for Ferdinand and Adele. Children were the foundation of family life. For women, they were the path into the human tribe. They meant membership in a world where families gathered at country homes, surrounded by generations, and young mothers chatted while their children played. Childlessness meant a quiet, lonely apartment where the gilt clock ticked loudly while Ferdinand worked at the sugar factory. It meant being less womanly, less than a full participant in the human race—even an object of pity. Ferdinand would have to give up the dream of being a paterfamilias. He faced an empty house, the absence of heirs. It was a great loss. But he still had his work.
For a married woman, childlessness was a catastrophe, the loss of the prime anchor of personal and social identity.
So when Adele went to Klimt’s studio that winter, she faced the possibility of failure as a woman. No one ever believed Adele was in love with Ferdinand. But she was expected to feel lucky, or at least content. Instead, she struggled with sobering disappointment.
At that moment, a door opened to one of the most exciting experiences any woman in Vienna could desire.
Klimt made endless sketches of Adele. They were simple pencil drawings on thin manila paper, of Adele seated, her hair piled on her head. Or Adele smiling, laughing, her movements like the frames of a film. Work on the painting went slowly under Klimt’s dark, determined gaze. He would make more than a hundred studies of Adele. Only a handful of women would ever receive this much of his time and attention.
In this portrait, Adele and Klimt began the next chapter of their lives.
The Empress
Klimt had a well-known aversion to scripture. But he loved religious symbolism, and considered art the source of an almost religious truth. So that December of 1903 he made an aesthetic pilgrimage to Ravenna, an ancient Roman capital and Adriatic port, to study the sixth-century mosaics, the greatest legacies of Byzantine art outside Constantinople.
Klimt’s footsteps echoed on stone floors as he walked through the octagonal San Vitale Basilica, and gazed up at the gleaming murals. The golden tiles of Byzantium had dazzled Europe. Gold symbolized the primeval power of the sun, and in the Christian world it represented the divine. Gold tile was reserved for potentates and early Christian saints.
Klimt beheld the age-old stories of Cain and Abel, of Moses and the Burning Bush, of the sacrifice of Isaac and of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. The Lamb of God was flanked by a kaleidoscope of peacocks, flowers, and fruit. Jesus Christ, in a rich purple robe, offered his martyr’s crown to Saint Vitale.
As Klimt drank in the explosion of color, his eyes wandered to Empress Theodora, glowing against golden tiles that shimmered like a halo above her head. Remarkable Theodora, portrayed by disapproving sixth-century historians as a stage actress, a courtesan, an infamous woman. Whatever her common origins, one civil servant praised her as “surpassing in intelligence all men who ever lived.” Theodora had already been another man’s mistress when she met Justinian, the son of the emperor. Justinian defied royal opposition and married her anyway. Theodora was unable to bear him children. But she was a skillful military strategist with a canny ability to foil intrigues and plots. When Justinian became emperor in the year 527, he made Theodora an unusually powerful empress. “Neither did anything without the consent of the other,” grumbled the historian Procopius, who defamed Theodora as a power-hungry concubine. Theodora began to push for laws that eroded the chattel status of women. She fought the widespread kidnapping of women into prostitution. She pushed for laws against rape, for women’s rights to hold property and to inherit. Theodora was credited with helping to elevate the legal status of women to unprecedented levels. She herself became one of the most powerful women in the Byzantine Age.
The Eastern Orthodox Church made unlikely saints of this powerful couple, granting Theodora the immortality beheld by Klimt as he stood before her. These “mosaics of unbelievable splendor” were nothing short of a “revelation,” Klimt wrote.
This was the image that scholars suspect was the inspiration for Klimt as he began to plot his golden portrait of Adele as a painted mosaic, and his subject as a fallen icon.
“Degenerate Women”
The ongoing portrait made Adele and Ferdinand full partners in the Secession. It put Adele in the company of some of the most remarkable women of her time: art patronesses, journalists, and intellectuals. Adele had a haven from the confines of her sheltered family life, in a milieu in which she could freely exchange ideas about such things as Freud’s theories that human consciousness could be broadened by examining unconscious dreams and fantasies.
Adele was immersed in a serious program of study, reading philosophy and political texts. Every morning after Ferdinand headed to the sugar factory at the castle town of Bruck an der Leitha, Adele sat down to devour classic works of French, German, and English literature. She studied art, medicine, and science. Removed from the enforced conformity of university classrooms in which women were still unwelcome, Adele began to develop a highly individual point of view. She came to believe that insight could not be taught, but had to be discovered through a personal quest similar to Klimt’s artistic “voyage intérieur.”
“You cannot receive knowledge or high literacy from a High School education, nor from University professors,” Adele would write years later. “You have to proceed with open eyes and an iron will to become thoroughly educated.
“Only the person who places the highest demands on himself can progress one step further,” she believed. “Self-satisfied individuals are incapable of development.”
Adele’s association with Klimt propelled this intellectual journey by making Adele a member of an elite sorority.
One of Klimt’s allies was Berta Zuckerkandl, a young journalist whose salon of artists and intellectuals hosted the first conversations “by a small group of moderns” that led to the creation of the Secession. Berta considered Klimt a “great man” who lived by “the truth of his own soul.”
Berta was a woman with unusual clout. She was the daughter of Moritz Szeps, the Viennese newspaper editor who had been a confidant of the ill-starred crown prince. As a teenager, Berta had traveled with her father, meeting Disraeli and future French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, whose brother Paul would marry her sister Sophie. Berta, a keen observer of political and cultural currents, was becoming known as the “Viennese Cassandra.”
Berta was married to Emil Zuckerkandl, a pioneering anatomist at the University of Vienna Medical School. Emil was then arguing for the admittance of women to the school of medicine. The school dean, however, had a different view. He said that Emil, “as an anatomist, should know perfectly well that women’s brains were less developed than those of men.”
Berta and Emil privately rolled their eyes and snickered. But the school administrators were deadly serious.
Emil cleverly pronounced that female doctors had become a matter of imperial urgency. They were needed to treat Muslim women in the former Ottoman-ruled regions of Bosnia and Serbia.
Emperor Franz Joseph agreed.
Emil quickly called in a protégée, bright young Gertrud Bien. She passed the entrance exam, and under the reluctant gaze of the university administration, Emil escorted Fräulein Bien into anatomy class. She was ordered to sit in the last row, ask no questions, and wear men’s clothing so she would blend in. Shock settled over the room, then murmurs, as the young men realized that “Herr Bien” was a Fräulein. Emil had to call security to escort hecklers from the hall.
Emil made Fräulein Bien his assistant. In a few years, young Dr. Bien was Vienna’s first female pediatrician, and a member of Adele’s growing circle.
Berta’s salon was a magnet for Viennese who were fascinated by the latest trends in psychology, politics, and art. Visitors like Auguste Rodin dropped in, and playwright Arthur Schnitzler watched Klimt pursuing women like a “faun” there. Adele’s friend Alma got to know her future husband, Gustav Mahler, at Berta’s salon. Johann Strauss, a regular, had fallen to his knees and gratefully proclaimed her “the most marvelous and witty woman in Vienna.”
If art was a way to liberate minds, salons gave unusual women the social support to exercise aspirations that would not have been welcomed by Vienna institutions. They offered an alternative to stuffy circles closed to Jewish women by anti-Semitism and sexism. But what gave salons gravitas was the fact that in the days before mass media, salons were indispensable to the spread of ideas.
The fashion sense of the women in Adele’s circle was set by Klimt’s sister-in-law and companion, Emilie Flöge, a dress designer and early Vienna career woman. Flöge’s fashion house freed women from the confines of corseted Victorian dresses. She replaced them with loose, caftan-style dresses that allowed women to move comfortably, and were something of a feminine counterpart to the tunic worn by Klimt. Klimt and Flöge sometimes collaborated on the design of women’s dresses, giving the clothes added cachet. For women in Adele’s circle, the unfettered style of Flöge’s designs was a symbol of their liberated lifestyle.
Other constraints were more difficult to elude.
Adele’s friend Alma had made an enviable marriage with the composer Gustav Mahler, and had not waited for the wedding to consummate the union. But Mahler had demanded before they wed that his fiancée abandon her ambitions to be a composer. During their courtship Mahler wrote:
A husband and wife who are both composers: How do you envisage that? Such a strange relationship between rivals: Do you have any idea how ridiculous that would appear, can you imagine the loss of self-respect it would later cause us both? If, at a time when you should be attending to household duties or fetching me something I urgently needed, or if, as you wrote, you wish to relieve me of life’s trivia—if at such a moment you were befallen by “inspiration”: what then?
From now on you have only one vocation: to make me happy. You must give yourself up to me unconditionally, make the shaping of your future life, in all its facets, dependent on my inner needs, and wish nothing more in return than my love.
Ambitious women were policed by stigma. They were brazen, unnat-ural, mad, or, in Freudian terms, hysterical. Or simply irrelevant. Fellow intellectual Karl Kraus derided Berta Zuckerkandl as a “cultural chatterbox.”
In more conservative circles, women whose behavior violated feminine “nature” were labeled with a fashionable new term: “degenerate.” Women who pushed for higher education were “degenerate.” Women who agitated for the right to vote were having a “degenerate women’s emancipation fit.”
A best-selling book of the era, Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character, spelled out the social punishments for female individualism. “The sexual impulse destroys the body and mind of the woman,” Weininger wrote. Women lacked the capacity “not only of the logical rules, but of the functions of making concepts and judgements,” he believed; “a real woman never becomes conscious of destiny, of her own destiny.” Passivity was not just a virtue for women, it was a “natural” state, and “waiting for a man is simply waiting for the moment when she can be completely passive.”
“There is no female genius, and there never has been,” said Weininger. Normal women, in his view, “have no desire for immortality.”
In a hypocritical society hostile to women in general, and fearful of female sexuality in particular, Klimt’s studio was a haven of sensuality for women whose most elemental feelings and aspirations were pathologized as “degenerate.”
The “degenerate” label was soon applied to the artists and composers whom Klimt’s female patrons supported. “The degenerates babble and stammer instead of talking,” sneered Max Nordau, of the Neue Freie Presse. “They draw and paint like children who with useless hands dirty tables and walls. They make music like the yellow people in Asia. They mix together all artistic genres.”
The racially loaded culture wars of turn-of-the-century Vienna were on. It was only a matter of time before “degenerate” would be aimed at Jews. Turn-of-the-century Vienna was governed by opposing forces. As artists and intellectuals pushed ahead with new ways of seeing, giving birth to Austrian modernism, the old Vienna, conservative and hidebound, pushed back. Innovation from Klimt was met with hostility. The rise of Jewish patrons was heckled by persistent anti-Semitism. In another generation, these reactionary forces would prevail, absolutely, in a crushing triumph.
Eyes Wide Shut
Adele, too, adopted the chic flowing dresses favored by emancipated women and immersed herself in Klimt’s artistic world.
Even music was dangerous now. The disturbing atonal concerts of Arnold Schoenberg moved men to fistfights. Art forced people to see differently, listen differently, and feel differently. Adele was no longer an aspirant, but a member.
For her growing library, she commissioned a bookplate, or ex libris, by a well-known Secession artist, Koloman Moser, a close friend of Klimt’s. Moser drew a lithe, naked princess with long, black hair and a golden crown, holding her gown over her nude body as she emerges from a lily pond and encounters a frog croaking on a rock. The image seemed to sum up the prevailing view of Adele as the princess who had kissed the frog. Poor Ferdinand.
Klimt and Adele were now involved in a close relationship that would last the rest of their lives, much of it conducted in a hushed studio that was a haven for artistic creation and heated trysts. Neither of them left a written record of what occurred.
The indiscretions of the Vienna intelligentsia were open secrets, though in public, decorum was as rigid as the crust of Klimt’s golden mosaics. The Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler, who knew Freud, mapped out the tensions of this social schizophrenia in an erotic thriller, Dream Story, where masked Viennese indulge their sexual fantasies at a costume ball. In this confusing milieu, Sigmund Freud became the confidant for the sexual anxieties of a generation of Viennese women, and Klimt’s studio became a refuge for Adele and her friends.
Those who wondered whether Adele and Klimt were lovers looked for clues in his paintings.
Some art historians suggest that Klimt had met Adele years before, perhaps in the company of Alma, when she was a theatrical unmarried teenager, eager to throw herself into Vienna’s cultural whirl. If so, it would mean Adele met Klimt at his most amorous moment, a time he was unapologetically passionate, not for one, but for many. Alma may have told Adele of her struggle with her desire to surrender to Klimt.
One thing is strikingly clear: Klimt’s first portrait of Judith bears an almost photographic resemblance to Adele. Klimt envisioned Judith as a bare-breasted sexual provocateuse, a mysterious, dark-haired Salome with a golden choker and a triumphant smile playing on her lips. She was not so much a temptress but an aroused conqueror, holding the severed head of
Holofernes with the self-satisfied look of a femme fatale who has won the upper hand. Art historians were not the only ones left to sort out the waltz of intimacies. When Klimt unveiled his sexually charged Judith at the Secession in 1901, it was not just the heated eroticism that raised eyebrows. This Judith seemed familiar.
As Adele rose from the bed she shared with Ferdinand and sipped her coffee from their fine porcelain, she would have had to take interest in Felix Salten’s suggestion that this Judith was walking among the Viennese, in the form of a smoldering society belle.
Klimt’s portrait of the newly married Adele Bauer, ca. 1907, brought them together on a regular basis for more than three years. (Illustration Credit 13.1)
“In his Judith,” Salten wrote in a review, Klimt
takes a present-day figure, a lively, vivid person the warmth of whose blood can intoxicate him, and transposes her into the magical shadows of distant centuries, so that she seems enhanced and transfigured in all her realness.
One sees this Judith dressed in a sequined robe in a studio on Vienna’s Ringstrasse; she is the kind of beautiful hostess one meets everywhere, whom men’s eyes follow at every premiere as she rustles by in her silk petticoats. A slim, supple, pliant female, with sultry fire in her dark glances, cruelty in the lines of her mouth, and nostrils trembling with passion. Mysterious forces seem to be slumbering within this enticing female, energies and ferocities that would be unquenchable if what is stifled by bourgeois life were ever to burst into flame. An artist strips the fashionable dress from their bodies, and takes one of them and places her before us, decked in her timeless nudity.
Salten was adding fuel to a popular Vienna guessing game: Who was the model for this achingly sensual Klimt painting? Salten seemed to hint that he knew.
Years later, some art historians would argue that Klimt’s 1901 Judith was the young Adele.
The Lady in Gold Page 7