The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  “It happens to every artist,” he mused. “The young will always want to take everything that’s already there by storm, and pull it down.”

  Klimt was encouraging a younger friend, Oskar Kokoschka, who would soon unleash his own wild Expressionism on Bride of the Wind, a painting of himself in passionate embrace with a widowed Alma Mahler. When a seventeen-year-old Egon Schiele unfurled his drawings and asked if he had talent, Klimt looked at his angular nudes and replied: “Much too much.” Soon Schiele sat at the Café Tivoli with Klimt, a vital young prince to the aging king.

  The exuberance that fueled his gold paintings was weakening. Klimt had always had a terrible fear of syphilis, and now the aging Pan was suffering signs of its dreaded advance. Klimt’s letters complained of the skin eruptions that mark the advanced stages of the illness. “Results good. Boil seems to be closing,” he wrote Emilie Flöge.

  Klimt took healing trips to Lake Attersee with his beloved sister-in-law, Emilie Flöge. There he spent hours gazing, his paintbrush in hand, at the small villages that spilled down the mountains on the shores of the Attersee. He painted Schloss Kammer, a castle near the Villa Paulick. He painted the Persian carpet of wildflowers on the mountains. Flöge had become his home in this world. He had painted her portrait, but it failed to capture her confidence and enigmatic smile, and she was frank: she didn’t like it. This was a partnership of equals; Klimt finally settled into something approaching emotional intimacy.

  In this physical and moral retreat, Klimt was painting the portraits of women that people would be forced to remember—the women who had kept his career alive. The fact that he was deeply enmeshed in his patrons’ emotional lives lent psychological depth to his portraits.

  Serena Lederer’s niece Ria Munk had shot herself in the chest in 1911 over a failed love affair with a promising young writer. Her mother, Aranka, pleaded with Klimt to paint Ria posthumously.

  Klimt was also working on a second commissioned portrait of Adele, and visiting the Czech castle she shared with Ferdinand at Brezany. “Beautiful,” Klimt wrote Flöge after arriving at Brezany on September 27, 1911. “A very beautiful existence. I am for the time being the only guest of this couple,” though more were to arrive for quail hunting. “A mixture of rain and sun,” Klimt wrote the next day. “The hunt may be spoiled by the rain. I’m doing fine.” Adele may have known of Klimt’s illness. In February 1912, after a visit to a spa at Semmering, Klimt wrote from Brezany that “Mrs. Bloch tells me that I look very good, that this trip did me good. She thought I went to Attersee.” In mid-November, Klimt “arrived well” at Brezany. “The whole way it was already like winter. I ate the swill in the train dining car. But the exhaustion is quite strong.”

  In 1912 Klimt unveiled his second portrait of Adele. It was a very different work. Her expression was mature, direct, and anything but seductive. This was an older Adele, with world-weary eyes and cigarette-stained teeth, a painting some would call evidence of the end of the affair. This Adele was no Salome. She was beyond flirtation and the mundane. Here was a serious Adele, one who had left behind her golden youth and grown into a formidable woman who demanded respect. In this painting, Klimt’s admiration had deepened into empathy. This Adele mirrored his preoccupation with mortality.

  As the years passed, Klimt was more inscrutable than ever, outside of his supportive coterie of loyal patrons. He began to acquire “an almost pathological sensitivity of avoiding the public,” a newspaper article contended. “I am less interested in myself as a subject for a picture than in other people, above all women,” Klimt stated cryptically. “I am convinced that I am not particularly interesting as a person. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning until night. Whoever wants to know something about me—as an artist, the only important thing—ought to look carefully at my pictures and try to see in them what I am and what I want.”

  Klimt in a photograph that stood on the night table of Adele’s bedroom, 1912. (Illustration Credit 16.1)

  The Empire was shrouded in uncertainty, as if the dark prophecies of Klimt’s murals were coming to life. In August 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand left his Vienna residence at the Belvedere Palace for a trip to imperial Sarajevo, where an anarchist stepped out of the crowd and shot him, precipitating the outbreak of World War I. The ethnic tensions that Adele’s father feared would sabotage his railroad line through the Balkans were breaking apart the empire’s cosmopolitan mosaic.

  Klimt often seemed depressed. “Little pleasure for work,” he wrote Emilie Flöge that year. “I get up without much joy.” Later, he confided, “I didn’t want to write on the first day—I was too down. Worn down, washed out, crushed.”

  Klimt spent the first two years of the Great War painting Serena Lederer’s daughter Elisabeth. The Lederers had remained loyal. August bought Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze from a collector in 1915. There was no better Klimt collection in Vienna.

  Little Elisabeth had grown into a high-minded young beauty. Klimt captured her doe-eyed vulnerability, flanking her with protective Chinese warriors. He found it impossible to finish. “I’ll paint my girl as I like!” he would bark, cursing floridly. Finally, Serena drove to his studio and impatiently loaded the portrait into her car. When Klimt saw the painting on their wall, he shook his head. “It’s still not her,” he said.

  Klimt spent the last two years of the war painting his third portrait of Ria Munk. This time he resurrected the ill-starred teenage lover in a resplendent dress, surrounded by flowers. Klimt was having difficulty—“slaving away with the dead girl”—and sometimes he felt that “I just can’t do it.” But Aranka found solace in his artistic re-creation of her daughter. Klimt was feeling the strain. “Work proceeding slowly, like the War, but it has to go on,” Klimt wrote Emilie in 1916. “It all sounds so sad.”

  By August 1917, Klimt was feeling “artistically super rotten.” His latest independent painting, The Bride, was “really getting on my nerves.” A newspaper detected “weariness and suffering on the high, furrowed brow of the aging master.” His health was in free fall. Klimt was vacationing with the Primavesi family when a boil suddenly opened on his skin, so he headed to Bad Gastein for a spa treatment. By 1917, he was struggling to complete his portrait of Berta Zuckerkandl’s sister-in-law, Amalie, in a ballroom gown that left her delicate white shoulders bare.

  At some point, Alma Mahler noted in her diary that when she had longed for Klimt, “I did not know that he was syphilitic.”

  Perhaps Alma resented never being immortalized by Klimt. Or perhaps she was indulging her habitual anti-Semitism when in December 1917 she asked a salon of wealthy women, “Why is Klimt, the poor, radiant, great artist, only permitted to paint parvenues, and nobody well-bred and beautiful?

  “Take advantage of the time this genius is among us,” she urged them.

  Around that time, Klimt picked up his sketchbook and jotted down the name of one of his “parvenues”: “A. Bauer.” Adele Bauer. It was a final clue to Klimt’s mysterious tie to the woman he had painted into history.

  A few weeks later, in the wintry dregs of World War I, Klimt had a stroke. He was rushed to the Sanatorium Loew. When he stabilized, he was transferred to the Vienna hospital. There Spanish influenza swept through his ward. Klimt was quickly overcome. Gustav Klimt died on February 6, 1918. He was fifty-five. His last words were “Send for Emilie.” His life partner, Emilie Flöge.

  Egon Schiele sat at his bedside and silently made three sketches of the lifeless Klimt. The Austrian Artists’ Society announced, “Art has lost something enormous; mankind, much more.”

  “He died of syphilis,” Alma Mahler wrote in her diary.

  Adele recorded Klimt’s death with a cross in the black leather-bound agenda she used to track the final days of the empire, tracing the march of Austrian troops across Europe, each battle won and lost, each ship sunk—the unraveling of her world—like the jottings of a war correspondent in the battlefield. Among Adele’s handful of personal notations was K
limt’s birthday, and the day and time of his funeral, on a page with a printed quote by William Shakespeare: “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst be false to any man.”

  All of progressive Vienna crowded into the Hietzing Cemetery, near Schönbrunn Castle, to pay their respects to Klimt. Josef Hoffmann designed Klimt’s simple tomb. Arnold Schoenberg, whose music had caused fistfights, walked in the crowd with Berta Zuckerkandl. Serena and August Lederer came with Elisabeth. “I was paralyzed, and only the singing of the choir of a Beethoven piece during his funeral unleashed the tears and all the pain, the first tremendous one I had lived,” Elisabeth Lederer wrote.

  Klimt had come into the world at the dawn of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time of his death, the turn-of-the-century rebel had visually defined an empire that was now in its twilight.

  “He has entered into the centre of the earth in the Orient, this man with the high forehead of Rodin’s Man with Broken Nose and the mysterious features of Pan under the beard and hair of the ageing Saint Peter,” wrote artist Albert Paris Gütersloh.

  In the final days of World War I, Vienna’s shimmering era of brilliance was drawing to a close. By fall, the empire of 60 million people was defeated, and reduced to an Austrian backwater of 6 million. The Habsburgs and their titles were royal no more. Spanish flu claimed Schiele, his pregnant wife, and millions of others.

  Klimt and his golden moment were gone.

  “Hugs from Your Buddha”

  Klimt’s muse lived on. Still beautiful, Adele wore the formless dresses of the Wiener Werkstatte, an alliance of innovative designers and artists, and chain-smoked cigarettes from a long gold holder. Adele had grown into a serious woman. She told people she was a socialist.

  Adele had moved with Ferdinand in 1920 to a decidedly nonproletarian palais at Elisabethstrasse 18. The four-story town house was a rarefied address. Katharina Schratt had once lived there. Karl Kraus had lived in a building next door, where Ferdinand rented offices.

  Adele’s friend Alma Mahler lived a few doors down. Gustav Mahler had died in 1911. Alma had divorced her latest husband, Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, and was living with a Czech-born writer, Franz Werfel, near the offices of an obscure group of men who called themselves National Socialists.

  Adele proclaimed herself an atheist. She contemplated alternative spirituality, signing a letter “Hugs from your Buddha.”

  Richard Strauss frequently came to dine, though Alma dismissed him as “a speculator, an exploiter of opera, a materialist par excellence.”

  Adele’s family now used the kind of hyphenated surname, Bloch-Bauer, that was most common among the Viennese aristocracy, though it was ostensibly designed to carry on the family name after the death of Adele’s brothers.

  Adele considered herself equal to her remarkable friends. “If fate has given me friends who may be counted on intellectually and ethically as extraordinary, then I owe these friendships to one of my main qualities: the strongest self-criticism,” Adele would write. “I have always been, and still am, my strictest judge. Through the years I have become better and more mature, and have earned the right for myself to exercise criticism and place the highest demands on my friends.”

  Adele still saw her immortality in art. She was working with the new director of the Belvedere museum, Franz Martin Haberditzl, to make the family’s Klimt collection their legacy. “I think that in memory of my dear friend Klimt, I owe it to him to make a work by his hands accessible to the public,” she wrote Haberditzl. My dear friend Klimt.

  Haberditzl was a visionary. Confined to a wheelchair by what was diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis but some historians suspect was multiple sclerosis, he was leading an ambitious plan to make the Belvedere a showcase of new Austrian art. Haberditzl embraced the avant-garde. He was among the first important believers in Egon Schiele, buying his drawings and a portrait of Schiele’s wife, Edith. The grateful Schiele called Haberditzl his “soul mate,” and painted a thoughtful portrait of his warm, kindhearted patron. Haberditzl was recruiting the patrons who had helped to create the Secession to assist him in transforming the Austrian Gallery into a showcase for the art they had nurtured. He would bring to the Belvedere more than five hundred new works by 250 new artists. Aided by patrons like Adele and Ferdinand, Haberditzl would pull these artists into the august Vienna institutions that had once shunned them. Ferdinand helped pay for the acquisition of one of Klimt’s scandalous Faculty Paintings, Medicine, from Koloman Moser’s widow, Ditha, along with an old Klimt admirer, Sonja Knips. Klimt was gone. But the patrons he left behind still believed art had the power to open minds and change the world.

  Adele, by her early forties, ca. 1920, was a socialist, an atheist, and a proponent of women’s rights. (Illustration Credit 17.1)

  The transformation of the Belvedere was formidable. Like many venerable Viennese institutions, the Belvedere had a complicated past, even by the standards of Habsburgs, who buried their entrails among the “bone rooms” in the catacombs of St. Stephen’s and their hearts in the Augustinerkirche.

  The Belvedere’s creator, Prince Eugene of Savoy, was an aspiring soldier whose scandal-tainted mother had left him with dim career prospects in France. So in 1683 Prince Eugene headed to Vienna, where the Turks had laid siege outside the city walls, and helped rout them.

  The prince spent the rest of his life erecting a fantastically ornate Baroque palace that was a monument to his life as a warrior. He had a lusty eye for the male physique. On one ceiling, Prince Eugene had himself painted as Apollo, master of the Muses, rolling around the heavens with Eros, the Greek god of desire. His palace’s copper-green roof was made to resemble the tent camps of his Turkish adversaries, who left behind Vienna’s most important fuel, after wine and sex: coffee. Decorative arrows and shields symbolized the booty of war. Fantastic lion-women, his sphinxes, kept the palace secrets. He died in his sleep at the Belvedere in 1736, still a bachelor.

  It was the transformation of this campy palace of war, suffused, like so much of Vienna, with the weight of history, that childless Adele wished to leave behind.

  On January 19, 1923, Adele chose a piece of fine Elisabethstrasse stationery, dipped pen in ink, and wrote a short will. She asked Ferdinand to leave money to a home for poor children she sponsored, the Kinderfreunde. She left money to the Vienna Workers’ Association Friends of the Children and another charity. She left her jewelry to Gustav Bloch-Bauer’s daughters, Luise and Maria, and her other nieces and nephews. Her immense library of books would go to the People’s and Workers’ Library of Vienna. “I ask my husband after his death, to leave my two portraits and the four landscapes by Gustav Klimt to the Austrian Gallery in Vienna,” Adele wrote.

  Art was no longer Adele’s only existential concern. Women got the vote in late 1918, and a few months after elected a solidly Social Democratic city government that promised to help Vienna’s poor. Adele was immersed in the ideals of this “Red Vienna,” and the battle for social justice. The socialists were determined to turn the capital into a liberal island. They were fighting for health care, decent housing, workers’ rights, and secular education. The luxury taxes used to finance reform bred resentment, and church authorities preached against the atheists.

  The architects of this movement gathered at Adele’s house every week for a salon her family called her Red Saturday.

  Adele now held court at Elisabethstrasse with Karl Renner, the former chancellor of the first republic of Austria. Renner, a Social Democrat, had spent his youth at the birth of modern socialism with Leon Trotsky, at Vienna’s Café Central. Renner spoke of a revolutionary transformation of Vienna, an end to its teeming poverty. Their family friend Dr. Gertrud Bien, now a successful pediatrician, discussed the delivery of health care to the poor. Adele had never been afraid to wade into Vienna’s culture wars. This time it was not for an art-loving elite, but for the populist masses. “Goethe writes in Torquato Tasso: A talent is formed in still
ness, a character in the mainstream of the world,” Adele wrote.

  In her private life, Adele was a bit of a mystery. She was always tired, not feeling well, and suffering from headaches and vague ailments. No record of a diagnosis exists. Adele refused to go to the doctor. If poor women in Vienna didn’t have access to doctors, she told her family, why should she?

  Adele seemed disillusioned with her marriage. By the end of World War I, arranged marriages were giving way to love matches with an expectation of sexual passion, what Freud called a union of the “tender” and the “sensual.” The kind of intense union that Alma had insisted on, over and over. Her friend Alma had begun her affair with Walter Gropius before Gustav Mahler died; stormed through Kokoschka, married Gropius, then fallen in love with Franz Werfel. Alma had always attained the fascinating men who aroused her passion. Except for Klimt.

  Adele often seemed merely impatient with Ferdinand, with an air of resigned disappointment. When Ferdinand presented Adele with a luxurious diamond bracelet, Adele showed little pleasure. With socialism in the air, she rarely wore it.

  To her family, Adele seemed moody and self-involved. She barely looked up when Therese’s eight-year-old daughter, Maria, peered silently through the velvet curtains of Adele’s crowded salon. Maria was intimidated by her formidable, remote aunt Adele, with her long gold cigarette holder and her sober, unsmiling stare. Adele did not warm to children. Maria watched as Adele blossomed in the company of her distinguished, learned friends.

  The Good Spirit

  Ferdinand never lost the awe he had felt when he first set eyes on Adele, arrogant and self-assured, sweeping into the room in a long white dress, as slim as a vase. Ferdinand still felt privileged to be married to this proud beauty who answered her distinguished guests and their strong opinions with raised eyebrows and her own strong convictions.