“It’s ugly,” I heard Kraus say again. A few men around him agreed, and loudly.
Emil Zuckerkandl, who was standing with the other academics, was one of the first to clap his hands together. Soon a few others began to applaud, too. Someone shouted bravo! And the applause grew.
I looked at Ferdinand, and he at me.
“I think it’s brilliant,” I said.
“Well then, I’m sure it is redeeming,” my husband said. “Although I have to admit I don’t quite see what’s brilliant about it.”
The last thing I saw that evening was Klimt, taking a long drink of wine and gazing up at the sylph in the center of his painting. It was as if he wanted an answer from her, and knew there would be only silence.
I lived with Ferdinand on Schwindgasse in those early years of our marriage, in the very same apartments I’d visited with Mother during our courtship. Our home filled a good portion of a city block, with two parlors and a dining room suitable for grand parties, private rooms on the second floor, and Ferdinand’s business offices on the third floor below the servants’ quarters. From my bedroom windows I could look across the Ringstrasse and see the lights from the emperor’s palace winking on at dusk. Sometimes I could hear the royal horses whinny as the guards made their rounds at first light.
My rooms were my own and my bed was grand, piled with pillows in all shades of blue and white arranged so that I could lie back and look up at the sky. The green velvet chaise from my childhood bedroom was in front of a cupola window. I watched the sunset from my bed on spring evenings, and on nights when I couldn’t sleep I lay there rolling cigarettes and smoking until the sun came up.
The morning after the Secessionist party I woke easily, reached a toe out from under the blankets, and pushed aside the curtains. I was shrugging into my robe, deciding what to wear and whether or not I should send a calling card to make an appointment with Klimt, when Ferdinand knocked and came into my room. He was dressed in a brown jacket and tweed vest, and was carrying a pile of newspapers. I could tell by the way he held the newssheets against his chest that something bothered him.
“They’ve written another editorial about Sarajevo,” he said. “They’re advocating for suffrage throughout the empire.”
“It’s too early in the morning to worry about Bosnian radicals,” I said.
I took the newssheets from him, and found Karl Kraus’s culture journal.
“Here,” I said. “Kraus has reviewed the Secessionists’ show.”
I scanned the page quickly, running a finger under the lines about Klimt.
“It’s an attack—he says Klimt has no understanding of philosophy.” I read the rest aloud—In his ignorance, the painter has offended the intellectual and aesthetic principles of his sponsors at the university, and invited a new darkness to descend upon the Secessionist movement.
“He didn’t understand the painting or anything about it.” I was surprised that my voice was shaking. “We need this kind of art, Ferry—we need a way of thinking about the things that we’re afraid of or don’t understand.”
The emperor had supported the Secessionists, and Ferdinand supported the emperor.
“What kinds of things?” he asked.
“Sorrow,” I said, thinking over the painting, and what I’d felt last night. “Death. Pain. A world without God that’s still wise and beautiful.”
He shook his head. He didn’t believe in God, but he believed in the emperor and the order of our city and of our lives.
“I’m not sure this is a good thing for you to be worrying about,” Ferdinand said. “Remember what happened in Paris.”
“This isn’t like that.” I was prone to heady pronouncements, and I summoned one then. “This is the future of Vienna.”
“I’m not sure I agree,” he said again, but he did not insist on anything further.
After breakfast Ferry went up to his offices, and I told the maid that I would be out until after lunch. I bundled into my ermine cloak, kidskin gloves and warm boots, and set out on the Ring. The sun had broken through the clouds, and the city looked bright even though the trees were bare. Triton and Naiad Fountain in front of the Museum of Art History was dancing, and even the pigeons were clean and white. I took the path through the Volksgarten past the café where I knew Berta and some of the others would be meeting at eleven. I knew they’d be talking about Kraus’s review, but I didn’t stop.
Klimt’s studio was far from the First District, in a neighborhood where workmen lived with their families. As I got closer, the sidewalks narrowed and there were fewer carriages on the road. I passed housewives and laborers in burlap coveralls, schoolchildren in gardens catching snowflakes on their tongues, and men shoveling coal from rumbling delivery carts.
A low, white fence surrounded Klimt’s yard on Josefstädter Strasse. The gate was open, and I entered without shutting it. There was a brown flower garden that had not been turned or weeded, and a wreath of holly shrubs against the fat, yellow house.
I thought Klimt might be something of a madman to have created such a work of art. I wanted to see him alone in his studio; to see what was behind the face he presented to the world.
Beside the hedges I saw a wide window, and I stepped off the path to peer inside. Through the glass I saw a pretty young woman, about my age, sitting on a high chair. Klimt was standing in front of her, his long robe dragging on the floor, his eyes rapt on her face.
Without thinking, I hid behind a shrub.
Standing, I watched Klimt’s mouth move. His voice carried through the cracks around the edges of the silvered glass—the words were muffled, and yet they seemed perfectly clear. I pressed further back into the shrubbery and ducked my head. In my green cape, I was camouflaged by a tangle of ivy and branches.
“Take off your dress,” Klimt said.
A look crossed the woman’s face—some expression I hadn’t yet learned to read—and she crisscrossed her arms and drew the clean blue dress up over her head in a single motion.
Her brilliant red hair cascaded across full breasts, and her heart-shaped face tipped toward the painter. She looked eager. She wasn’t wearing a corset, so there were no tight strings to loosen and no buttons to unhook. Her shoulders were pale and freckled, the folds of her belly soft and loose.
My whalebone corset had never felt so terrible against my waist as it did at that moment.
“Your garters and your stockings, too,” Klimt said, followed by something I couldn’t make out.
It was cold outside, but I flushed as I watched her fingers roll the fabric from her thighs. The soft flesh sprang to life, pink and ready. I’d never undressed fully in front of anyone, not even my husband.
“It’s freezing,” the woman moaned, but she didn’t look cold. She wrapped a bright shawl around her shoulders and licked her lips. I could see the imprint of the brass snaps still on her skin; I could feel my own garters pinching the inside of my thighs. What had been invisible and imperceptible before that moment now seemed impossible to ignore—the heat between my legs, cool morning air reaching up through my own stockings and bloomers, the feel of garden ivy brushing against my shins.
“That’s beautiful, the scarf is . . .” Klimt’s voice trailed out of range as he reached for his sketch pad. “Now lay down, Mimi. Lie down and spread your legs.”
She did it: she lay down and opened her thighs. I saw the bold streak of red hair and the dark hollow of her opening, and I went breathless as Klimt’s pencil flew across the page.
“That’s right,” he said softly. I had to strain to make out his words. “Now touch yourself.”
A shock rocked through me: I felt as if I were back in Paris, alone onstage with the woman in the red dress. When my schoolmates had whispered about lust and desire I’d listened with a detached coolness, never understanding what it was that excited them so. I’d studied my anatomy book with barely a thought about sexuality, and nothing in my time with Ferdinand had made me dizzy or breathless. But as the wo
man brought her fingers to her mouth and then back between her legs, my hips began to move. Heat spread from my thighs to my navel, making me light-headed. Klimt’s pencil flew across the page and the woman’s fingers moved slowly, then more quickly, between her legs.
I nearly pressed my nose to the glass as he drew furiously, pulling the sketches from the pad and dropping them to the floor one by one—snatches of thighs and hip bones falling at his feet. At last he spoke in a low growl.
“Come here.”
“The boy will be awake soon,” Mimi murmured—it seemed I could hear the tiniest whisper of her breath, the call of a winter bird in the distance, the soft drop of snowflakes that had begun to land on the bushes around me, and the sigh of Klimt’s exhale as if in my own ear.
“We have plenty of time,” he said. She moved toward him as a fish through water—writhing her body as if swimming in a river—and in a fluid motion climbed up his torso, hiked up his robes and wrapped her legs around his waist.
He grabbed her bottom and they closed their eyes. I stood as I was, watching his buttocks tighten and hips thrust as he growled her name and pressed her against the wall.
It was too late to turn away. I watched until Mimi threw back her head and moaned sharply, and then the two fell apart as quickly as they’d come together. I backed away—the spell broken—terrified that her eyes, flashing toward the window, had seen me with my mouth open, panting.
ADELE
1900
I turned from Klimt’s window and hurried back out through the open gate.
I didn’t want to go home, but I knew I couldn’t stand there.
Time had to pass. My blood had to cool.
I walked furiously through unfamiliar streets, past men digging in a ditch and a stockyard full of sheep. The houses thinned. A few brick homes with thatched roofs lined the road and then gave way to open fields. I walked beside them without seeing anything. More than an hour passed—I heard the church bells chime twelve—before my body finally settled and I went back to the studio on Josefstädter Strasse, back through the white gate.
There was no knocker on the door. I rapped as loudly as I dared.
“Go away,” Klimt called. “I’m working.”
I kept knocking until he pulled open the door. What possessed me, I have no idea. Maybe it was desire. Maybe I wanted to feel the heat inside that room.
Klimt was wearing his strange brown robe. I saw none of the softness I’d seen in his face earlier, nor any of the amusement that I’d seen in his eyes the night before. I wished, then, that I’d gone straight home. But it was too late. He was close enough to touch. I couldn’t go back.
“I’ve come,” I said in a rush. “You asked me to come to your studio.”
“Yes.” He softened when he recognized me. Behind him, cats padded over sketches that had been carelessly dropped on the floor. I saw no sign of the redhead.
“I read Kraus’s review,” I said.
“Kraus is an ignorant mule,” he said.
He looked tired—not at all like the man I’d watched through the window or the man I’d met last night.
“I wish you’d sent a card ahead, Frau Bloch-Bauer,” he said gently. “Or made an appointment.”
“But I’m here now,” I said, more boldly than I felt. “And it’s cold outside.”
Slowly he opened the door and invited me in.
A cat mewled at my leg. I looked down, and found I was staring right at a pair of splayed legs, sketched with a hand between them at the crotch. I smelled the sex in the air, and dared to glance through a doorway at the back of the studio.
Mimi was still there, but she was dressed. She had a child on her lap, and she was breastfeeding him. The juxtaposition of mother and lover inhabiting a single body within the space of an hour was stunning to me.
“That’s my model, Mimi,” Klimt said without a hint of intimacy. “She’ll be leaving soon.”
I tried not to stare as Mimi gently separated the child’s mouth from her nipple. She pulled her hair into a scarf and bundled the boy into a coat and hat. When she stopped to let Klimt give the child a pat on his head, I saw that her hands were rough, like a washerwoman’s. But her skin was glowing, and her little boy had big, winsome brown eyes.
“Send for me when you need me,” she said.
The boy raised his arms to Klimt.
“Hug Pa-pa,” he squealed.
Papa?
Klimt put his arms around the boy, and nuzzled his pale neck with a tiny growl. The boy giggled. Then the two were gone.
In the quiet atelier, the memory of Klimt’s bare bottom tied my tongue. I felt none of my heady giddiness as I twisted a cigarette into the holder and fumbled for my lighter.
“I didn’t mean to scare away your model,” I said at last. I decided to say nothing about the child. “I came because your painting says everything that I feel inside.”
Klimt had a changeling’s face, and I saw it then for the first time. He was an urchin one moment, a seductive lover the next. On that morning he looked decidedly untamed, as if the man wrapped in the tweed suit had broken out of his clothes and was free to run wild.
“Go on, please,” he said. “You sound much more intelligent than Kraus.”
“The whirl of terror and longing,” I said. Sex and fear seemed closely linked to me that day, as they’d never been before. “The loss of control—all the things I’ve read about in my philosophy books.”
“I’m not a scholar,” he said. “I’m sorry if I gave you that idea last night.” He found a piece of graphite and searched until he found the knife to sharpen it. “I make art, that’s what I do.”
“It’s all there,” I insisted. “I’ve been thinking about the face at the bottom of the mural. She’s Wagner’s Wissen, isn’t she? She’s Wisdom, but she stands outside the whirl of our emotions—she’s there, but she’s so small you can miss her.”
“I’m a simple man,” he said, almost wearily. “I work every day, from morning to night. I have no time to talk about philosophy when I should be working.”
He was tired, there was no doubt about that. I felt foolish for even thinking he’d want to see me on that day, after such an eventful night.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was impulsive. I can go, if you like.”
He kept talking, as if he hadn’t heard me.
“I spend every day in my studio.” He gestured as if to say look around, don’t you see my work is everything? “The university professors are already threatening to withhold payment for the mural. If they don’t like Philosophy, I can only imagine what they’re going to say about Medicine and Jurisprudence, which I’ve barely begun. So you see, I don’t have time to sit and read—I don’t even have time to worry. All I can do is paint.”
When he finished his short monologue, I smiled. I don’t know why. I can only think that it was flattering to hear him say so much, as if he were confiding in me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to smile, I know you’re a serious man.”
His pencil was sharpened, and he reached for a sheath of paper.
“And you’re a very serious young woman.”
There again, I saw the changeling. I wondered if I, too, seemed different than I’d been the night before. I certainly felt different. I’d seen things in the past sixteen hours that I’d never even imagined.
“Yes, I do take myself seriously,” I said. “Maybe too seriously.”
“How does a serious young woman like you spend her time?”
His pencil was whispering across the paper. I wanted to keep his eyes on me.
“I read—I read all the time,” I said. “I go to the opera, to the theater, to museums, to Berta Zuckerkandl’s salons. I attend lectures, too.”
“What kind of lectures?”
Neither of us stood still; we were moving in concentric circles then, getting closer to one another and then moving apart.
“I love British and French literature—I especially a
dore Jane Austen.”
I thought of Emma, Austen’s heroine, who made all kinds of mistakes when she involved herself in romantic affairs where she didn’t belong. I mentioned Dickens’s David Copperfield.
“He’s the hero of his own life,” I said. “That’s an idea I like very much.”
Klimt’s gaze was intoxicating. I’m embarrassed to remember how little it took to keep me talking. I smoked one cigarette after another as he dropped his sketches onto the floor and table. I caught glimpses of my hair, my mouth, and my arms in motion as he worked.
By the time he put down his pencil, almost two hours had passed. He sorted through the sketches quickly, and thrust one toward me.
“This is how I’ll paint you,” he said.
I was shocked to see myself naked from the waist up, my face a blur but my breasts exactly as they were in my own mirror.
“Nude?” I cried. “I haven’t asked you to paint me at all—and especially not nude.”
“Isn’t that why you’re here?”
The time I’d spent in his studio had passed almost without passing at all—it was as if we’d stepped together into the endless circle of time, or some other timeless place.
“No,” I managed to say. “I’m here because I read Kraus’s review, and I want to answer it.” I took a breath. “I’m thinking I might write a rebuttal and try to place it in the Neue Freie Presse.”
There, I’d spit out the words. They didn’t sound so crazy after all. I knew enough about philosophy and anatomy, which was also important to the painting. I wanted to be like Berta; now, perhaps, I could begin.
“There’s no solution in words,” Klimt said slowly. “The only answer is in art.”
I tried not to feel discouraged or dismissed. I looked around his studio. There were women everywhere, in every state of dress and undress. Some were drawn hastily on paper, others were painted carefully on canvas. Turned away from the window was an almost-finished portrait of regal Rose von Rosthorn. Her body was sheathed in a glittering black gown, the jewels at her neck still wet with white paint glistening as a snowflake on a leaf.
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