by Tim Bonyhady
Klimt was sustained through these years by a small group of private patrons who admired his new work and enjoyed the frisson that came from embracing the controversial. Interest in Klimt was so great that, when the Secession first devoted an issue of Ver Sacrum to him in 1898, the magazine’s circulation more than doubled. The demand for his tiny output of just five or six paintings a year also allowed Klimt to increase his prices substantially in the early 1900s, making him Vienna’s most expensive contemporary artist. His fee for a life-size portrait was 10,000 crowns, or about $100,000 in today’s money.
As Moriz and Hermine would have known, Klimt’s portraits were his only paintings to inspire general acclaim. His unusual ability to render materials, textures, hair, and skin was one factor. But so was his mix of realism and idealism, which saw his portraits praised as “faithful to reality, yet almost unreal.” They were thought to represent their subjects at “the finest moment of their lives,” even when, as with the thirty-six-year-old Rose von Rosthorn-Friedmann, whom Klimt painted in 1901, a Viennese critic publicly characterized her as “past her prime” and the twenty-one-year-old Alma Schindler privately dismissed her as an “old hag.”
Those close to the Secession, such as Moriz and Hermine, also knew about Klimt’s womanizing; a number of his sitters may have had affairs with him. As gossip circulated around the Secession, its supporters learned that Klimt had several children with his models, perhaps even discovered that he had two babies by different mothers within a month of each other in 1899. They wondered whether the dress designer Emilie Flöge was simply Klimt’s companion, at least briefly his lover, or his one enduring mistress. They probably knew that Klimt attempted to seduce Alma Schindler, who was the woman most pursued by Vienna’s greatest artists, writers, and musicians at the turn of the century. They heard that Klimt became Rose von Rosthorn-Friedmann’s lover while painting her, which prompted Alma to write, “He takes what he can get,” seemingly an expression of contempt for Klimt—except when Alma wrote exactly the same about the theater director and playwright Max Burckhard, she added, “Just what I’d do!”
Ferdinand Andri, Moriz Gallia, 1901. (Illustration Credits ill.4)
Klimt’s reputation as a difficult artist to employ preceded him when Moriz and Hermine decided to have their entire family painted. They knew that Klimt refused to paint men. They understood that he demanded substantial advances but rarely completed his work on time. They realized that, in keeping with his highly developed persona as an artistic genius not subject to the strictures of ordinary society, he never acknowledged that he was fortunate to be able to work on this basis but treated even his biggest patrons as if they were lucky to have him paint them.
Hermine’s appearance may have been an issue. A few years later Klimt reputedly refused to paint another Viennese matron, Marianne Löw-Beer, because she was plump, very different from his ideal of female beauty. As Hermine was growing increasingly stout, when the Gallias approached Klimt, he might have preferred not to paint her. But Klimt understood in the early 1900s that he could not be so selective when he painted both the thirty-six-year-old Rose von Rosthorn-Friedmann and the fifty-year-old Marie Henneberg. Because of the Gallias’ support of the Secession, Klimt had no choice. Although he did not have to start immediately, he had to paint Hermine.
While Moriz and she waited, they decided to commission portraits of the rest of the family, starting with Moriz—a relatively unusual decision in turn-of-the-century Vienna where the husbands of Klimt’s sitters generally went unpainted. Because no Viennese artist was renowned for portraits of men, Moriz and Hermine probably weighed a number of possibilities, while considering only members of the Secession. One was Carl Moll, a close friend of the Gallias, who had just painted his own family. Another was Max Kurzweil, whom Moriz knew because they were both Jews from the small Moravian town of Bisenz. Moriz and Hermine opted for Ferdinand Andri, who was acclaimed as “an artist who would never be forgotten” when he first showed with the Secession in 1899 at age twenty-eight and, by 1901, was on the society’s governing committee and shaping its public image by designing the poster for its tenth exhibition. Because Andri was still eager for commissions, he embarked immediately on a three-quarter-length portrait of Moriz and, as soon as it was done, painted the Gallia children.
Moriz was forty-two years old in 1901—balding, bearded, big-eared, and portly. As several photographs record, the mustache, which had made him look stylish—even debonair—as a young man when he waxed it to form a perfect handlebar, had lost much of its shape. His face, once thin, had become soft and jowly. His standard dress was a dark three-piece suit with a white shirt and bow tie. While the writer Stefan Zweig recalled that his father never smoked an imported cigar despite making a fortune as a textile-mill owner—a kind of moderation that Zweig declared typical of Vienna’s Jewish bourgeoisie—Moriz was unable to relax without a Havana in hand. His preferred stance was to have his right hand in his trouser pocket, a cigar holder held high in his left. Andri painted him like this, an archetypal successful businessman, while otherwise showing Moriz as quizzical and contemplative, tinged by sadness if not self-doubt, creating an engaging, personable image but hardly a flattering one.
Almost everything about Hermine’s portrait was different when Klimt embarked on it, probably in 1902. He typically worked much more slowly than Andri. He also worked on a larger scale, painting Hermine full length. His much greater artistic ambition, pictorial imagination, and technical facility were even more significant, as were the different conventions for male and female portraiture. While Andri thought it appropriate to paint a man dressed just as he appeared every day, Klimt worked to make a woman look special, even extraordinary, while still providing a likeness. The result was anything but a mate for Andri’s painting—Hermine’s portrait utterly eclipsed Moriz’s.
The clothing of Klimt’s sitters was crucial, though how they came to wear it remains largely a matter of conjecture. Klimt’s painting of Emilie Flöge is an example. By one account, her spectacular blue and gold dress decorated with spirals, circles, and squares was the one piece of clothing designed by Klimt for any of his sitters. By another account, this dress was a pictorial invention of Klimt’s, created by him on canvas. For all her renown as a founder of Vienna’s most innovative fashion salon, no one has suggested that Flöge might have designed this dress herself.
As Gretl and Kathe recalled it seventy years later—relying perhaps on what Gretl witnessed as a six- and seven-year-old as well as what Hermine told them—Klimt began by fitting out Hermine. Rather than simply deciding what she should wear, Klimt designed her clothes himself and had them made by Flöge. His choices were typically modern. As with many of his other early portraits, he painted Hermine in different shades of white in the style of the Anglo-American artist James McNeill Whistler. Klimt opted for a long, flowing reform dress, together with a ball-entrée or short cape for Hermine’s shoulders and a boa for her neck with a pink broad band around her waist. At most, Hermine chose her own jewelry—a gold brooch with two enormous solitaire diamonds for her bodice, pearl earrings, and two rings, an emerald surrounded by diamonds and a sapphire with a gold bar.
Gustav Klimt, Hermine Gallia, 1903–1904. (Illustration Credits ill.5)
Klimt’s next step was to draw Hermine, making very quick pencil or crayon sketches to work out the composition of his painting. While Klimt made more than one hundred sketches for his first “golden” portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer a year or two later, he usually required only about a dozen. Klimt did more than forty of Hermine. He began by showing her sitting, then did even more of her standing. He drew her with hands apart and hands clasped, her face looking directly at the viewer and her face in profile, sometimes turned to the left, sometimes to the right, before deciding on a pose different from all his other portraits, which made her painting distinctive. He had her stand on a slight angle, her upturned face toward the viewer, her hands clasped.
Like many society pain
ters, Klimt regularly improved the appearance of his sitters, so the gulf between his portraits and photographs of these women is often profound. When Klimt painted Hermine, he disguised her portliness and depicted her with much more glamour and grace than any contemporary photographer. Yet a photograph taken over a decade later shows Hermine looking much like Klimt painted her, with her hair the same and her face on the same angle. This resemblance may be the result of Hermine’s trying to live up to Klimt’s picture and for once succeeding. Perhaps the photographer did all he could to emulate Klimt. Whatever the explanation, Hermine is much more sensual and beautiful in this photograph than in Klimt’s painting.
The standard expectation of portraiture in Vienna was to provide a likeness and capture character, revealing the sitter’s nature through her or his exterior. The prime vehicle for doing so was the face, which was regarded as the window on the soul. But Klimt generally worked in the very different tradition of aristocratic portraits developed by seventeenth-century painters such as Anthony Van Dyck, who distanced their subjects from the viewer rather than opening them to scrutiny. In keeping with this approach, Klimt showed his patrons as self-absorbed, staring off into space, more or less expressionless.
Did this mean that Klimt revealed little or nothing about his sitters? The novelist, playwright, and essayist Hermann Bahr, who was the self-appointed leader of the literary group Jung Wien, thought so. Despite his great regard for Klimt, Bahr maintained: “He paints a woman as though she were a jewel. She merely glitters, but the ring on her hand seems to breathe, and her hat has more life in it than she herself.” Franz Servaes, the art critic of the Neue Freie Presse, disagreed. Partly because he assumed that Klimt’s sitters determined how they appeared in his pictures, Servaes viewed their clothes, jewelry, and even their poses as expressive of their personalities. Servaes also credited Klimt with profound understanding of the relationship between the outer and the inner, unusually adept at conveying the souls of his sitters through his rendering of their silk dresses.
The portrait of Hermine tests this argument. The National Gallery in London has suggested that the portrait reveals “Klimt’s fascination with drapery, which is the determining feature in the painting. The face and personality of the sitter interested him less than the sinuous rhythms of the costume.” This assessment ignores how, like many of Klimt’s other portraits, the painting of Hermine depends on the contrast between the stylized abstraction of her clothes and the relative naturalism of her face. For all the interest of the frills, patterns and folds, textures and translucence of Hermine’s dress, her contemplative, even melancholy, face commands our attention.
The portrait occupied Klimt off and on for months through 1903. When he exhibited it at the Secession that November, he described it as unfinished. A photograph of the portrait in the Secession shows that it could easily have been taken as complete. But the exact appearance of the painting in 1903 remains unclear—and not just because Klimt later made slight changes to Hermine’s hair, neck, and shoulders. The English art historian Frank Whitford has suggested that the portrait is one of many Klimts that have lost luster with age. It certainly is a very different picture from the one I knew as a child in Sydney. I remember being fascinated by the globules of paint that Klimt used to construct Hermine’s gold brooch with solitaire diamonds. The paint was so thick that the brooch was almost three-dimensional—raised high above the surface of the canvas. This paint is now gone.
The exhibition at the Secession was special because it was the only one-man show Klimt ever held. This Klimt Kollektiv was doubly exciting because it did not attempt an overview of the work of the forty-three-year-old artist but was confined to the six years since the Secession’s founding, when his work had been most innovative. The exhibition’s interest was all the greater because ten paintings were new—a remarkable number for Klimt, who was exceptionally productive in 1903, spurred by the need to fill the Secession’s rooms as much as the opportunity to have an exhibition to himself. The prime attraction was the last of Klimt’s vast canvases for the University of Vienna, Jurisprudence. Because Philosophy and Medicine had excited such controversy, many wanted Jurisprudence to do the same. The Neue Freie Presse expected that Jurisprudence would be the “sensation” of the exhibition, provoking a “war of words” over whether Klimt was “a creator of masterpieces or painter of offal.”
Expecting the worst, Klimt’s admirers had a book ready in his defense, which Hermine and Moriz immediately bought. It was by Hermann Bahr, who identified Klimt as the one Austrian on a par with the finest contemporary European painters, the latest in a long line of great Austrian writers, composers, and artists pilloried by a blinkered, intolerant society. But the great polemicist and satirist Karl Kraus was almost alone in deriding Jurisprudence. Having already characterized Klimt’s work as a domain of “goût juif,” or “Jewish taste,” in the course of identifying a larger connection between “modern art and idle-rich Jewry,” Kraus lambasted Klimt for reducing jurisprudence to a barbarous system of revenge amounting to no more than “hunt them down and wring their necks.” In branding Klimt a fraud, Kraus maintained that drunken students prosecuted for abusing policemen could only envy Klimt’s success in getting away with painted insults.
The installation of the exhibition by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, who had just founded the Wiener Werkstätte with the businessman Fritz Waerndorfer, added to the excitement. While Hoffmann designed the exhibition’s small, sumptuous anteroom, Moser designed the nine rooms containing Klimt’s work with unprecedented simplicity. The walls were all white apart from a thin gray-and-gold frieze, which Moser used as a cornice and skirting and placed around all the doors. The rooms were empty apart from a scattering of new “cubic” chairs with square backs, square sides, and square seats that were among the most striking Viennese examples of geometric furniture. Instead of the pictures being hung two or three high, they were hung in a single line with ample space between them, much to the delight of Vienna’s one notable female art critic, Berta Zuckerkandl, who admired Moser’s creation of an environment “as still and discreet as possible,” while still expressing her shock at the “royal squandering of space.”
The portrait of Hermine was the dominant painting in the exhibition’s sixth room, which also included a portrait of an unidentified girl and two landscapes. While these pictures were grouped together because of their “color harmony,” each had a wall to itself. A photograph of the portrait of Hermine shows it in the most elegant setting ever created for it, framed not only by a simple thin piece of gilded beading but also by two of Moser’s cubic chairs and by the gray-and-gold frieze that turned the entire wall into an outer frame.
The painting was no match for Klimt’s other new woman in white, commissioned by Anton Loew, who owned Vienna’s most exclusive sanitorium. Not only was Loew’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Gertrud, much younger and prettier than Hermine, but she had also been painted by Klimt in an unusually narrow, striking format. Klimt’s new portrait of Emilie Flöge was even more eye-catching because of her extraordinary blue-and-gold dress and her remarkable beauty, which Klimt did not exaggerate. While the twenty-nine-year-old Flöge was just four years younger than Hermine, she looked like she belonged to a different generation. Klimt also painted her with much more inventiveness when he set her head against a halo of flowers, creating the first of his ornate, exotic backgrounds, one of his most sinuous, seductive images. The first response of local critics appeared in Vienna’s morning newspapers before Hermine and Moriz went to the private view. The Secession’s greatest champion, Ludwig Hevesi, lauded the new portraits for their “magical delicacy which was unique to Klimt.” Berta Zuckerkandl credited Klimt with capturing the “sublimated essence of the modern type of woman.”
The Klimt portrait of Hermine with two of Koloman Moser’s cubic chairs in the Klimt Kollektiv at the Secession, 1903. (Illustration Credits ill.6)
The private view was the Gallias’ first opportunity to see h
ow Hermine’s portrait looked properly framed, hung, and displayed, rather than on Klimt’s easel in his studio. It was also their first opportunity to compare the painting with Klimt’s other new portraits, just as everyone who saw Hermine would have compared her picture with how she looked that day. But the private view also provided collectors such as Hermine and Moriz with the best opportunity to buy more of Klimt’s work when there was the greatest possible choice. While the Secession made much of how it organized exhibitions “on the basis of purely artistic considerations,” the Klimt Kollektiv was also a commercial venture in which sixteen of his paintings—including two of the most controversial—were for sale. One was Klimt’s Pallas Athena, which was widely regarded as shocking when he showed it at the Secession’s second exhibition in 1898 because of his unprecedented depiction of the Greek goddess as a terrifying warrior. The other picture was Goldfish—in fact a painting of three young naked women dominated by one taking evident pleasure in displaying her ample bottom—which one critic greeted in 1902 as “a product of the most perverted taste, a soulless larking about with paint.”
Seven paintings sold at the private view. While the overt sexuality of Goldfish again proved too much for Viennese collectors, Pallas Athena was bought by one of the founders of the Wiener Werkstätte, Fritz Waerndorfer. Hermine and Moriz chose one of Klimt’s landscapes, which, while not as controversial, were his most modernist pictures and consequently still excited fierce responses and often took years to sell. “The people rolled about laughing,” Ludwig Hevesi wrote of the response to Klimt’s Crab Apple Tree in 1898. “They should be in an exhibition on Mars or Neptune. On our globe things still look somewhat different,” another critic observed of the Klimt Kollektiv. The Gallias chose one of Klimt’s forest interiors, in which he painted the trees from so close that their trunks typically extend beyond the top of the picture frame. It was a Beech Forest that Klimt probably had begun only that summer.