by Tim Bonyhady
The painting is in Vienna because the Secession set out to transform the permanent display of contemporary art in the city by persuading the imperial government to establish a Moderne Galerie. This cause was championed by Moll, who was guilty of a typical conflict of interest in using his position on the government’s arts council to make the case for the gallery when he aspired to be its inaugural director. Meanwhile, the Secession set about acquiring works from its own exhibitions in order to donate them to the government so that the new gallery would have more to show. It also tried to persuade some of its wealthiest supporters to buy major oil paintings for it. Moriz was the first to respond when he paid for The Evil Mothers.
The Secession fixed on The Evil Mothers as part of an international competition over Segantini among Austria, where he was born, Italy, where he spent most of his life, and Switzerland, where he died. While Italy initially claimed Segantini by including his work in its displays at world exhibitions and Switzerland posthumously granted him honorary citizenship and erected a Segantini museum in St. Moritz, Austria began embracing Segantini in 1896, when Vienna’s Künstlerhaus invited him to participate in its annual exhibition and awarded him its gold medal. The imperial government followed by reversing his classification as a deserter, which resulted from his failure to undertake Austrian military service. The Secession did most by filling a room with Segantini’s paintings at its first exhibition and staging a retrospective of his work that attracted a record number of visitors to its building.
Austria still needed a major Segantini. If a modern gallery was to open in Vienna, one of Segantini’s best paintings had to be in it. The obstacle was cost, as the prices for Segantini’s work skyrocketed after he died in 1899, making him one of the most expensive artists in the world. When the exhibition opened at the Secession in 1901, one of Segantini’s small, late works cost 40,000 crowns (now about $400,000). This sum was the same as Moriz’s annual salary from the Gas Glowing Light Company in 1901. It was four times what Klimt received a few years later for his much bigger portraits. But Franz Servaes of the Neue Freie Presse was not alone in expecting that Segantini’s work would soon become immeasurably more expensive. After Franz Joseph visited the exhibition, Servaes was confident that the government would “prove itself worthy of its great son” by buying Segantini’s most ambitious work, his Alpine Triptych, in which he grappled with the themes of life, death, and nature. When the government did not, Moriz provided the money for The Evil Mothers, the centerpiece of the exhibition’s first room.
The importance of The Evil Mothers was underlined repeatedly over the next decade. When the Moderne Galerie opened in 1903, The Evil Mothers was on show, hung with one of Monet’s rare figure paintings and two of Klimt’s landscapes. When the Secession looked back on its contribution to art in Austria a year later, it identified The Evil Mothers as its most significant gift to the state, eclipsing van Gogh’s The Plain at Auvers, which another of the Secession’s patrons bought for it. The Evil Mothers also influenced the course of Austrian art as the Secession had hoped—its impact clear, above all, in the series of landscapes with highly stylized leafless trees painted by the young Egon Schiele.
Auer von Welsbach may have influenced Moriz’s gift by not only making repeated substantial donations to charities for children and students but also by endowing the Secession. Auer engaged in this philanthropy because he believed in giving something back to the society that had enriched him. He also understood how the imperial government rewarded philanthropy with an array of titles, which conferred great prestige in a society preoccupied with modes of address. While the steel baron Karl Wittgenstein refused to be ennobled because he thought this elevation would underline his status as a parvenu, almost everyone else in Austria who could get a title was eager to secure one. In 1901 the government rewarded Auer. As he was already “von Welsbach,” the government gave him a hereditary baronetcy.
Just as the donation of a foundation picture for the Moderne Galerie by one of Freud’s admirers secured his elevation to a professorship at the University of Vienna, which conferred prestige but involved no work, so Moriz’s purchase secured his title. Carl Moll, who was the Secession’s main fund-raiser, probably approached the government as soon as he realized Moriz might pay for The Evil Mothers. The case for Moriz’s elevation was simple. Because of his work with Auer in the gas mantle company, he had played a key role in developing a new industry, one criterion for businessmen seeking a title. Because of the cost of The Evil Mothers, Moriz had engaged in substantial philanthropy. Most likely, the painting cost more than 100,000 crowns (now about $1,000,000), which was close to Karl Wittgenstein’s contribution to the construction of the Secession’s building. If so, Moriz’s expenditure was remarkable because the wealth he had accumulated as a company manager may not even have been one-twentieth of Wittgenstein’s fortune.
Due to the price of The Evil Mothers, the imperial bureaucracy responded immediately. Moriz probably provided the money to buy The Evil Mothers in early or mid-February 1901. The documents recommending that Moriz become a Regierungsrat, or Imperial Councilor—another position involving no formal powers or responsibilities but significant prestige—were completed by the end of the month. When Franz Joseph signed the documents at the start of March, his approval was a formality. After Moriz visited Moll on February 25, Alma Schindler observed that Moriz had secured his title in return for a “prodigious loss of money on his side.”
Hermine was a beneficiary of this process as she became Frau Regierungsrat Gallia, just as Moriz became Herr Regierungsrat Gallia. Moll was probably another beneficiary; he received an Order of the Iron Cross at the same time. While Alma Schindler recorded that Moll “did not make too much of this honor, because he claimed not to know why he had received it,” its timing suggests the government was partly rewarding Moll for engineering the purchase of The Evil Mothers. Alma also noted that “innumerable people immediately began harassing Moll with congratulations.” No doubt they did so with Moriz on an even greater scale because his title was more prestigious.
The usual practice of the Secession, like other Austrian institutions that benefited from philanthropy, was to conceal the identity of those who endowed it. When the Neue Freie Presse reported the acquisition of The Evil Mothers, it simply attributed the purchase to “private means.” The Secession wrote much the same in Ver Sacrum. Moriz knew the Secession would implicitly acknowledge his gift by making him one of its members. He also expected this gift to change his status among the artists and architects of the Secession who knew about it, establishing him as someone worth courting and flattering, even if they were contemptuous of him behind his back because of his new money and wrong religion.
If Alma’s diary is any guide, the purchase of The Evil Mothers was also pivotal in her relationship with Hermine. While Alma did not mention the Gallias until Moriz’s elevation, she was soon doing so regularly. She went to the family’s apartment in the Schleifmühlgasse for dinner that March, met Hermine in the Prater before having tea with her in the Schleifmühlgasse a few days later, and then saw both Moriz and Hermine again after the opera. Alma also saw Hermine later in the year when they again had tea, and Carl Moll, who was always looking to orchestrate more commissions and purchases, invited Moriz and Hermine and Theobald Pollak to dinner with Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser.
7
Rooms
Koloman Moser made spectacular presents. One of Gustav Mahler’s gifts to Alma was a silver box by Moser topped with red coral, dated Christmas Eve 1902, and inscribed with Alma’s initials. One of Klimt’s presents to Emilie Flöge for Christmas 1903 was a silver necklace by Moser with a large egg-shaped stone at its center and five semiprecious orange stones on silver chains hanging in a star pattern. When Theobald Pollak wanted a gift for Hermine in 1903, he also went to Moser, commissioning a silver sweet bowl that had lapis lazuli beads around its rim and Hermine’s initials set in a square of pearl shell on its handle. Because Pollak was am
ong the many assimilated Viennese Jews who celebrated Christmas with gift giving, he may have given the bowl to Hermine then, though he may have waited until New Year’s, which he also marked with gifts.
This present fits the image of Pollak in Alma Schindler’s diaries as embarrassingly extravagant in his gift giving. It is another manifestation of Pollak’s closeness to the Gallias, which led Gretl to identify him as Moriz’s “best and only friend” and the entire family to call him by his Christian name. Yet this present also illustrates how easy it was for Hermine to be at the forefront of fashion in Vienna. While she kept a keen eye on what was most chic, her friends such as Pollak and Moll also introduced her to the new. When Pollak gave her the bowl in December 1903, it was just six months since Moser and Josef Hoffmann had founded the Wiener Werkstätte with the businessman Fritz Waerndorfer. While Hermine’s portrait by Klimt was first being shown in the Klimt Kollektiv at the Secession in a Moser room framed by Moser chairs, she acquired her first piece of Moser silver for her apartment in the Schleifmühlgasse.
Koloman Moser, Sweet Bowl, 1903. Hermine’s first piece of Wiener Werkstätte, given to her by Theobald Pollak. (Illustration Credits ill.22)
Hermine’s apartment already included a wealth of silver—an essential ingredient of any upper-middle-class Viennese household. The establishment of the Wiener Werkstätte opened up possibilities not only for more silver made in its first and biggest workshop but also for gold, leatherwork, bookbinding, and furniture. The Gallias could ignore the Werkstätte, buy just the occasional object, or go there for almost every household item. This decision was not only a question of cost but also one of taste, which members of the one family often shared, leading one relative after another to employ the same designer. Yet there often were also profound differences within families, as some members embraced the modern while others pursued the old. The families of Moriz and Hermine were like this, providing very different models of how to live.
The revival of the old, whether in the form of the neoclassical, neo-Renaissance, neo-Gothic, or neo-baroque, was the dominant style across the Hapsburg Empire. Hermine’s uncle, Eduard Hamburger, chose it in 1895 when commissioning a villa from one of Vienna’s most successful architects, Jakob Gartner, who was indirectly related to Eduard through marriage, since Gartner’s mother was a Gallia. This villa was one of a group for leading members of the Jewish community in Olmütz, which resulted in the most important precinct of historicist architecture in Moravia. In keeping with Eduard’s position as chairman of the Jewish community, he commissioned the first, most spectacular villa.
The appetite of Adolf and Ida Gallia for conventional trappings of wealth and power was manifest in the late 1890s when they bought their villa in Baden, which had carved lions at the base of its front stairs. They displayed the same taste in 1902, when they commissioned Gartner to design their two apartment blocks in Vienna, including the one where they lived. This house was one of many Ringstrasse buildings that came with an imposing foyer decorated with frescoes and a master staircase leading to the best apartments on the second and third floors, as well as a secondary staircase leading to the higher floors. The neoclassical facade exemplified what the city’s modernists decried as architectural malaise.
Melanie Gallia, the oldest child of Moriz’s brother Wilhelm, lived very differently from 1902, when she married Jakob Langer, who operated a chain of currency exchanges with his brother Leopold. Many wealthy Viennese couples began married life in apartments with architect-designed rooms, usually paid for by the bride’s parents as part of her dowry. The Langer family’s architect was Adolf Loos, who had made a name for himself as an essayist but was struggling to secure architectural commissions. His work combined two radically different aesthetics. Most of his furniture was severe, using simple geometric patterns, but he also copied the elaborate rococo chairs of the eighteenth-century English cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale, which he regarded as the most comfortable chairs ever made, impossible to better, ideal for contemporary use, and hence “modern.” In 1901 Loos designed the interiors of the Langer brothers’ currency exchanges. In 1902 he fitted out four rooms in the apartment of Jakob and Melanie. A year later he designed a room in Leopold’s apartment and another in his country house. By then, the Langers were among Loos’s most important early patrons.
Loos and Josef Hoffmann had much in common. They both were born in Moravia in 1870, were in the same class in high school, and attended the same technical college. Both also looked to England for inspiration, employed the finest craftsmen, selected the most expensive timbers, and used simple forms at the start of the century before gradually becoming more decorative. But Loos abhorred the idea of a total work of art, or Gesamtkunstwerk, as applied to interior design, arguing that the rich should buy the work of skilled craftsmen instead of trying to express their individuality by commissioning architects to design objects for daily use. Hoffmann’s objects also failed Loos’s test of utility. While Loos acknowledged in 1898 that Hoffmann was “an artist with an exuberant imagination” who could “successfully attack the old traditions,” he still declared himself “utterly opposed” to Hoffmann’s direction. A decade later Loos dismissed Hoffmann’s work as a “mistake.” When he first delivered his polemic “Ornament and Crime” as a lecture in 1910, Loos went even further. As part of decrying decoration as retrograde and degenerate, a waste of labor, materials, and money, he declared Hoffmann’s work “intolerable.”
The gulf between Loos and Hoffmann was so great that families who commissioned apartments from Loos are generally assumed to have never given commissions to Hoffmann. The commonplace is that, while intellectuals went to Loos, businessmen went to Hoffmann—whereas Loos appealed to socialists, Hoffmann appealed to liberals and conservatives. According to this view, for any individual to have gone from employing Loos to commissioning Hoffmann would have been like trading with the enemy. For members of the same family, like the Langers and Gallias, to do so was little different. But Hermine’s commitment to the Secession meant that she would never have considered employing Loos even if he had designed the kind of silverware that Hermine began collecting. The closest that Moriz and she came to acquiring any of Loos’s work was when they bought a copy of Sprüche und Widersprüche, Karl Kraus’s second book published in 1909, which Loos designed. Otherwise, like most of Klimt’s patrons, they went to Hoffmann, who enjoyed much greater contemporary success than Loos, becoming a professor at Vienna’s School of Applied Arts and obtaining a string of commissions from wealthy supporters of the Secession.
Moriz and Hermine first encountered Hoffmann’s work in 1898, when he began creating interiors for the Secession’s exhibitions. They saw more of it from 1901, when he designed a house for Carl Moll in the artists’ colony of Hohe Warte on Vienna’s outskirts. It came closer to them in 1903, when Theobald Pollak acquired a Hoffmann carpet and Hoffmann silver for his apartment in the building on the Schleifmühlgasse where Hermine and Moriz also lived. They would have seen still more in 1905, when Moll staged the Wiener Werkstätte’s first Viennese exhibition in the new premises of the Galerie Miethke, designed by Hoffmann, on Vienna’s most fashionable shopping street, the Graben.
The family’s first recorded purchase from the Werkstätte was big, but late: five “flower baskets,” or vases, which all employed the simple geometric grids made of either silver or plated silver known as Gitterwerk, which put Hoffmann at the forefront of modern design. They were bought in 1906 by Hermine, who was responsible for most of the decoration of their apartment in keeping with the standard assumption that the domestic environment of a Viennese matron was an extension of her personality. The placement of Hermine’s initials rather than those of Moriz on the family’s silver cutlery was a clear mark that the dining room was hers. Anyone who smoked implicitly got the same message when offered cigarettes from a Hoffmann box, especially designed for Hermine even though she did not smoke, which also carried her monogram.
The Werkstätte’s next gre
at public display in Vienna was at the Cabaret Fledermaus, which opened in 1907 on the Graben and rapidly became the most effective showroom for the Werkstätte’s work. More than a dozen artists, led by Klimt and Hoffmann, designed almost everything in the cabaret’s auditorium, foyer, and American Bar, including the tables, chairs, vases, sculptures, light fittings, posters, menus, menu folders, and programs. The result was the closest the Werkstätte came to creating a public Gesamtkunstwerk, though the styles that the cabaret contained were mixed. While Hoffmann was at his simplest, working in black and white, the ceramicist Michael Powolny was typically extravagant, employing a riot of color.
Moriz and Hermine were again slow to go to the Fledermaus, which was one of Europe’s most innovative and exciting cabarets. When they finally went six weeks after its gala opening, the interior probably was the main attraction, especially since Moriz had an interest in the Fledermaus’s electric lights, which were fitted with bulbs from Watt. After a concert at nine and a cabaret at ten, there was Spanish music and dancing in the American Bar from one till four in the morning. “Sehr nett,” “very nice,” Hermine recorded with characteristic blandness. A fortnight later they were back, accompanied by Adolf and Ida Gallia and Nelly Hamburger, the new wife of Hermine’s brother Guido, who had moved from Freudenthal to Vienna to run a branch of the Hamburger family company as well as work with Moriz in the gaslight business.
The marriage of Guido and Nelly prompted another architectural commission. Rather than marry in Vienna, Guido and Nelly went to the Semmering, a fashionable mountain resort an hour’s train ride from the city. The service was in the Catholic church in the village of Maria Schutz. The celebrations were at the grand hotel Panhans, where most of the wedding party stayed. The festivities started one evening with a dinner for nineteen and continued, after the wedding the following morning, with a lunch for twenty-four, after which Guido and Nelly left to honeymoon amid the palm trees of Abbazia on the Dalmatian coast. On their return, they occupied an apartment in Vienna’s Third District, where Hoffmann had designed four relatively modest rooms.