Patrick Bade
Art in Vienna 1897-1918: Klimt and the Succession
Patrick Bade - Art in Vienna 1897-1918: Klimt and the Succession
- Right, good. I’ll get started then. So you all know this painting, it’s become so famous, Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, known as the Woman in Gold and when that’s sold in 2006 for $135 million, it became the most expensive painting ever sold at auction. And this unleashed a kind of feeding frenzy of commercialisation around Klimt and his art. Well I think most of you know the background story to this picture. And many of you have seen the film, The Woman in Gold that told how Adele Bloch-Bauer, who died in 1925, wanted her picture to go to the Austrian state but it was to stay with her husband until he died. And the Nazis preempted that by seizing it from him. And, well, I won’t go into it because I think you know that story very well. Let me see, what’s happening here. Why is it not moving? Yes, here is Klimt with his two most famous pictures, The Kiss and The Woman in Gold. And as I said, there is this feeding frenzy of commercialisation. You can get Klimt coffee mugs, you can get Klimt DVDs, you can get Klimt tattooed if you’d want to. jigsaw puzzles, Klimt fridge magnets. This is a photograph I took on the last time I was in Vienna. You can see a car with, in English “come for a kiss” at the Belvedere. So what is it? And course Klimt is a wonderful artist and his paintings are very enjoyable, but it’s more than that. I think our fascination with Klimt has to do with the time and place in which these pictures were created, our fascination with Vienna in 1900. Because so much of what has happened since throughout the 20th century into our own century was born, you know, for good and bad, for very bad, in some cases, was born in Vienna around 1900.
So I think if we, you know, if we want to understand the culture of the 20th century, somehow we have to get to grips with the culture of Vienna in 1900. I find this particular photograph very fascinating. We’re on the Ringstrasse in front of the, what was then the Imperial opera. And we can date this quite precisely by the shape of those two women in their orange dresses coming towards us, it’s this hourglass shape. So I think we can date this fairly precisely to around 1905, 1906. And of course Vienna 1900, I don’t have to go into this because you, you’ve heard David’s lectures and Trudy’s lectures, it is the Vienna of Sigmund Freud, it’s the Vienna of Theo Herzl and his highly influential essay, The Judenstaat, which is really, I suppose the blueprint for the creation of Israel. It’s the Vienna of all these artists and intellectuals and writers, Karl Kraus, Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, I’m sure it’s come up many times in, in fact I know Trudy is going to discuss this with you, that this Vienna that we’re so fascinated with was Jewish or shall we say, Jew-ish because it’s impossible- apart from the visual artist, it’s almost impossible to think of anybody of any interest in Vienna in 1900 who wasn’t assimilated Jewish, part Jewish, was half Jewish. And here is Arthur Schnitzler from the same kind of background, his notorious novella, Reigen. And I think many of you will have seen the beautiful Max Ophuls’ film, La Ronde which is based on Reigen. And it’s, a kind of episodic novel. 10 episodes starting with a soldier having sex with a housemaid, and I can’t remember which one infects the other with a venereal disease. But then the disease gets passed around the city of Vienna and it goes around in a circle and it comes back to the original lovers at the end.
So a very, very shocking outspoken book when that was published in 1903. And there’s, you think, what was it- What was going on there? What is it about sex? There seems to have been an awful lot of it going on in Vienna in 1900. And the dark side, this adorable looking child that you feel you want to pick up and put on your knee, this is Adolf Hitler, who was not born in Vienna, as you know, he’s born in Braunau am Inn but came to Vienna as a teenager, and his ideas were formed by this witches cauldron that was Vienna in the early 1900s. Here you see him as a 13 year old already I think with a disturbing face. This is not a happy young boy, I think on the right hand side in this very, very famous photograph, well, discovered actually not that long ago. School photograph of 1901, not in Vienna, but in Inn with the great philosopher Wittgenstein and Hitler, again looking not very happy in the same class. Now, last time of course I was talking about the Ringstrasse with its historicist architecture, and I described it as being a great architectural fancy dress ball. So by 1890s this kind of historicism was going out of fashion, there was one of those big pendulum swings. There was a new style, born in Brussels, Art Nouveau, and that spread like a virus across the western world mutating wherever it went. It actually arrived in Vienna relatively late. It starts in Brussels in 1892, can say quite precisely with the Maison Tabelgssel by 1895, it spread to Paris. And it comes to Vienna, as we shall see in 1897 to 1898. But by the early 1890s Vienna prided itself on being a great art centre, but was not taken seriously in the German speaking world. If you read German art magazines of the early 1890s, and I’ve read them all because my unfinished PhD thesis many, many years ago was about German art magazines in the 1890s.
And Vienna was really dismissed with some contempt as being a bastion of conservatism and this awful bombastic wedding cake historicist style of the Ringstrasse. So, but suddenly in 1897, Vienna there’s a sea change. Everything changes. I can’t really think of another city or another time where there was such a drastic change almost from one day to the next and it’s across the board. It’s in literature, it’s in architecture, it’s in painting and it’s in music. It symbolised, I think, in music 1897 Brahms who for the last generation or so had been the representative of musical conservatism, Wagner, they were the music of future. Young people regarded Brahms as the music of the past. He dies in 1897 and in the very same year, the young Gustav Mahler arrives in Vienna to take over the Vienna Philharmonic and the Opera House, I’m going to be talking about that next week. He is the famous new broom, who sweeps out the cobwebs of the Vienna Opera House. And his most famous saying was, “tradition is sloppiness.” And so in all the art magazines in the early 90s you see article after article condemning historicism of the Ringstrasse and writers saying, why does a railway station have to pretend to be mediaeval? Why do buildings have to dress up in historical garb? Why can’t we have a style for our times? And there were recommendations that instead of always looking at buildings from the past and borrowing the decoration and the style from those buildings, we should look at nature, look at plants, look at animals, and find our inspiration in the natural world. Well these two buildings were constructing Vienna simultaneously. This is the moment of change.
When you come into Vienna from the airport on a bus or in a taxi, you will pass these gasometers that were built between 1896 and 1899 and you, of course, it is totally absurd. Why should gasometers be made to look like they were constructed in the Middle ages? These are kind of Neo Roman sort of gothic gasometers. So at the very same time, 1898, Otto Wagner builds the Majolikahaus and you can see he’s done precisely what was suggested by many critics. He’s looked to plants and the natural world rather than to classical or mediaeval architecture for his inspiration. Now, what I think is so extraordinary and special about Vienna, it’s different from other cities. The suddenness of the way that the city goes modern and the way it affects certain artists mid-career. And that is particularly true of Otto Wagner. He was in his late middle age and he’d had quite a long distinguished career behind him as a historicist architect. And he goes modern, very, very quickly again, almost overnight in 1897 to 1898. Here are 2, the 2 houses in Vienna that Otto Wagner designed for himself. The villa on the left in a near classical style with all its decoration borrowed from Greek temples and so on, it dates in the 1880s and he moved on from that. He built himself a new modernist, sleek paired down house in the early 1900s, which you see on the right hand side. I showed you this image last time, which is of the Kunzler house, which was like the salon in Vienna. And it was the main exhibiting venue in Vienna. There was really no, not much of an alternative in Vienna in the 1880s to the 1890s.
But younger artists became very dissatisfied with the conservatism of the Vienna Academy and of the juries that selected pictures for exhibition in the Kunzler house, and they’re also dissatisfied with what they thought was the completely inartistic way the pictures are exhibited frame to frame, floor to ceiling. Now Vienna’s secession, of course, is the most famous secession, but it’s not the first. It was preceded by similar movements, I think Berlin is the first secession, Berlin secession that’s followed by the Munich secession, and then along comes the Vienna secession. So look at this, the way the pictures are exhibited and also, only paintings and a couple of sculptures. But when the Vienna secession is created in 1897, and again, interestingly, it was completely Jewish money that really set this up. That it was wealthy Viennese Jews who were the backers and the supporters of the secession. So here is an exhibition at the secession, and it was showing new Austrian art, but it was also showing new foreign art, you can see Rodin’s Age of Bronze on the left hand side, you can see a painting by Segantini in the middle, they were showing the impressionists, post-impressionists Van Gogh, Munch, all that was new from all over the world, and showing it in a way that was much more artistic. Allowing space around the individual exhibits and at the following year, 1898, the first show such a huge success, sort of sellout success, that they were able to raise the money to have a purpose built exhibition building called The Vienna Secession by Joseph Maria Olbrich which you see here. And so 1897 when it was set up, the inevitable choice for President of the Secession was Gustav Klimt and you see him here seated like an emperor, a man with of enormous authority seated in a throne-like chair on the left of this image.
Now Klimt has certainly become one of the most recognisable artists in the world. You can walk into a museum, you walk into a room full of pictures and you spot the Klimt on the other side of the room and from a great distance, you can say straight away, yes, that’s Gustav Klimt, it can only be Gustav Klimt. And you can say that’s a sign of a great artist. And I wouldn’t deny that to him, but first of all I want to say there are 2 styles that he created. These are actually 2 portraits of the same woman, it’s both Adele Bloch-Bauer, one in his golden style, which is from 1902 to 1907, and the other painting in his later style that dates from 1912, which is more painterly, more influenced by the impressionist. So actually you can see these 2 pictures in 2 very different styles. But the 2, my 1st big point that I’m going to elaborate, to some length is that Klimt is an eclectic. He’s an artist who creates his style from borrowings from other artists. And you can say, yeah, well don’t all artists do that? But I think he does it to a greater extent than most. And I don’t want to in any way to hold that against him. And once again, I’m going to give you my favourite quote from Picasso, I’m sure some of you heard me say it many times, Picasso said, “bad artists borrow, good artists steal.” And the meaning of that is that you’re an artist with a strong personal vision and personal style, anything you take from other artists, it becomes yours. And that is certainly the case with Klimt. He is born into a very humble background, his father was a craftsman, a metal engraver and he was born in a suburb of Vienna. And he and his brother they made the decision as teenagers, not to apply for the Academy. They applied for the less prestigious, Kunstgewerbeschule, the School of Applied Arts.
And I think it was very practical reasoning around this. So if you go to the Academy and you train as an artist with a capital A, maybe eventually you’ll make it, you’ll become a superstar or a painter prince like Makart. But the chances are you won’t and you’ll have a very difficult life and you might starve in an attic. If you train as an applied artist, you are guaranteed employment. So Klimt was probably, and his brother, were thinking, yes, we’ll earn a living as designers, as decorators not necessarily as great artists. But all the same a lot of the training would’ve been quite similar to the training you would’ve had at the Academy. So the central plank of any artistic training in the 19th century was life drawing. Well drawing first of all, from plaster casts to instil a sense of the ideal in you, plaster class of Greek statues. And then you move on to a drawing from the nude. And this is a drawing that Klimt made when he was a student and it’s a competent drawing, but there’s nothing about it to tell you that there’s anything special about this artist. If you had a thorough training in an art school in the 19th century, pretty well anybody could do this. Here are examples by other very famous artists, as students, it’s Munch on the left hand side and Seurat on the right hand side, as I said, anybody who went through the system in the 19th century could do this kind of drawing. And of course the main art, centre for art training in the world was Paris. And if you like these kind of life drawings, you can find them by the dozen in any flea market in Paris, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of these drawings and you can pick them up for next to nothing in Paris. So he starts off at, this is Klimt he’s 22 years old when he makes this image, 1884 and it’s very accomplished, but it could it’s anonymous really well, it’s not anonymous because you’ve got his GK Gustav Klimt, but it could be by any competently trained artist of the late 19th century.
So in the same year, 1884, he set up a company with his brother and a friend called Franz Marc, and they offered painted decoration for theatres, private houses, restaurants. And they worked in around the Habsburg Empire going as far east as Romania, Hungary, of course. And they were quite successful and they built up a reputation. Oh, this is just to remind you of Makart, who I was talking about last time, who was the painter prince and Klimt, I think you know, that would’ve been in the back of his mind, wouldn’t it be great to be like Makart? And I think he the sumptuous and the richness of Makart was certainly something that stayed with him. And there is a story of him as a student in Vienna bribing Makart’s manservant, to let him into this very famous studio, which I talked about last time. And of course he was absolutely awestruck by the richness and the sumptuousness of the studio. Now in 1886 to 1888, he works, he got them at the, he and his brother and Franz Marc, they got their most prestigious command, their most prestigious work to date, which was to decorate, to provide big murals for the staircase of the National Theatre, the Bijou Theatre. And on the left is one of Klimt’s contributions these murals show the history of theatre, and this shows the Greek Theatre at Taormina in Sicily. And it’s a very, it’s completed in 1888 and it’s a very conventional work for 1888. You could have shown something like this at the Paris Salon.
And in fact, I think it’s pretty obvious that the nude figure is directly inspired by the British artist, Lord Leighton, his painting of Psyche on the right hand side, it’s very bland, very smooth, very academic in style and make the point again 1888 is of course a key year of early modern art with these 2 masterpieces, Gauguin’s Vision After the Sermon, one of the most radical and innovative paintings in the early modern art that dates from, it was painted in Brittany in 1888 and in the same summer in Arles, van Gogh paints this picture of his bedroom. So this is modernism, this is cutting edge and of course, by comparison Klimt looks very, very conventional, very old fashioned. The other big mural he contributed for the staircase well, you can see it’s a ceiling painting on the right hand side, it’s of Romeo and Juliet. And again, I think he’s, you know, he’s, looking around to other artists for inspiration. Top left, is the French salon academic artist, Cabanel painting story of Paolo and Francesca. And I think that is what Klimt’s been looking at, this very lovely drawing. This is a study for the head of Juliet in Klimt’s mural. It’s an exquisite drawing, but completely conservative and conventional in style. Now where we first begin to see the Klimt that we recognise and love is his next big commission in fact, the last big public commission, well the last big successful public commission. And it’s for the staircase, again, grand staircase of the Kunsthistorisches Museum that was a building that went back, it was constructed in the 1870s and it’s the height of the Ringstrasse style and inevitably it was a very, very prestigious project, commission and it was going to go to Makart and Makart only got as far as painting the lunette, the semicircular pictures around the central image before he died in 1884. And then the main image was handed over to Hungarian artist, Munkacsy who painted the main image you see here in the ceiling, but he too became ill and died.
And the project was handed over to Klimt and Franz Marc. And Klimt got what you might think was the very ungrateful, difficult task of filling the, this awkward shape of the pendentes, either side of the arches. But he seems to have relished the challenge, it’s like he really enjoys squeezing his figures into these funny awkward shapes. And for the first time we get this kind of flattening and stylization, which we associate with his mature art. Even though, as you can see, his making figures in different historical styles to correspond with the objects on display within the museum, so it can be Egyptian, it can be Greek. They’re very difficult to see when you go to Vienna, and I do hope at some point I’ll have a chance of going to Vienna with, with some of you, it’s always worth taking a pair of opera glasses or binoculars because these pictures are very high up and very, very difficult to see. In 2018, on the centenary year of Klimt’s death, they constructed this platform, it was rather wobbly platform, I found it quite vertigo inducing, but it was wonderful to have the opportunity to get up and close to these murals by Klimt. If you look at the woman on the right hand side, yes what style she’s supposed to be? I suppose she’s meant to be mediaeval or she lands up looking very fantasy, very Vienna, 1900s, as does this Greek lady.
Now he reaches full maturity in a series of portraits of women from the late 1890s. And this is pretty well what he sticks to after say 1897. I don’t think, I’m just trying to think, I don’t think there’s a single important portrait of a man. He only paints women and he only paints, by and large, women that he finds physically attractive, he could pick and choose and usually he painted women that he had an affair with. He was, you know, notorious for sleeping with all his models, both the ones who paid for the pictures and the models that he paid. And this is a Serena Lederer on the left hand side, I’ll be talking more about his relationship with her later on, and this absolutely ravishing exquisite portrait of Sonja Knips on the right hand side. Now there the big influence I think on these portraits from the end of the 1890s is actually James McNeil Whistler. Whistler on the right hand side, Klimt Serena Lederer on the left-hand side. Both of these pictures, Whistler called his pictures harmonies or symphonies emphasising the musical properties of the colour and the relationship of tones. And I would describe this Klimt on the left hand side as being rather like the Whistler of you know, a harmony or a symphony in white. Both artists, of course, strongly influenced by Japanese woodcut prints with this compression and flattening of space. In both cases they use this rather Japanese device of actually cropping the figure at the bottom. So actually can’t, you don’t really have a strong sense of them standing or existing in three-dimensional space.
But as I said, Klimt is looking around at everything. And of course on hand, he has one of the world’s greatest collections of old master pictures in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. And the Kunsthistorisches Museum has one of the world’s finest collection of Velazquez’s portraits. And I think there’s a rather weird reference to the courtly headdresses of the Spanish court in this Klimt portrait of Fritza Riedler. Japan, I mentioned cause Japanese were cut prints that were when America forced Japan to trade with the West in the 1860s and these prints flooded into the west, there were an absolute revelation to Western artists. I think a lot of Western artists felt that the whole post-renaissance way of composing pictures and creating space had become tired and cliched. And 2 things I think really opened their eyes to other ways to look at the world. One was photography, and the other with these Japanese wood cut prints. Now the poster by Klimt, you see on the right hand side for the magazine or The Secession, which is called their sacra. It’s very well, you could see the top bit is rather inspired by a Greek vase painting. But the composition with the asymmetry and the large areas of empty space and the flatness of the whole thing is very Japanese. So when Klimt first designed this, as a poster and a cover for the magazine, it was actually censored because the figure of Theseus, King of killing the Minotaur, his genitalia were visible and that was not thought to be acceptable.
So he was told to put on a fig leaf to cover it up and he didn’t want to do anything so binal and conventional as to stick a fig leaf on the figure, so what does he do? He uses a rather Japanese effect of a tree that is conveniently covering up the naughty bits cropped at top and bottom, rather like the mast in this Shiraga, on the left-hand side. And throughout his life right to the end, he is very fascinated by oriental art, Japanese art, but also Chinese. This portrait on the left-hand side of Friederike Maria Beer she was a rather plump, placid, pleasingly plump young woman. And he obviously thought how can I make that a bit more exciting? Make her a bit more exciting. So he took this violent battle scene of, actually it’s of a Chinese porcelain vase that he’s put into the background of this picture, and on the right hand side you see his studio, which was decorated with Chinese paintings and Japanese wood cut prints. Now I suppose he’s most famous for his gold golden style, which is actually quite a short period in his career, it’s only about 5 years, 1902 to 1907, and it was inspired by a trip he made to Ravenna when he saw the late antique early mediaeval Byzantine mosaics, And this is what is of course behind the style of the woman in gold. Other influences, as I said, he’s very, he’s like a little boy with a huge box of assorted chocolates and he’ll pick and choose and combine.
And I think he was interested in the English Pre-Raphaelite, one image that I think had a profound effect upon him was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting, Beata Beatrix, that you see on the left hand side. And I think that was the inspiration for The Judas with her halo of hair and her head thrown back and her eyes closed or semi-closed and her lips parted with an expression of ecstasy. And so I think he picked up Pre-Raphaeliteism probably directly from looking at Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Burne-Jones, who was very, very famous and popular throughout Europe in the 1890s, but also indirectly through the Belgian symbolist artist, Fernand Khnopff, who went to Vienna had a big success there and in fact, Klimt and Khnopff were in competition for the favours of Alma Mahler, I’ll be talking about that in a couple of weeks time, so here is, Khnopff and noticed this, you know, band around the neck that almost seems to sever the head and there’s this Pre-Raphaelite type of female beauty with a very strong chin. And it’s a type that was very fashionable throughout the western world. So the, The Judith, she’s of course a biblical heroin, but she looks very modern. Some people have suggested that she’s inspired again by Adele Bloch-Bauer, there is a passing resemblance to that portrait. But notice this language, facial expression, the piled up hair, the strong chin, the drooping eyelids, the amazing eyebrows, this is actually a drawing by the American illustrator, it’s a humorous drawing by Charles Dana Gibson, who is famous for drawing these very fashionable young women, and this drawing is entitled, Designed for a wallpaper for a Bachelor’s Bedroom.
Now this is my personal suggestion, I’ve not seen it anywhere in any literature except in my book about Klimt, in that I think, well he certainly went to Paris, and I think he took a good long look at the murals of and ceiling paintings of Albert Besnard, B-E-S-N-A-R-D. This is his painting on the left, a ceiling painting by Besnard in The Salon in Paris painted in the 1890s. And I think it was the direct inspiration for Klimt’s Vienna University ceilings, which sadly were destroyed, well, were destroyed, they were in a Jewish collection, they were confiscated and then destroyed by the Nazis. And throwing in yet another part of the cocktail of the Klimt style, the Swiss artist, Ferdinand Hodler it very famous in his lifetime far, far more famous than Klimt Albertina in 1900 throughout the world, and famous enough when he died in the 1930s to be given a French state funeral, but thereafter totally in oblivion until there was a show about 5 or 6 years ago at the Petit Parle in Paris. Hodler another artist, again, far more famous than Klimt in his, in their day and very influential, and he developed this style that he called parallelism, where you have this decorative repetition of figures and poses and in the background here we have Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, which I think again is influenced by Hodler.
And so Klimt is always willing to take his cue from somebody else, well into his career. This is Knoth, a painting that, on bottom here, was shown at The Secession and won a prize and was actually acquired by the Austrian state, so if you want to see that picture now, it’s in the Belvedere in Vienna. And a painting by Klimt painted soon afterwards with many of the same compositional features. And Rodin, Rodin, of course, he was the most famous artist in the world in 1900, without a doubt and in 1902, Rodin made a grand tour of Germany and Central Europe, it was like a royal tour. And he was received in Vienna like royalty and Klimt was assigned to take him around, I don’t know that they spoke each other’s languages, but there must have been people around all the time to translate for them and there were definitely a kind of mutual admiration that went on between Klimt and Rodin, Rodin in the middle here, this famous piece that he originally made for The Gates of Hell, she who was once the helmet maker’s beautiful young wife and this one very moving depiction of a body that’s absolutely ravaged by age. And I think that again is the inspiration for Klimt on either side here. The Secession was showing impressionist paintings almost from the beginning and once Klimt gives up that very hieratic golden style, and he moves into a more relaxed, more painterly style, I think, Monet is certainly a big inspiration. And so I’m going to, well I think I don’t need to tell you, I’m sure you can guess, which is which, but you can see that they’re both using, Klimt is using a very, very similar luminous pallet to Monet and a similar weave of broken brush work.
But the Klimt on the left, I would say is flatter than the Monet. Again, Klimt on the left hand side, Monet on the right, both enjoying and celebrating the fecundity of nature in a summer garden details, Klimt on the left, Monet on the right. Now we get to the subject of sex and as I said, there’s a lot of it about in Vienna in 1900 of course Freud is the person who’s most associated with trying to look at human sexual, explore human sexuality in a scientific more objective way uninfluenced by 2,000 years of Judeo-Christian morality. Looking at the human body and the sexual functions in a much more direct way. Now these are 2 paintings, of course you can imagine that were extremely shocking. The painting called Hope on the right hand side, it’s pretty well a first. It’s extremely, extremely rare in Western art to see pregnancy represented, even if the women were clothed. So to have a nude pregnant woman was really pushing out the boat. It was really shocking. But maybe the most shocking thing of all in these 2 images, is the detail of the destroyed University ceiling on the right hand side was the frank depiction of pubic hair. Pubic hair was a dark secret, women’s pubic hair that is in the 19th century. Although it was also definitely an object of fascination. I think I’ve quoted before an amazing book that was published in the 1880s, it’s a guide for English speaking sex tourist of Paris and it’s an inventory really of all the women you could hire for sex in Paris and it describes them in incredible detail and always dwells very considerably on pubic hair.
But if you, as a young man in the Western world, if you didn’t go to brothels, and I suppose most of them did, you would have probably no opportunity to discover that women have pubic hair because it was never represented. Go to museum you could see acres of paintings of nude women, but without pubic hair. And of course the most famous story associated that with Ruskin who failed to consummate his marriage. He married a young woman, beautiful young woman they were married for 5 years and didn’t have any children. And when people said gently to Ruskin, is there a problem? He said, yes, there is a problem because he only knew female nudity from art and it was such a shock to him on his wedding night to discover that his wife had pubic hair he was completely unable to consummate the marriage. She was still a virgin, the marriage was dissolved, and she married Millais who painted the picture on the left hand side who presumably did know that women had pubic hair and it didn’t gross him out because they had numerous children together. But you can see even Millais in this painting does not indicate in any way that the woman has pubic hair. Klimt was very fascinated by pubic hair and even went to the point of painting it in on his women and painting the clothing over the top of it. As we see from this painting, which was left unfinished when he died in 1918, that he had carefully painted in, you can see the figure on the right, the woman’s pubic hair and was about to cover it all up with a patterned fabric. Now Klimt, we’re in a terrible confusion, I think, about sex, we’re probably more confused about sex than the Victorians were and of course, since Me Too, everybody’s terribly, terribly aware of the sexual abuse of women.
If Klimt were around today, there would be queues of women suing him, I think. He would be very, very vulnerable to the Me Too movement. When he died, there were no less than 14 claims of paternity against him. And I’m showing you a picture of a woman called, Elizabeth Lederer Bachofen-Echt. That’s a mouthful, isn’t it? And she was the daughter of the industrialist, August Lederer and she married into the aristocracy, but her parents were Jewish. And during Second World War, there she was in her palace, in her in Vienna and the Nazis came to get her and she said, no, no, you’ve got it wrong. My mother, Serena Lederer, whose portrait we saw, had an affair with Klimt, and my father is not August Lederer, my father is Gustav Klimt. So that gave the Nazis pause for thought of course it still meant that she was what they would’ve called inverted commerce, a Halbjudin, half-Jewish. But they didn’t really want to send a daughter of Gustav Klimt to the gas chambers. So in fact, they let her be, she didn’t survive the war, she died, but at least she died of natural causes in her own bed and not in the most horrible of circumstances. Well, here is Klimt. He was a very sexy man, I think, or at least women liked him. I don’t think anybody ever or complained about his sexual harassment. Women actually did chase after him. And so there is Serena Lederer, the mother of the woman I’ve just shown you. And he’s known to have, or assumed to have, had affairs with Adele Bloch-Bauer on the left hand side and with the lovely Sonja Knips and there’s a little indiscreet touch in that painting, she’s holding a little red covered sketchbook with his personal sketches in it, that he gave to her. But, so he cut a sway through the wealthy bourgeoisie of Vienna. But he was obviously a man of limitless sexual appetites.
And if you went to his studio, of course there were always nude women hanging around to model for him and he was dressed, as people said at the time, like a monk, but there’s this kind of, how would you or whatever he is wearing, of course it was practical for painting in, it was also practical for having sex with the models. All he had to do, well, didn’t have to do anything did he? Just whip it off in no time at all. But I don’t want to malign him. Everything I know about Klimt actually makes me like him as a human being. And one thing that is very, I think is positive, is that he, there are several, illegitimate children that he acknowledged, he supported their mothers financially, and he seems to been very fond of them. This is a very sad picture of the corpse of a small child that he had with a model called Marie Zimmerman, this is Otto Zimmerman. And when the child died, he made this portrait of the child. And there are letters surviving in which he expresses real sorrow and grief for the child. Now, one of his most notorious episodes of his life is of course the kiss with Alma. She was in her late teens, he was in his late 30s, I’ll talk more about this actually when I get to Alma because the whole thing is very well documented. The whole story, that she always said to the end of her life, that this one kiss that she had with Klimt that she wrote about in her diary, and of course her mother read her diary and found out about it and there was a lot of trouble, she said it was the best kiss she ever had in her life and I suppose Klimt, he knew a thing or 2 about kisses and kissing as we know from these images. So as I said, there is this new intense interest in human sexuality in Vienna in 1900. Freud, Klimt, Schiele, then to talk a lot more about it next week, but it was, Vienna is a city of extremes, extreme conservatism, Catholicism and extreme radicalism.
We’ve got Stefan Zweig here, on the left hand side, and if you read that wonderful, wonderful book, The World of Yesterday, I do hope you all read it, it’s worth rereading, he talks about the sexual hypocrisy in Vienna and the incredible sexual repression, you know, underneath these layers and layer and layers of very restricted clothing, there was often dreadful lack of hygiene and he also said, you know, people, as I said earlier, young men and women could get married with very little idea of what the human, even what their own body looked like. There were just so many inhibitions and of course this was rich material for Freud and his famous Interpretation of Dreams. But so Klimt and the Viennese are not alone there are others who are trying to explore human sexuality. Hope I’m not going to shock anybody too much with these images, but as another key factor in this more honest exploration of human sexuality was the depiction of sex in Japanese wood cut prints, like the one you see on the left hand side and on the right is Beardsley. And he too is a radical explorer of human sexuality, he was actually given a set of these erotic prints by the artist William Rothenstein, who’d bought them in Paris and then was worried his mother might discover them, so he gave them to Beardsley. Beardsley actually framed them and put them on the wall in his house in Pimlico and then invited all his friends around to five o'clock tea, to admire the Japanese prints. But Klimt, I think is a really a pioneer in acknowledging, you know because there was this idea in the 19th century that sex is for men, it’s not for women.
You know the famous phrase, you know, the advice to a young bride, a young British bride by an older woman, “You just have to put up with it.” You lie back and think of England while this horrible thing is being done to you. But when you look at Klimt’s drawings, you can see women who enjoy sex. And this is Klimt on the left hand side, Rodin of course exploring the same kind of thing and the kiss, now am I going to ruin this picture for you if I explain what is going on here? Well, tough. You can switch off as if you don’t want to hear this as my dear friend Marina Vayze always says, “you know where the delete button is.” So the kiss, what is it? It’s actually a represent, a very graphic representation of the sex act. You see the man and the woman embracing within what seems to be a womb or is also a phallic shape. You see that all the decoration in this has a sexual symbolism. That all the decoration on the male clothing is long and thin, therefore phallic. And all the decoration on the woman’s clothing is elliptical as it is of course in the woman in gold and representation of the female sex. And so this is really the moment of climax, moment of orgasm, and then you can see in a very stylized decorative way the spermatozoa flowing down on the right hand side. Yet similar imagery in the Munch Madonna, which represents the moment of climax and also the moment of conception of the foetus with these little tadpole like things whizzing decoratively around the border. I think the elliptical decoration on the if you look at the Klimt drawing on the right hand side, it’s pretty obvious what the meaning of all those elliptical forms is.
And you can even find it of course in images of nature, this is actually not Klimt, it’s actually Monet on the top right hand side. And I’m running out of time, so I’m going to finish actually I’m running ahead here, this is the end of next week’s Wednesday’s lecture 1918 which the end of the First World War, the end of the Habsburg Empire, it’s the terrible, terrible Spanish flu epidemic which carries away so many of the leading figures of Viennese culture, including Klimt, on the left hand side, that’s a drawing by Egon Schiele. It’s the only image we have of Klimt without a beard because while he was being treated in hospital, they shaved the beard off. And then of course, a few months later, Schiele also contracts the Spanish flu and he dies of it and that is Schiele on his deathbed. So I’m going to come breathlessly to an end and see if we have, see if we’ve got some questions.
Q&A and Comments:
Yes, Noya Gallery, I’m very glad, I mean, in some ways I regret that the had to leave Vienna because she wanted to stay there. But if she can’t be in Vienna, I think the Neue Galerie in New York is a great place for her to be where she’ll be seen and enjoyed by so many people.
Thank you , she was auctioned for $135 million, I know it’s completely impossible to kind of grasp that really, isn’t it? Yes. Yeah, quite right, the comment, the half Jewish, yes, but you’re talking from a Jewish point of view. So I’m always actually very nervous about using that horrible term. It’s such an ugly term, a Nazi term, Halbjude, half Jew. It has very racist, unpleasant connotations. But that is how they would’ve seen it.
Q: Why am I in the dark?
A: Because nothing works in this house, it all needs to be rewired, re-planned, that’s the answer to that one.
Q: Which one?
A: It was Ludwig, the philosopher who was the classmate of Hitler. Gaudi. Yes, I mean they are, I think Gaudi and Klimt, I think it’s almost impossible they knew each other’s work, but there are interesting parallels. I don’t know what the tent is hanging in the Kunzler house.
Q: Did Barnes take his lead?
A: I think not particularly from Vienna, but I think there was generally a movement at the end of the 19th century, I mean it actually started in London. There were in the private galleries in London the Grosvenor Gallery and so on that started hanging pictures in a less claustrophobic way. Secession, many of people the period, not succession No, secession. Secede. It comes from the word secede.
Q: Can I explain the popularity of Klmit versus Egon Schiele?
A: Well I think Klimt is a lot easier, you know Schiele is a difficult, difficult artist and Kokoschka also. I think that Schiele, well Klimt thought that Schiele was a better draughtsman than he was and I think that’s probably true. Breaking traditions seceding from official organisations, seceding from the academies. The platform was in the Kunstgewerbeschule museum and it was only up for the summer of 2018.
Q: Wouldn’t you say that Whistler’s women were more 3D than Klimt’s?
A: Yes, a little, but I think they’re already, you know, they’re earlier, that’s like 20 years earlier, but I think and they’re already eliding the form with the, the background, and flattening space. Yes, there might be some kind of psychological connection that’s interesting.
Q: Rilke. Yes, I don’t know that Rilke in 1902, did Rilke accompany Rodin on that trip?
A: There were other people, I mean there was . She was fluent in French and she was definitely Rodin’s hostess. So, you know, there would have been people around anyway, who could have translated for them. Yes, I mentioned The World of Yesterday, wonderful, wonderful one of my favourite books actually. I didn’t mention Amelia. No, no. I should have done it. She was his companion and we presume lover and through huge numbers of letters between them, but his letters to her are very, they’re not love letters they’re little practical letters about laundry and God knows what. Stefan Zewig wrote The World of Yesterday.
Q: Did he paint Amelia often?
A: I mean he worked with her cause she was a fashion designer this one portrait of her that she didn’t like and that she sold, no I don’t think he painted her often. Thank you for your… No, he never married and if anybody asked me if he had children, yes he had masses of them. I felt a bit rushed, you know, because there’s a lot to say isn’t there? Right. We thought of Demi Moore was the first person to show a pregnant belly. No, Klimt was way, he anticipates Demi Moore by quite some time. The Margaret Stone Vichtenstein, yes that’s a wonderful portrait, but I mean I can’t cover everything. it’s not intentional, it’s just the state of my house. Did he use, I don’t know whether it’s 24 carat, he certainly used gold leaf in his paintings.
Thank you all very much for your nice comments.
Q: I’m stuck in the idea that it is sperm on the woman’s dress of The Kiss. Why is it not just a passionate kiss and a pattern on her dress?
A: Read Alessandra Comini, she’s actually the best person on Klimt. It’s not my idea. I’m not, you know, voicing some weird original idea on you, I think it’s quite common interpretation of that painting. No, Klimt was not half Jewish. It’s very interesting that the only artist of significance in Vienna in 1900 who was to use this controversial term, half Jewish was, and I don’t know whether it’s his father or his mother I’ll be talking about him on Wednesday. Right. Albert Benois. Yes, I think he does, definitely later on. He definitely deserves to be better known. He’s a most interesting artist.
Q: Any idea what Freud thought of Klimt?
A: You know, Klimt was not in any way intellectual. I think it’s more interesting actually to think of what Klimt thought of Freud. I would be very surprised if Klimt actually read The Interpretation of Dreams. But I think he must have picked up the ideas because you know, he was, Klimt was completely moving in these very intellectual Jewish, he lived in a Jewish world. All his patrons were Jewish, pretty well all his friends were Jewish and they would’ve been talking about Freud. And so I think he would’ve picked up Freud’s ideas from them.
Is there an Egyptian, he’s certainly was very aware of Egyptian art and there was plenty to look at in the Kunstgewerbeschule’s museum. No, I don’t, it’s not a trip to Morocco. No, no. It’s a trip to, anyway you’d find Roman mosaics perhaps in Morocco, but you wouldn’t find Byzantine ones.
Q” Mary portrayed pregnant?
A: I’m not sure. I can’t think of any really where she’s obviously pregnant Art Nouveauo. Yes, it’s the Vienna Secession style is the Viennese version of Art Nouveauo. Yes there is a list of all the artists, of all the people I mentioned. You should have it, you should have been sent it as always with the PowerPoint. Klimt’s brother died very young. I wasn’t allowed to teach in Detroit in 1956. I soon started to show a pregnancy since the children would know what we had done. Well thank God the world has improved in some ways, hasn’t it? Let’s face it.
Q: Do I think he was influenced by Clay?
A: No, because Clay is, no, I don’t think so, Clay is later anyways, quite a bit younger. It’d have to be the other way around. There is a Klimt painting, one of the 2 portraits of Friederike Maria Beer is in Tel Aviv, and there are probably other paintings too.
How did the, can you talk a little about how the… Yes, the fact that, you know, there is little blocks of gold as you have in the ravenna mosaics. So it’s that very strong sense of surface pattern, that’s what comes from, and the use of gold. Alessandra Comini, she was so fabulous, I heard her when I was a student, she could be alive, she’d have to be a 100, I think, and she wrote the most amazing PhD thesis she was lucky enough, I suppose in the 60s, that a lot of the people who were painted by Klimt and Schiele were still alive and she went around, they were mostly in America of course they mostly Jewish, they were mostly refugees in Hawaii, and places like that and she went round talking to these very old Jewish ladies and they told her that she was, she was an engaging personality was Alessandra Comini, so they were wonderfully indiscreet and they told her the most amazing stories about what went on with Klimt and Schiele. No, Kilmt’s mother was not Jewish. I haven’t definitely got a tour booked for Vienna. But Kirker tours, if you call Kirker holidays, it is you contact Lucy, she will tell you, I’ve certainly discussed doing the tour to them, but they haven’t confirmed it with me yet.
My concept of the femme fatale it certainly interested Klimt and not just Viennese artist. My first book was actually on the theme of the femme fatal. Oh that’s interesting, I love Lucy was the first pregnancy shown on TV. Can’t see what the problem pregnancy should be, you know, after all we’ve all been there. Madonna del Parto, oh yes, that does ring a bell. I think you’re right, Piero della Francesca.
Q: Isn’t applying gold leaf a painstaking process?
A: Well, you know, a painting is a painstaking process. I don’t think it’s necessarily more painstaking.
Sorry, I missed that, You didn’t refer to symbolism. Yes, there are aspects of Klimt, particularly paintings like, you know, Hope and so on where he could be, you could link him to the symbolist movement. Did Macintosh have any… Macintosh was exhibited at the… Yes, I think he probably did, but Macintosh was more of an influence on the decorative arts in Vienna exhibited with The Secession.
Let me see, Dr. Alessandra Comini lives in Dallas, she’s 85. My mother was her Italian teacher. Oh well, she’s a great friend and absolutely, well you can tell her, if you, if anybody is in contact with her that well I absolutely adore her books, and the 1 lecture I went to her, with her, made an indelible impression. I will never forget it. I just thought what a fantas… God I would so love to meet her. Thank you for your nice comments.
Hannah, going to Vienne in 3 days, oh my god. What can I, well I can’t begin, I need another hour to tell you what to see in Vienna. There’s so much to see there, well obviously you have to go to the Belvedere that’s the number one thing to see all the Klimts, Schieles. Klimt exhibit Neue Galerie in New York. Yes. Mediaeval paintings of pregnant full belly Mary, I have to follow that one up. Yes. Klimt was, was paid very well, he was a very high earner. Yes, there is that painting by Vermeer, which is probably his wife wearing a blue dress where she looks pregnant. At least van Gogh thought she was pregnant because he wrote a letter about that picture. Anyway, that seems to be it. Thank you all very, very much and I’ll move on on Wednesday to Schiele and Kokoschka.
Thank you Patrick, and see everybody soon.
[Patrick] Yep.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.