As Klimt slowly developed her portrait, Adele was settling into a marriage in which something was clearly missing. She was possessed by the same desires as Alma. But she had failed to hold out for a grand passion. Now she found herself in the embrace of a homely man twice her age who had never been confident with women. And she was spending vast amounts of unstructured time with Klimt, whom Alma, and many other women, found arousing.
This would go on for three years.
What occurred between Adele and Klimt as he worked on the portrait is left to the imagination. Klimt revealed little of his complicated personal life in his limited correspondence, and only a few of Adele’s papers have ever been recovered.
What might have happened was written by Arthur Schnitzler, a member of Adele’s circle who used the thinly disguised personal lives of people he knew as the fodder for his plays. Schnitzler knew Klimt, had watched him flirt with women at Berta’s salons, and had bought two drawings from him. Schnitzler had dreams in which Klimt appeared.
Klimt’s Judith, 1901. (Illustration Credit 13.2)
Schnitzler wrote The Comedy of Seduction, a play about a fictionalized Klimt and a beautiful society woman whom he calls Aurelie—from the Latin word for “golden.” His Klimt character implores Aurelie to allow him to paint her portrait, promising to immortalize her like the empress in the mosaics at Ravenna. Aurelie coyly resists, but she is intrigued.
At society parties, the artist dances too close to Aurelie under the gaze of her fiancé. He whispers that she must surrender to his “artistic” urgency. Only by painting remarkable women, he insists, can “I become the person I am.”
“Did I ever have to beg?” the artist implores.
He talks her into posing at her elegant home, then pushes her to come to his studio, where “my house stands alone, and there are high walls around the garden,” much like Klimt’s isolated studio.
She is reluctant. She has heard about models lounging there undressed. “The police will come before long and raid that nest,” a matron warns. “There are women running around there the way God created them.”
Another woman whispers that he paints his mistresses “just as Corregio painted Io, when the cloud descended on her. And he is always the cloud.”
The artist implores: If she comes to his studio, she will live forever, like the empress in Ravenna. “Don’t refuse me any longer,” he pleads. “I want to paint you in the sunshine. Heaven’s light over your hair, over your forehead, your throat, your neck, your hips. We’ll be like an island on the ocean. Come.”
Aurelie finally goes to his studio. The artist is not there. She finds her finished portrait and stands before it, stunned. Here, beneath the façade her society spent a lifetime creating, is her true face. The artist has lifted her mask to reveal who she really is.
Later that night, she sits alone at home, amazed, infuriated. Aroused. Calling her carriage, she hurries across Vienna. “To embrace him or kill him?” she asks herself. “I don’t know.”
A crowded costume party fills the artist’s garden. Couples move through a dark, fragrant night, “alive with the lamentation and singing of violins and flutes.” Aurelie wanders under the stars, through torchlight and darkness, as “all around me gliding and sliding, shouts of joy, a sinking down.”
Suddenly she is face-to-face with the painter.
She sinks down, “smothered in flowers, darkly glowing eyes above me,” overwhelmed by desire. “Did it last for minutes or hours? Was it a dream or was I awake?”
“And then I experienced it—all of a sudden I was not myself anymore. I was the picture he painted. I felt myself, in the limbs I’d surrendered, my quivering breasts . . . all as I’d seen them in the painting—and knew then: this painting did not lie; this painting expressed a truth of which I’d had no idea . . .”
Felix Salten, the sultry Vienna journalist who wrote about Klimt, ca. 1910. He went on to write the children’s classic Bambi. (Illustration Credit 13.3)
The artist had descended on her like a cloud. Her passion was not a source of shame, but a transformative moment. The painting was the catalyst for her sexual awakening.
Whatever occurred between Klimt and Adele, Schnitzler’s play captured the sexual fantasy the Vienna elite had of Klimt in his prime.
Did Klimt unmask his subjects, in the same way Freud sought to lift the veil on the human psyche? Did Klimt celebrate his female subjects, allowing them complex emotions and sexuality, or did he exploit women? Given all that we know, probably both.
Years later, Dallas psychiatrist and art historian Salomon Grimberg, determined to unravel this mystery, would unearth an erotic Klimt drawing of a woman that was indistinguishable from his sketches of Adele. Except this woman was nude and aroused. Did Adele strike this pose? Or did Klimt fantasize about it?
Whatever occurred between Adele and Klimt as he painted her portrait, his own family would assume he tried to seduce her.
The Outsider
Lurking at the fringes of Adele’s world was a penniless, shabbily dressed young man from the provinces who came to Vienna with dreams of becoming an artist. This man’s troubled parents, like Klimt’s, had been unable to meet his basic emotional needs, much less provide entrée into the cultural milieu he longed to join. He was shy, unconfident, awkward with women.
His name, Adolf, was from an old German name meaning “noble wolf.” His surname was chosen by his father, Alois Schicklgruber, who was born out of wedlock and as an adult adopted a variation of the name of the man his mother had later married, Hiedler, spelling it “Hitler.”
Hitler was Austrian, though the world forgets this. He grew up near the German border, in the stronghold of Austria’s ferocious promoter of anti-Semitism, the politician Georg von Schönerer; a region where the German nationalist salutation “Heil!” was already popular.
In Linz, Hitler studied at the same school as Ludwig Wittgenstein, the son of the Secession patron. Though they were the same age, Wittgenstein was two grades ahead. Wittgenstein became one of the century’s most influential philosophers, mapping the way in which “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”—the manner in which language shapes thoughts and perceptions.
Young Adolf had a different destiny. He got poor grades and was asked to leave school, at seventeen, in 1906. He headed to Vienna, to study art at the Court Museum. But he found himself irresistibly drawn to the Ringstrasse. “For hours and hours I could stand in wonderment before the Opera and the Parliament. The whole Ringstrasse had a magic effect upon me, as if it were a scene from The Thousand-and-One Nights,” he recalled.
Hitler moved to Vienna in 1907, renting a tiny bedroom in a crowded district. His room was a few doors from the Alldeutsches Tagblatt, or Pan-German Daily, which endorsed the anti-Semitic Schönerer and advocated Anschluss, the linking of Austria and Germany into a single German Reich. In September, Hitler walked to the Academy of Fine Arts to take the admissions test, expecting it to be “child’s play.” But he failed the drawing exam. “I was so convinced of my success that when the news that I had failed to pass was brought to me it struck me like a bolt from the skies,” Hitler remembered.
Crushed, he walked out of the majestic academy on the Schillerplatz, “for the first time in my young life at odds with myself,” Hitler recalled. “My dream of following an artistic calling seemed beyond the limits of possibility.” Some would blame Hitler’s rejection by Jewish professors for his subsequent anti-Semitism. But none of Hitler’s jurors were Jewish.
In fact, Hitler was the beneficiary of kindness from Jewish Viennese. As he became an increasingly down-and-out artist, he moved into a six-story men’s shelter in a crowded workers’ district on the outskirts of Vienna, a hostel financed with large donations from Baron Nathaniel Rothschild and the Gutmanns.
The Jewish owner of a frame and window store, Samuel Morgenstern, became the buyer of Hitler’s drawings and watercolors. Morgenstern, a kind, entirely self-made man, felt sorry
for Hitler and managed to interest his customers in Hitler’s mediocre architectural scenes: the Auersperg Palace, the Parliament, the Burgtheater.
Rejection from the academy was hardly fatal. Another man excluded in 1907 would become its director years later. But Hitler was immersed in a Vienna that offered him a scapegoat for his woes. He initially disapproved of the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Karl Lueger. But he soon became fascinated by “beautiful Karl,” a fiery, charismatic orator who was able to focus popular discontent on the liberal Jewish intelligentsia. Lueger railed against the “press Jews,” the “ink Jews,” the “money and stock market Jews.” He promised to liberate the Viennese from the “shameful shackles of servitude to the Jews,” once suggesting that Viennese Jews be marched onto a boat and sunk on the high seas. Soon Hitler would confess “open admiration” for Lueger, “the greatest German mayor of all time.”
Living at the fringes of society, Hitler began to transform his frustrations into resentment against Jews who enjoyed privileges denied to him. “Jewish youth is represented everywhere in the educational institutions . . .
while there were hardly any Aryan youth,” he would write in Mein Kampf (My Struggle), the best seller he wrote from prison after his failed uprising in 1923.
Like Klimt, Hitler saw salvation and dignity in art. He was dazzled by the 1907 production of the Richard Strauss opera Salome. But perhaps reacting to the chaos of his childhood, Hitler sought an orderly, tidy art. He avoided the bright colors that arouse emotions. He shied away from portraying people, creating instead tourist scenes that were linear and unimaginative, devoid of innovation or originality.
Hitler was an admirer of Makart. He blamed Jewish tastes for promoting Vienna modernism, which he would dismiss as “nothing but crippled daubing.” Anything “wholesome was called kitsch by the filthy Jews,” he complained.
But some modernists were embraced by critics and patrons. As Salieri once asked of Mozart, how could God love them more?
For this, Hitler blamed the Jewish press. At a time when Felix Salten and Berta Zuckerkandl were prominent arts writers, Hitler disdained the “art reviews in which one Jew scribbled about another.”
“This race simply has a tendency toward ridiculing everything that is beautiful, and it frequently does so by way of masterful satire,” Hitler wrote. “Behind that there is more: there is a tendency toward undermining and toward ridiculing authority.”
He began to loathe Eastern Jews in their black caftans, and the “odour of those people” which “often used to make me feel ill.” He began to see Vienna Jews as “germ-carriers” of a “moral pestilence” that was “worse than the Black Plague.” Hitler asked, “Was there any shady undertaking, any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did participate? On putting the probing knife carefully to that kind of abscess one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew.”
At his hostel, Hitler regaled other penniless men with his belief in the creation of a single country with a united Germanic nationality. He derided Vienna’s “linguistic Babel” and longed for “the hour of freedom for my German-Austrian people. Only in this way could the Anschluss with the old mother country be restored.”
Years later, Hitler would recall how his Vienna ordeal had “turned into the greatest blessing for the German nation.” Being “deprived of the right to belong to his cherished fatherland” would give Hitler the impetus to bring Austrians together with “their mother country.”
When Hitler left Vienna in 1913, his obsession with German hegemony was inseparable from his belief in a “Germanic” art reflecting the völkisch values of his fatherland.
If Adele had passed Hitler on the street in Vienna in those days, carrying his paints and pastels, she would have seen only an unfortunate young man, lacking in confidence. She probably would have felt sorry for him.
The Painted Mosaic
Klimt unveiled his first portrait of Adele in Vienna in June 1908. It made Adele, at twenty-six, an instant celebrity. The Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung described the portrait as “an idol in a golden shrine.” Another critic complained it was “more Blech than Bloch”—Blech is the German word for “brass.”
Everyone had something to say about it.
Adele had arrived.
Adele’s portrait hung at the Kunstschau, a downtown garden exhibition space designed by Vienna artists and architects led by painters, like Klimt, who were now moving beyond the Secession. The Kunstschau galleries were installed in a strolling park, with courtyards and a café, and Adele and Ferdinand could wander in with friends and contemplate the portrait. Architect Josef Hoffmann himself had made the simple golden frame, heightening the gravity of the painting.
The visceral impact was complex. Adele’s lips were red and full. Her eyes stared out from a light-filled gold leaf that seemed to create a transcendent plane of its own. Adele’s pale face floated against this mosaic like that of a silent film siren. “The expression ‘vamp’ had not yet enriched our vocabularies, but it was Klimt who first invented or discovered the ideal Garbo or Dietrich, long before Hollywood,” Adele’s friend Berta Zuckerkandl noted.
Like the Mona Lisa, this painting seemed to embody femininity. But it was a restless, sensual femininity, devoid of matronly resignation.
Perhaps it was Klimt’s mischievous nature that made him imagine dressing Adele in a heavy bejeweled choker, as he did with his provocative Judith. Adele’s hand was bent, hiding a crooked finger that seemed a touching mortal imperfection when set against so much grandeur.
The painting seemed alive with meaning. The Egyptian eyes of Horus floated on a tapestry with stylized vulvular symbols. Ludwig Hevesi thought it had “a rapturous feeling of the most majestic colorfulness. Colorful, sensual pleasure, a dream of bejeweled lust” that gave viewers the feeling “of being able to rummage through gems.” It was “a bodiless, pure feast for the eyes, conjuring up, once again, the soul which lived in the physical art of former times of magnificence.”
Klimt embedded Adele in a luminous field of real gold leaf, giving her the appearance of a religious icon, which art historians would compare to the mosaic portrait of Empress Theodora in Ravenna.
Hevesi coined an expression for this new style: Klimt’s “painted mosaic.”
The Kunstschau show was the first major exhibition of new Klimt works since he walked away from the state art world in disgust. The show also exhibited his portraits of Margarethe Stonborough-Wittgenstein, the in-tellectual daughter of the Secession patron and sister of Ludwig, the future famous philosopher, and Frieda Riedler, another progressive Viennese woman.
Klimt had ennobled these women from Vienna’s “second society,” elevating this emerging meritocracy to an aesthetic aristocracy. “They have a great longing to rise above the ordinary, everyday world, like princesses and madonnas, in a beauty that can never be ravaged and devastated by the clutching hands of life,” wrote Joseph A. Lux, a critic. With Klimt, these women found “the nobility which they are longing for.”
Klimt’s Adele Bloch-Bauer I. (Illustration Credit 15.1)
The fact that these woman were of Jewish ancestry was not lost on critics. “Whether her name is Hygieia or Judith, Madame X or Madame Y, all of his figures have the pallor of the professionally misunderstood woman,” sniped Karl Kraus, adding that the models also shared the same dark rings under their eyes, or Schottenringe—a play on words alluding to the Klimt models who were from wealthy Jewish families that lived near Vienna’s Schottenring.
But some Viennese coined an expression to describe the exotic, dark-haired allure of Klimt’s models: “la belle Juive,” or “Jewish beauty.” They too were promoting a stereotype, but this time it was appreciative.
With the gold portrait, Adele was frozen as a symbol of the enlightened turn-of-the-century Viennese woman, imbued with the opulence Klimt disdained and thrived on. The Habsburgs would borrow Adele’s gold portrait for exhibitions, to present the rega
l face of an empire that was modern, sophisticated, and decidedly urbane. “The new Viennese woman—a very specific type of new Viennese woman, whose ancestors are Judith and Salome—was discovered or invented by Klimt,” a reviewer would write. “She is delightfully dissolute, attractively sinful, deliciously perverse.”
Danae, painted 1907–8, at the same time as Adele’s portrait.
As Klimt rubbed gold leaf on Adele’s portrait in 1907, he was finishing his painting of long-limbed Danae, the mythic symbol of divine love. Locked in a tower of bronze by her father, the King of Argos, Danae is receiving a celestial visitation from Zeus. There is a look of rapture on Danae’s face as his immortal gold falls between her thighs, conceiving the son, Perseus, who will slay the Medusa.
As was done in religious art, Klimt used gold to convey the reach for the divine. The next gold painting Klimt would show at the Kunstschau was The Kiss; a delicate woman wrapped in the bear hug of a naked man, in a field of gold that shimmered with transcendence. Years later, scholars would remark upon Adele’s resemblance to the woman in The Kiss, and how Adele’s crooked finger matched the hand of the woman who kneeled before Klimt’s mortal embrace.
Klimt’s Women
By 1909, Klimt was at a crossroads.
Pablo Picasso and Cubism were creating a new way to see. Vassily Kandinsky was mapping abstract modernism. Claude Monet was pushing the limits of artistic expression with his water lilies, without even leaving his garden.
Klimt had failed to win recognition for his experimental work in Vienna. He was back to decorative work, finishing a commission of a golden tree of life, for a Brussels villa designed by Josef Hoffmann for Belgian engineer Adolph Stoclet.
He had not triumphed, like Picasso, over his detractors. He sometimes worried he was becoming passé. “The young no longer understand me. I don’t even know whether they appreciate my work anymore,” Klimt told Berta Zuckerkandl.
The Lady in Gold Page 8
