by Tim Bonyhady
One of Moriz’s own companies, Watt, soon followed suit, commissioning the Italian artist Adolphe Hohenstein to produce a poster promoting its Monowatt electric bulbs. Moriz also made the Gas Glowing Light Company one of the small group of companies that advertised regularly in the Vienna Secession’s exhibition catalogs, both to attract customers and to subsidize the society’s publication costs. Yet Moriz’s main involvement with art was in a private rather than professional capacity. Over fifteen years, Hermine and he were not only significant collectors but also major cultural philanthropists who gave much more to the state than they spent on any of their own pictures.
Adele Bloch-Bauer, the subject of Klimt’s most famous “golden” portrait, and her husband, Ferdinand, exemplify the difficulties in determining how Viennese couples went about such collecting. It has often been assumed that Adele was not only one of Klimt’s many lovers but was also responsible for the Bloch-Bauers’ acquisition of much of Klimt’s work, including seven of his paintings. Yet there is no evidence that Adele was Klimt’s lover, and a letter from Adele in 1903 reveals that Ferdinand initiated her first portrait. Adele’s only documented Klimt purchase was in 1909, when she bought sixteen of his drawings. The ultimate ownership of the Bloch-Bauer paintings by Klimt is just as unclear. Again the standard assumption has been that Adele owned them. Adele herself seemingly thought so when she lent six of the paintings to an exhibition at the Österreichische Galerie in 1919. Her last will, which she wrote in 1923, has sometimes been read as stating so. But when the earliest list of Klimt’s patrons was published in 1918, it identified Ferdinand as the owner of the Bloch-Bauer pictures, while identifying women as owners of several other paintings. A book about Klimt published in 1920 similarly identified Ferdinand as the owner.
The Gallias’ situation appears simpler because Moriz was explicit in his last will. He stated that Hermine had always owned the family’s household goods, including their paintings and furniture, rebutting the ordinary legal presumption that the household goods of an Austrian couple belonged to the man. Yet this statement may have been a fiction designed to diminish the size of Moriz’s estate and hence reduce the death duties paid by the family when, as expected, Moriz died before Hermine. A who’s who of Viennese art collectors published in 1914 identified Moriz rather than Hermine as the owner of the family’s pictures, suggesting that that was how the Gallias thought of them. The list of Klimt’s patrons published in 1918 did the same.
The family’s taste was shaped, above all, by Carl Moll, who was not only one of Vienna’s finest artists but also its greatest artistic entrepeneur at the turn of the century, known as “the impresario of the Vienna Moderne.” From the late 1890s, Moll proved himself as accomplished at organizing exhibitions as he was at selling pictures, as adept at gaining the ear of government as he was at becoming close to men and women with money to spend or give away. In 1900, Karl Kraus savaged Moll for becoming just another avaricious creature of the art market by working as the “art agent” of the coal merchant David Berl. Moll appears to have acted in much the same way for Moriz and Hermine, who arrived in Vienna with little knowledge of art, though it is not clear whether they paid for his help.
Moriz and Hermine’s appetite for collecting was, in many respects, typical of successful Viennese Jews and recent converts to Christianity. Klimt’s patrons included several industrialists whose families were of Jewish descent. Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte attracted so many Jewish patrons that the Werkstätte produced bilingual New Year’s cards with texts in German and Hebrew. The architect Adolf Loos was even more dependent on the city’s Jews for commissions. The audience at Vienna’s operas and theaters was similar, prompting Stefan Zweig to claim that “nine-tenths of what the world celebrated as Viennese culture … was promoted, nourished, or even created by Viennese Jews.” They were “the real audience, they filled the theaters and the concerts, they bought the books and the pictures, they visited the exhibitions.”
This support of the arts was part of the pursuit of education, refinement, and good manners—known in German as Bildung—by assimilated Jews. A new class looked to make up for their want of inherited social and economic status by buying cultural cachet. This desire was fueled, Arthur Schnitzler suggested, by the prejudice that Vienna’s Jews experienced in other parts of their lives. As these men and women encountered discrimination, they turned to culture to distinguish themselves. Their appetite for paintings, music, and literature allowed them to fill a niche once occupied by Vienna’s aristocrats.
The usual pattern of families who moved to Vienna was that members of the first generation were too intent on making their fortunes to spend much on art, but the second generation was more liberal. The Gallias were very different, spurred by the creation in 1897 of the Secession, just six years after Moriz moved to Vienna and four years after Hermine joined him. As the Secession became one of the most successful new artists’ organizations in Europe, attracting the emperor’s immediate imprimatur, a state subsidy, vast crowds, and many collectors, Moriz and Hermine were among its earliest supporters. Although they acquired nothing from the Secession’s first exhibition, held at the city’s Horticultural Society building in March 1898, at least one of their paintings was in the Secession’s next exhibition, that November, in its own new building on the Friedrichstrasse. It was one of Carl Moll’s largest canvases, depicting the interior of Vienna’s Peterskirche, a baroque church in the First District modeled on St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
The only question is whether Moriz and Hermine bought this painting from the exhibition or some time later. The painting’s Christian subject is reason for Moriz and Hermine to have initially rejected it; most Jews would not have bought such a painting of a Catholic site and would have been embarrassed to have their Jewish friends and relatives see it in their homes. Moriz and Hermine may have done so because of her strong Christian inclinations. The strength of Moll’s relationship with the Gallias by the start of the 1900s also suggests that their first significant dealings with him had been a few years before. The purchase by Moriz and Hermine of the Peterskirche painting from the Secession is the most likely catalyst for their friendship.
Either way, the Gallias’ collection of Secessionist pictures soon grew. While they appear to have bought just one or two paintings in some years, they acquired at least four in 1903, including the Klimt Beech Forest, an even bigger landscape by Ferdinand Andri, a smaller oil by Moll of the house where Beethoven lived in the outer Viennese suburb of Heiligenstadt, and a sparkling neo-impressionist moonlit scene by Ernst Stöhr. When Klimt finally completed his portrait of Hermine early the following year, the Gallias’ apartment in the Schleifmühlgasse boasted one of the great early Secessionist collections.
This patronage was thrown into question when, like many other breakaway artists’ groups in Europe at the turn of the century, the Secession soon fractured. One source of discord was a proposal advanced by Klimt and his supporters that the Secession buy Vienna’s leading commercial gallery, the Miethke, which Moll had run from 1904. Another, again advanced by this Klimtgruppe, was that Moll run the Miethke from the Secession’s building while showing only some of the society’s artists. When a majority of the Secession decided that Moll was guilty of a conflict of interest in 1905, the Klimtgruppe resigned in protest, depriving the society of its most innovative artists and architects, though its exhibitions continued to attract crowds, enjoy critical attention, and sell paintings.
A letter from Klimt to Moriz accepting an invitation to dinner at the Schleifmühlgasse, the Gallias’ home in Vienna’s Fourth District from 1893 until 1913. (Illustration Credits ill.20)
Moriz and Hermine continued to buy from the Secession after this schism—above all, a beautiful landscape by Adolf Zdrazila, the foremost Silesian painter of the early twentieth century, whose work appealed to Hermine because it showed her childhood home. When the Gallias visited the Munich Secession in 1912, Gretl declared its Viennese counterpart “mu
ch more beautiful,” most likely referring to both its building and the art it showed. Yet Moriz and Hermine were much closer to the Klimtgruppe, including Klimt himself, who was an occasional visitor to the family’s apartment. Like Sonja Knips, Adele Bloch-Bauer, and Eugenia Primavesi, who were also painted by Klimt, Hermine acquired his photograph, though, unlike these other women, Hermine did not put this photograph on display or place it in a special album.
Moll remained close to the Gallias. Just as he invited them to his house on the Hohe Warte, so they invited him to their apartment in the Schleifmühlgasse and sometimes went to the opera, theater, and concerts with him and his wife, Anna. Not long after the Klimtgruppe quit the Secession, the Gallias, Molls, and Theobald Pollak all went to a performance of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Six years later Moll was so close to the Gallias that he gave them one of his own paintings, a still life of roses. He also visited Hermine’s birthplace of Freudenthal, where he almost certainly stayed with her parents. In between, Moriz and Hermine bought most of their pictures from him.
Hermine’s photograph of Klimt. One of the celebrated series of portraits of Klimt taken by the Madame d’Ora studio of Dora Kallmus, c. 1908. (Illustration Credits ill.21)
Moriz and Hermine had every opportunity to buy the best art from across Europe because both the Secession and the Galerie Miethke were internationalist in what they exhibited, but like most Viennese collectors of the modern, Moriz and Hermine preferred the local. A rare exception was a large watercolor by the Russian artist Constantin Somoff, who exhibited at the Galerie Miethke in 1905. Otherwise, Moriz and Hermine expressed their Austrian identity, which dated only from the 1890s when they moved to Vienna, by concentrating on Austrian artists. When they stopped collecting around the time they moved into their Hoffmann apartment in 1913, they owned at least twenty-five paintings stretching over almost eighty years, illustrating the rise of modern Austrian art as Klimt and his followers saw it.
The family’s collection started with Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, the finest Austrian artist of the first half of the nineteenth century, who enjoyed great contemporary success from the late 1820s, when the imperial family commissioned him to paint a series of portraits and Vienna’s Academy of the Fine Arts made him a professor. But after Waldmüller published two polemics attacking the academy, it dismissed him on a janitor’s pension. When he died in 1865, he was almost forgotten and remained so until the mid-1890s, when he was embraced both by traditionalists who admired his realism and by members of the avant-garde who lauded his attacks on the academy, support for younger artists, and anticipation of impressionism by painting en plein air. When his work was allocated its own room at the exhibition of Austrian art staged to mark Franz Joseph’s jubilee as emperor in 1898, the critic Ludwig Hevesi set Waldmüller at the start of a lineage of radical art in Austria, identifying him as an “Ursecessionist,” or “proto-Secessionist.”
The prices fetched by Waldmüller’s paintings were soon immense. By one account, in 1907 his pictures were worth ten times what they sold for in his lifetime. The main dealer in them was Moll, who almost always had Waldmüller’s work in stock after choosing him as the subject of his first exhibition at the Galerie Miethke. Moriz and Hermine bought a pair of Waldmüller’s small portraits of a man and woman from 1837, when he was at his most prolific, completing a portrait every two to three weeks as well as an array of other pictures. Both of these paintings possess the comfortable self-assurance that characterizes Waldmüller’s commissioned portraits. Both are in near frontal poses against neutral backgrounds, which was Waldmüller’s standard composition. Both are on smooth, shiny surfaces painted with the remarkable detail that prompted Waldmüller’s identification as the Ingres of Austria and looked anything but radical. They probably appealed to Moriz and Hermine because they suggested old money, identity, and culture while possessing great modernist cachet.
Moriz and Hermine also bought the work of the most innovative Austrian landscape painters of the 1870s and 1880s, Emil Jakob Schindler and Rudolf Ribarz, whose estates were both handled by Moll. They acquired the work of members of the Klimtgruppe, including two harbor scenes by Max Kurzweil, who exhibited at the Galerie Miethke in 1907. But the artist who occupied the most substantial place in their collection was Moll himself. Hermine and Moriz were Moll’s foremost patrons, acquiring about ten of his paintings, including a landscape that he painted in Freudenthal and his finest series of prints, a boxed set of woodcuts published by the Wiener Werkstätte depicting twelve houses in and around Vienna where Beethoven lived.
The catalyst for these subjects was a Beethoven exhibition staged by the Secession in 1902 around a massive polychrome sculpture of Beethoven by the German artist Max Klinger. But this exhibition also marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the Heiligenstadt Testament, Beethoven’s most famous piece of writing, in which he expressed his anguish at his increasing deafness. Moll made a woodcut of Beethoven’s house in Heiligenstadt that was published in the exhibition catalog. In 1903 he completed a painting of this scene, and Hermine and Moriz bought it after Moll had shown it at the Secession. Three years later Moll completed his set of twelve woodcuts, which was first shown in 1908 at the most important exhibition organized by Klimt after leaving the Secession, the Kunstschau Wien, which included Klimt’s first “golden” portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer and his Kiss.
The Secession’s Beethoven exhibition is renowned for its collaboration across the arts. While Mahler conducted a passage from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the opening, several members of the Secession, led by Klimt, produced friezes and reliefs in order to create “a spatial work of art” around Max Klinger’s sculpture. Yet it was not just musicians, sculptors, and painters who joined in celebrating Beethoven. As patrons such as the Gallias were swept up in the Beethoven cult, they also bridged the divide between the arts. After hearing Mahler conduct one Beethoven concert after another, Hermine and Moriz collected some of the most significant Secessionist art celebrating Beethoven’s life in Vienna.
Adele Bloch-Bauer and her husband, Ferdinand, the sugar baron of the Hapsburg Empire, were the most famous collectors with the same taste as Moriz and Hermine. But while the Bloch-Bauers bought the same artists as the Gallias, they generally acquired more pictures because of their greater wealth. In addition to seven paintings by Klimt, which included a second portrait of Adele and another beech forest, the Bloch-Bauers acquired nine paintings by Waldmüller, three by Schindler, and one by Moll. When it came to collecting pictures, Moriz and Hermine were mini Bloch-Bauers.
The dazzling snow-covered landscape, almost always on display in Vienna’s Österreichische Galerie, is dominated by a woman caught in the large tree in the foreground on the right. She is standing low on the trunk, wearing a golden diaphanous dress, her head back, holding a leafless branch with one hand, her long, windswept hair wrapped around another leafless branch, her face, neck, and shoulders aglow in the afternoon light, a baby at her breast. Several more women, similarly clad, also with long hair, are underneath the mountains to the left. While two have babies at their breasts, the nearest does not. Her baby lies on the snow, seemingly dead, at the end of the roots of the tree in which the woman is caught.
This picture from 1894 by Giovanni Segantini is one of the great examples of neo-impressionism, the art movement pioneered by Georges Seurat in Paris in 1886 using dots of pure color, which Segantini developed in his own style using long thin lines of paint dubbed the “Segantini stitch.” The painting is also one of the great works of symbolism and, like many symbolist pictures, begs an explanation. While there is manifest storytelling and moralizing going on, this theatrical scene does not fit any standard religious, mythological, or literary subject. Who are these women? What is their relationship to their babies? Why are they in this remote, frozen landscape?
The picture’s title, The Evil Mothers, provides a partial answer without explaining what these women have done wrong. “The Nirvana of the Lustful W
omen,” the poem by the Milanese writer Luigi Illica that inspired Segantini, is illuminating. Its view of women was profoundly conservative—very different from the plays seen by Hermine and Moriz grappling with the “woman question” and the “new woman.” It was about women whose unbridled lust led them to fall pregnant, then to reject their babies because of their hedonism and selfishness. Their punishment was to be cast into a barren, freezing landscape until they repented and their natural maternal instincts began to blossom, allowing them to move toward salvation by suckling the babies who had died through their neglect. In taking up this subject, Segantini cast female sexuality as both dangerous and evil.
A description of The Evil Mothers by the Viennese critic Franz Servaes is indicative of the painting’s initial impact. Servaes wrote: “Incredible misery is expressed in the figure of this bereft damned woman. The very curve of her body is like a weeping cry of woe; the outstretched arms speak of helpless despair; the fluttering hair hanging in the tree is like the pain of one who is taking her own life.” Segantini’s deeper motivations occupied one of Freud’s earliest German followers, Karl Abraham, when he wrote the first extended psychoanalytical study of an artist. Abraham argued that the key to Segantini’s work was his sexual fixation with his mother, who died when he was five. According to Abraham, The Evil Mothers revealed Segantini’s “unconscious desire to punish his own mother and to take revenge upon her.”
