Developments in the 19th Century

 

Art Styles in 19th century - Art Map



 

Gustav Klimt



 

Secessionist Symbolism and Femmes Fatales

 

Gustav Klimt

 

Nothing survives from this deliberately conducted campaign except the tangible evidence of photographs and one partial reproduction of the vanished masterpieces - and the bitter recognition of the impotence of the artist pilloried by censorship. Klimt was never to become professor at the Academy; but before those who mocked him he held up the mirror of "naked truth" - Nuda Veritas.
"To art its liberty", wrote Hevesi on the pediment of the Secession House. Klimt wanted to be completely free, wanted to think and paint without being dependent on official commissions, and in this he received the support of several loyal patrons. Before the Vienna University scandal he had met Nikolaus Dumba, the son of a Greek businessman from Macedonia with contacts in the Orient, who had made a fortune in banking and the textile industry. The interior decoration of his office had been done by Hans Makart. After Makart's death, Klimt became Dumba's most favoured artist. It was to him that the furnishing, accessories and decoration of the music salon in the Nikolaus Dumba Palais were entrusted. This included two supraportal pictures, the first of which shows Schubert at the Piano, while the second, Music II, is of a Greek priestess with Apolline cithara. The first harks back nostalgically to the lost paradise of a well-placed, carefree society that enjoyed the diversions of music in the home. The second is quite different in style and points the way to a world of symbols expressed by the Dionysian power of music. "In these two pictures", wrote Carl E. Schorske, "bourgeois serenity and Dionysian unrest confronted one another in a single room. The Schubert picture shows music-making in the home, with music as the artistic high point of a secure and well-ordered way of life. The scene glows in a warm candlelight that softens the outlines of the figures, so that they melt into convivial harmony... Klimt makes use of Impressionist techniques in order to replace historical reconstruction by nostalgic evocation. He presents us with a lovely dream, glowing but incorporeal - the dream of innocent, pleasure-giving art in the service of an untroubled society."

Schubert at the Piano
1899

Klimt in the unthreatening guise admired in Vienna, with the sentimental bourgeoisie's
favourite composer, to round off their delight.

Gertha Felsovanyi

This was the Klimt whom Vienna loved, an unthreatening Klimt who enchanted even the most conservative public, rewarding their applause by giving them even more than they had expected - the composer Schubert, hallowed object of their sentimental veneration. Klimt reserved his most flattering style for his patrons in Viennese society. This was evident in his Portrait of Sonja Knips, and is evident also in the gentleness of the subsequent "wives" portraits, of Gertha Felsovanyi or Serena Lederer, and in Emilie Floge. Yet the women in these portraits always have the same serene air of reverie: they look at the world, and at man, with a sense of melancholy but also of detachment. Klimt's "horror vacui" is intensely concentrated in their monumental presence. His eclecticism allows him to draw now on Velasquez, now on Fernand Khnopff. From the one he takes the manner of painting the bouffant hair-style and the contours of the chin; from the other, certain characteristics of the femme fatale. There is invariably something crushing in the apparent passivity of his subjects.
Whenever Klimt was not working for a patron, he seemed to throw off all restraint and paint as he truly willed. A quite different type of woman entered the picture, dangerous and instinctual, as in Pallas Athene and Nuda Veritas. Appearing first in the design for "Ver Sacrum", she therefore became known as the "daemon of the Secession". The second version, an oilpainting 2.6 metres high, marked the breakthrough of Klimt's new "naturalistic" style. The public was shocked and confused by the provocative red-headed nude with red-haired pubis, no Venus but a larger-than-life Nini, a creature of flesh and blood severing the links with the traditional idealisation of female nudity in art. The pubic hair alone was a declaration of war on the classical ideal. The Schiller quotation served as commentary, reinforcing the provocation and pre-empting the ensuing public rejection: "Though you cannot please all men with your deeds and with your art, yet seek to please a few. To please the multitude is not good." The first version, published in "Ver Sacrum", was headed by an equally elitist quotation, from L. Scheffer: "True art is created by a few, to be appreciated by a few."
Judith I and, eight years later, Judith II are further realisations of Klimt's archetypal femme fatale. His Judith is no biblical heroine, but rather a typical Viennese of his own epoch, as demonstrated by her fashionable if costly dog-collar necklace. According to Bertha Zuckerkandl, Klimt was creating a type of woman comparable to Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich, long before these women came to tame (and before the term "vamp" achieved common currency). Proud and dismissive, yet at the same time mysterious and bewitching, the femme fatale casts her spell over the - male - observer.
The pictures cannot be viewed independently of the gilded frames that give them an iconic quality. The frame of the first version was made, incidentally, by Klimt's brother Georg, a goldsmith. The ornamentation of the painting is carried over into the frame in a manner very popular at the time which had been developed by the Pre-Raphaelites. The pictures also show the influence of the Byzantine art which Klimt had seen on a journey to Ravenna. The deliberate contrast between the plasticity of the finely modelled and coloured face and the two-dimensional surface of the ornamentation is a distinctive feature of these pictures; it creates an effect almost of photomontage, and contributes greatly to their charm. The figures on the van Eyck brothers' Ghent altar are often cited as formal precursors.

Portrait of Serena Lederer
1899

Klimt knew how to appeal to the prosperous Jewish citizens of Vienna, who supported the Secession; he painted their wives with a full measure of charm, and with a trace of haughtiness.

Without doubt, Klimt found in Judith a compelling symbol for justice wrought by woman on man, whose atonement is in death. In order to save her city, Judith seduced Holofernes, the enemy general, and then cut off his head. The Old Testament heroine is the perfect example of courage and decisiveness serving an ideal, the castrating woman... In this biblical figure, Eros and death are united in the familiar conjunction which the fin de siecle found so intriguing, another example of the castrating woman, with shameless power to confirm the most perverse fantasies, being Richard Strauss's "Mycenaean ruler", bloodthirsty Clytemnestra.
Klimt's Judith was bound to antagonise a section of Viennese society which was otherwise willing to accept his infringements of taboos, namely the Jewish bourgeoisie. This time he was breaking a religious taboo, and the viewers could not believe their eyes. Commentators opined that Klimt must have been mistaken in his claim that this ecstatic, indeed orgasmic, woman with her half-closed eyes and lightly parted lips was the devout Jewish widow and courageous heroine, who with never a trace of pleasure had executed the terrible mission assigned her by heaven and beheaded the dastardly Holofernes, leader of the Assyrian army. Surely, people said, Klimt must have been thinking of Salome, the typical femme fatale of the fin de siecle, who had already fascinated so many contemporary artists and intellectuals, from Gustave Moreau to Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Franz von Stuck and Max Klinger. Well-meaning souls repeatedly listed the "Judith" pictures under the title "Salome'" in catalogues and journals. Whether or not Klimt did actually assign to his Judith the characteristics of Salome remains uncertain; whatever his intentions, the result was the most eloquent representative of Eros and of the fantasies of a modern femme fatale.

Yet Klimt was not only familiar with the femme fatale. While his compositions for the Great Hall of the University were still causing a stir, he, cultivating his garden like a latter-day Candide, turned his attention to landscape painting, taking as his starting-point the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist landscapes. There could be good grounds for seeing Monet as the model for some of Klimt's early landscape paintings, such as The Marsh (1900) or Tall Poplars II (1903). As a landscape painter, however, Klimt offers a bold synthesis of Impressionism and Symbolism. The brush strokes of the dissolving forms are reminiscent of the Impressionists, but the schematisation of surfaces, often displaying the influence of the Orient, is typical of Art Nouveau. Unlike the Impressionists, Klimt shows little interest in weather, in the play of light and shadow. As in his portraits, he constructs enamelled mosaics, combining naturalism with schematism. This is evident when one compares such pictures as After the Rain, Nymphs or the Portrait of Emilie Floge with Beech Forest: in his landscape paintings, as in his portraits and allegories, figures and shapes appear as it were in relief against a setting of planar ornamentation.
The forest scenes, such as Beech Forest or Beech Forest I, resemble a tapestry in which Klimt invokes a kind of eurhyth-mic spirit, creating recurrent patterns with grouped vertical and horizontal lines. Van Gogh assisted the breakthrough of modern painting with all the power of despair, whereas Klimt was more a silent harvester, the sensuous shimmer of his landscapes enhancing their floral ornamentation and symbolic signification. The diverse mosaics that swallow up the horizon and negate space offered relief from the "horror vacui" that tormented him.

After the Rain (Garden with Chickens in St Agatha)
1899

Klimt's landscape paintings are equally important and informative. The chickens stand out in quasi-relief from the surface of the painting; as symbols of nature's fertility, they correspond to the erotic syntax of his portraits.

Beech Forest
1902

Klimt brings to his landscape paintings the same sensuousness that one finds in his portraits. He applies to the rich tapestry effect an element of eurhythmic spirituality, with recurrent vertical and horizontal groupings.

Beech Forest I

The fact that his landscapes show no sign of people helps us to understand that Klimt actually treats them as living beings, and since woman is the chief protagonist in his work, we may conclude that he treats his landscapes as women. Does not the gown worn by Emilie Floge in the first 1902 portrait look as if the material has been cut from one of these forests, to cling to her like a second skin? Klimt chose this gown so that her slender silhouette might appear to full advantage; small wonder then that it almost gave rise to another scandal in Vienna. Even his mother protested at the newfangled dress that was so very out of line with the frills and flounces currently in vogue.
In Klimt's portraits, the dress is no less important than the model. In a subtle way it serves to unveil the woman's personality, heightening the effect of face, neck and hands. Ingres may be seen as a classical precedent; his portraits likewise give full expression to sensuousness. For both artists, clothes have the same essential function as bodily organs, or rather, they become organs. Gaetan Picon's comment on Ingres could be applied equally well to Klimt: "Nothing is more sharply, more subtly Ingres than the harmony of neck and necklace, of velvet and flesh, of shawl and coiffure; or the line in which breast encounters low-cut gown, arm encounters elbow-length glove. If these portraits of women have an especial glow, it is because they emanate from the radiance of desire; they come to us in covert nakedness..."