1913 (29 page)

But then there’s an argument. Leo Stein can’t bear his sister’s preference for Cubism any longer – nor the fact that she quite clearly regards Alice Toklas, who lives there with them, to be not just a cook, teacher and secretary but also a lover. Leo Stein can’t understand any of it. He takes the most beautiful Renoirs, Cézannes and Gauguins and flees from Paris to art’s Promised Land, settling down near Florence. Gertrude Stein immediately fills the empty spaces on the walls
with Cubist paintings by Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris from 1912 and 1913. From that moment on Alice Toklas takes Leo Stein’s place at the Saturday evening salons. The brother and sister whose combined energies created the most important collection of modern art ever assembled in such a short time never spoke another word to one another.

Leo sends offers of reconciliation from Florence, one after the other. But Gertrude doesn’t answer. Later, she attempts to deal with their separation using the method most intellectuals favour in trying to deal with things that trouble them: she writes a book about it. She calls it
Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother
. She believes this will proclaim her independence in black and white. Instead, of course, the main thing it shows is that she never came to terms with the separation from her brother.

In the June edition of the
Neuer Rundschau
a text is published by 25-year-old author and Mann disciple Bruno Frank. The topic is ‘Thomas Mann: A Study following
Death in Venice
’. It includes, alongside a beautiful, detailed interpretation of the novella, these extraordinary lines diagnosing the era:

So there you have it. Gustav von Aschenbach, the last tragic hero of Modernity.

On 16 June the wakeful and courageous writer in question sets off on a three-week vacation to Viareggio, on the Tuscan coast, with
his wife, who has just returned from another spa cure. There, in the Hotel Regina, he lays aside
Felix Krull
, having toiled away on it for a while, and begins work on
The Magic Mountain
, as he had unsuccessfully tried to do in Bad Tölz, but only by the sea does one have an uninterrupted view of the soul – and of the mountains before it.

Holiday! Egon Schiele ad Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian successor to the throne, play with the model railway. The Prussian officers swim naked in Lake Sacrow. Frank Wedekind goes to Rome, Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz go to the Tyrol (but stay in separate hotels). Alma Mahler escapes to Marienbad because Oskar Kokoschka has called the banns. He consoles himself by boozing with Georg Trakl. Constant rain. Everyone goes half-mad in their hotel rooms. But still: Matisse brings Picasso a bunch of flowers
.

(
illustration credits 7.1
)

On 10 July the highest temperature ever recorded is measured in Death Valley: 56.7° C. On 10 July it rains in Germany. It’s barely 10°.

This July, August Macke and Max Ernst, his young admirer, become closer friends. Macke even uses a notebook with a few lecture notes by Ernst as a sketchbook. Together they organise an exhibition called ‘Rheinland Expressionists’, which, for want of a suitable gallery, they open in Cohen’s bookshop in Bonn. Hanging from the shop’s first-floor window is a huge poster that the participating authors have inscribed together. Max Ernst also makes sure that news of the exhibition reaches the right audience: under a pseudonym he writes a review in the Bonn
Volksmund
, chiefly praising the art of his friend Macke, whose abstractions ‘provide expression for the spiritual through their form alone’. So in 1913 everybody is fighting over the unconscious.

The psychological, the transcendental, is in the air. In 1913 the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico paints his first proper ‘metaphysical landscape’, in Guillaume Apollinaire’s phrase. It is called
Piazza d’Italia
and shows: nothingness.

If you know that de Chirico studied in Munich for a long time, you can tell from the yellow of the buildings and the width of the streets that the metaphysics in the art of this strange, Greek-born Italian is all Munich. In this way Leo von Klenze’s classical architecture appeared between the Hofgarten and Wittelsbacherplatz in 1913. Böcklin and Klinger were de Chirico’s artistic forefathers, Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche his intellectual ancestors – and de Chirico no longer needs them for his studies in the loneliness of the lonely individual. Because that is the viewer himself, who is irrevocably drawn into the meaninglessness of the new century. Or, as de Chirico himself says: ‘Art was liberated by the modern philosophers and poets. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were the first to teach the deep significance of the non-meaning of life, and how that meaninglessness could be transformed into art. The good new artists are philosophers who have overcome philosophy.’ So de Chirico reduces perspective to a state of absurdity. And soon becomes a revered authority in Paris, Berlin and Milan, on increasingly shaky foundations.

From 16 July, Egon Schiele spends his holidays with his patron and sponsor Arthur Roessler in Haus Gaigg in Altmünster on the Traunsee. He announces his arrival in a long letter – he’s coming either at three or four o’clock, or at five or six. But he doesn’t come. And his host walks the half-hour journey from the station back to his house, shivers, drinks tea with rum and then rum with tea. It’s bucketing down. Eventually Schiele knocks on the terrace door – he has arrived at a different time and from a different direction. And not alone, either, but with Wally Neuzil, whom we know today from the great watercolour
Wally with a Red Blouse –
but who was nobody at the time.

The next morning his luggage is to be picked up from the station. Roessler asks him what it comprises exactly. To which Schiele replies: only the bare necessities. Then they collect from the station: a few clothes, cracked clay jugs, colourfully glazed peasant bowls, thick tomes, art books, primitive wooden dolls, tree trunks, painting and drawing utensils, a crucifix. Schiele assembles all these things as inspiration in the guest room, to work. But he works for: not one minute. Instead he hikes through the wonderful landscape of the Salzkammergut. Enjoys being with his girlfriend and being looked after by Roessler’s staff. His host hoped that Schiele would paint, and that
he could use one of the paintings for the living room of the summer house. But Schiele just doesn’t paint. One morning Roessler goes into Schiele’s room and sees Schiele sitting on the floor watching a little clockwork train set go around in a circle. Schiele switches tracks, couples and decouples while loudly imitating the noises. He can do perfect imitations of train whistles, coupling, shunting, squealing. He asks Roessler to join in. Someone has to do the announcements at the little station.

The London
Times
reports that the successor to the Austro-Hungarian throne has sulkily withdrawn to his Bohemian castle near Konopiště, and is lying on the floor in the nursery. He orders every guest who comes to visit to lie down on the floor and help him add on extra tracks. The Kaiser is supposed to have brought in psychiatrists in plain clothes a long time ago, to observe and treat Franz Ferdinand as inconspicuously as possible. Franz Ferdinand hides all summer in his castle; he wants to be far from Vienna, the strange old Kaiser and, above all, the General Chief of Staff, Conrad von Hötzendorf, who is constantly trying to carry out a preventive strike against Serbia.

Franz Ferdinand can’t bear the abuse of the court any longer. Everyone there was against his friendship with Sophie Countess Chotek, because she was beneath his dignity and naturally his class. The court only agreed after wife and children had renounced all claims. So Sophie was condemned to a life in the shadows. She might have had three children by Franz Ferdinand, but she was shunned in Vienna; she was even forbidden to sit next to her husband in the imperial box at the Burgtheater or the Hofoper. She was not forbidden to go for walks with him around Konopiště Castle. That was why her husband had renamed it the ‘Upper Way of the Cross’ early in their relationship. But with his wife, Sophie, and three children, Franz Ferdinand is clearly what you would call happy. Because he isn’t actually needed in Vienna, the archduke, who is seen in the capital as a short-tempered, uncontrollable power-politician, is a loving
husband and father. He spends hours playing with his children in the gardens of the Bohemian castle, and it is his purest joy when they know the names of all the flowers whose blossoms spill opulently over the box tree hedges. Next door, in Janovice Castle, Sidonie Nádherný is in mourning.