The Lady in Gold (4 page)

To outsiders, Klimt seemed to lead a charmed life. People were calling him the heir to Vienna's late “
prince of painters,”
Hans Makart, a romantic painter of scenes of Romeo and Juliet, wood nymphs, knights, and troubadours. Makart had turned his studio into a salon for wealthy women, flattering them with unctuous portraits and romantic attention, until he died,
ravaged by syphilis, in 1884.

A comparison to Makart was a heady designation for a man who had
stayed away from grammar school as a boy because his family was too poor to replace his shabby clothes. In the years when Klimt aspired to be no more than an art teacher, such acclaim would have been beyond his wildest ambitions.

Klimt admired Makart, of course, and acknowledged his influence. But he wasn't interested in following in his footsteps as an artistic courtier of official Vienna. He was restless in the gilded cage of a state-sanctioned artist.

The lucrative work had lifted him from desperate poverty. But he bristled at the conventional world he now inhabited. The provincial prejudices of the Viennese aristocrats who courted him only fed his brewing rebellion against his own success.

In the privacy of his lush walled garden studio, Klimt had begun to reach into his own psyche. He was experimenting with
Symbolism, a French movement that used mythical figures and psychologically charged symbols. Its proponents had a particular fascination with strong female figures.
They rediscovered a neglected portrait, Leonardo da Vinci's
Mona Lisa,
and resurrected it as a masterpiece of the “eternal feminine.”

Klimt was gravitating to new patrons, self-made Viennese industrialists, many of them Jewish, who were buying the innovative new art that state museums rejected. To this emerging elite, Klimt was something of a sex symbol. His charisma was enhanced by his devil-may-care impatience with the hypocrisies of Viennese society. In this Janus-faced world, men of distinguished lineage hid their indiscretions with prostitutes, or their “sweet girls” from the lower social orders, while respectable women were expected to pretend not to like sex.

Klimt liked women.

At a time when open female sensuality was disdained as an aberration or a “hysteria” to be treated, Klimt's elegantly erotic line drawings, more whispered about than seen, made it clear he understood the sexual desires of women. “
The erotic neurasthenia that vibrates in many of his most deeply felt drawings is filled with his most profound and painful experience,” wrote art historian
Hans Tietze of this “refined man of nature, a mixture of satyr and ascetic.”

Women far above Klimt in social status were disarmed by his direct, irreverent manner, his burning stare and deep baritone. His magnetism was enhanced by the kind of powerful physique more typical of a woodcutter or a sailor. Klimt did nothing to discourage his image of roguish virility.

Yet his work habits were rigidly ascetic. He lived with his mother and sisters. He woke at first light, sometimes at his studio on Josefstädterstrasse, then set out on a brisk walk across Vienna for his hearty breakfast at the Café Tivoli. He returned to his studio for long days of painting, taking breaks to exercise with barbells.

Klimt's influences were Viennese. In an era when gold symbolized imperial power, he let the reflections of the herculean golden globes and statues perched on Vienna buildings bleed into his paintings. In a Vienna in which even psychoanalyst
Sigmund Freud sifted through the black market for Egyptian antiquities, Klimt incorporated exotic motifs from North Africa and sketched the ubiquitous sphinxes scattered through imperial palaces.

But it was women who fascinated Klimt, and women who were emerging as his patrons and champions. In a class-stratified, anti-Semitic Vienna crowded with pretentious royalty, Klimt began to accept commissions to paint portraits of women from the new Jewish intellectual families. The women in these families lived in a world of ideas. Some knew Freud personally and weren't shocked by his belief that subconscious sexual desires burned beneath Vienna's embellished façade. These women were not born into their place in society; they were creating it.

Perhaps Klimt saw something of himself in them.

Vienna, one of the oldest settlements on the River Danube, has always been a frontier, a walled city of the West on the doorstep of the East, defending itself from outsiders but shaped by immigration since the beginning of time.
The Aurignacians left Venus-like fertility figures in Austria before moving on to paint caves in France and Spain. The restless Celts moved up the Danube, building a settlement on a wooded bluff above the waters the Romans would later call Vindobona.

The warrior emperor Marcus Aurelius himself guarded the vineyards of this Roman bulwark from Marcomanni attackers, building the walls higher to fend off the Huns, the Goths, and the Alemanni. Soon it was the eastern bulwark of Christendom, the frontier defender against Slav
invaders and Magyar horsemen who thundered across the Hungarian plain. The garrison became a growing citadel known as Wien.

The discovery of a golden scroll in a child's grave near Vienna with a Jewish prayer—“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is Our God! The Lord is One!”—placed the Jewish presence at least as far back as the third century, suggesting Jews were co-founders of Roman Austria. But as Christianity replaced paganism, the relationship with Jewish citizens became capricious. They were tolerated, then expelled; allowed to return as merchants, but not to own houses. Literacy set Jews apart, and the Jewish tradition of aiding their widowed, orphaned, and handicapped inspired envy.

If Jews became too successful, a misfortune—plague, drought, war, famine—transformed peaceful neighbors into howling mobs. Jews were defamed as usurious moneylenders and killers of Christ, then derided as shiftless wanderers when they fled.

Jeanette Bauer, whose youngest child, Adele, was Klimt's most famous model, ca. 1862. (
Illustration Credit 3.1
)

Gradually, Jewish industry—along with bailouts of spendthrift barons, counts, and princes—won respect, even titles, from Germanic aristocracy. By 1814, diplomats at the
Congress of Vienna were flocking to the salon of the
Jewish aristocrat
Fanny von Arnstein, and they whirled to the beat of
a salacious mountain courtship dance, imported by Danubian boatmen, that the Viennese called the waltz.

When the earliest reforms of the Jewish emancipation came in 1848, Vienna had only two hundred tolerated Jewish families. Now thousands more packed their bags in Galicia, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. As restrictions on Jewish residency loosened, Vienna beckoned.

In 1857, Emperor Franz Joseph ordered the dismantling of Vienna's massive stone fortifications. It was a revolutionary decision. The battlements had grown to immense dimensions during the
Crusades, financed, according to legend, with ransom for freeing Richard the Lionhearted. The walls had stopped the Turks and sheltered Viennese sensibilities from the crude peasantry. Down came the walls! The imperial city was remaking itself. Johann Strauss II, the merry fiddler, wrote the “Demolition Polka” to celebrate this chaotic reinvention.

The construction din on the Ringstrasse, the cradle of the city's rebirth,
was as ferocious as the monumental new neoclassical Parliament building architects had crowned with chariots of winged goddesses permanently in battle. The emperor's War Ministry was adorned with avenging angels and busts of soldiers that celebrated the empire's ethnic diversity: Serb horsemen with handlebar mustaches, Hungarian Magyars wearing head kerchiefs like Gypsies, Croats with the jaunty cravats that Parisians adopted as the tie, and Bosnians sporting the “
blood-red fezzes” that the Austrian novelist
Joseph Roth compared to “tiny bonfires lit by Islam in honor of his Apostolic Majesty.” “
If you want peace, prepare for war” read the ministry's inscription.

The Habsburgs courted wealthy Jewish families to finance railroads and factories,
honoring them with aristocratic titles handed out like party favors. Jewish barons—Rothschilds, Gutmanns, and Scheys—could now aspire to marry their daughters to Catholic aristocrats. They could mingle in Vienna's “second society,” of freshly minted aristocrats and industrialists.

Between 1860 and 1900, the Jewish population of Vienna exploded, from 6,000 to 147,000, the largest in Western Europe. As the turn of the century neared, nearly one in ten Vienna residents was Jewish. Vienna had gained some of Middle Europe's most talented minds, like
Sigmund Freud, whose family had moved from an Edenic town in Moravia;
Gustav Mahler, whose family had relocated from Bohemia; and
Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose family had converted to Catholicism generations ago.

Affluent Viennese Jewish families were instant lovers of Viennese culture. They filled the empire's new theaters, opera houses, and schools far out of proportion to their share of the population. Less than 10 percent of Viennese children were Jewish, yet Jewish children were 30 percent of high school classes. The Jewish Viennese embraced the newly unrestricted fields of science and medicine. More free to make things up as they went along, they supported new artists, intellectuals, and political trends. They became such crucial patrons of culture that soon, the journalist
Stefan Zweig wrote, “
whoever wished to put through something in Vienna,” or “sought appreciation as well as an audience, was dependent on the Jewish bourgeoisie.”

The Jewish elite was, as the Czech writer
Milan Kundera put it, the “
intellectual cement” of Middle Europe.

Yet most Jewish families crowding into Vienna lived far from the charmed circle on the Ringstrasse. The
Ostjuden
, or Eastern Jews, had fled poverty and pogroms in backward corners of Poland and Russia. They arrived desperate and devout, crowding into decrepit warrens that clung to the banks of the Danube Canal in Leopoldstadt, the old Jewish ghetto,
now referred to as “
Matzoh Island.” This was turn-of-the-century Vienna: a cosmopolitan, wealthy imperial city, a playground of aristocrats and palaces, a magnet for desperately poor refugees.

Anti-Semitism marched hand in hand with the rising prominence of Jewish families.
Georg von Schönerer, an anti-Semitic politician near the German border, was jailed in 1888 for beating Jews. But his sister, the open-minded actress
Alexandrine von Schönerer, socialized with Jewish theater patrons, and their father was a friend and business associate of the Rothschilds.

One of Georg von Schönerer's disciples,
Karl Lueger, would make Vienna the birthplace of anti-Semitism as a mainstream political force. Lueger, who electrified crowds by blaming Jewish entrepreneurs for Vienna's economic woes, was elected mayor on an anti-Semitic platform and took office in 1897 over the strident opposition of the emperor. “Handsome Karl” introduced electric streetlights, a public marketplace, and municipal gasworks—all the while pleading for assistance from the very Jewish bankers he denounced as an international conspiracy. When it was pointed out that Lueger himself socialized with people of Jewish descent, Lueger snapped: “
I decide who is a Jew.”

For members of the privileged Jewish elites like Moritz Bauer, the crude anti-Semitism of politicians like Lueger was background noise, the tasteless chatter of déclassé demagogues who were best occupied with fixing the streets.

Moritz and Jeanette Bauer were newcomers to Austria when their Viennese daughter was born, on August 9, 1881, in the heat of the Danubian summer. They named her Adele, Old German for “Noble,” suggesting the family's aspirations to live the promise of the emancipation.

The Greeks thought inspiration was a gift of the gods.

Freud believed art arose from attempts to resolve psychological conflict, and that for creators, the pain of childhood trauma was a wellspring of
inspiration. If so, it didn't require Freud to identify the demons that haunted the workaholic artist and serial philanderer who was Gustav Klimt.

Klimt was born the second of seven children on July 14, 1862, in Baumgarten on the outskirts of Vienna, into a Catholic family of the city's large immigrant underclass. His father, Ernst Klimt, from Bohemia, was a gruff uneducated Czech, isolated by his rudimentary German and frustrated by his meager earnings as a gold engraver.
Klimt's Viennese mother, Anna, had once nurtured unattainable dreams of being an opera singer. Now she struggled with anxiety and depression that deepened after each child's birth.

Gustav Klimt grew up miserably poor. His father worked brutal hours, lacking the connections to obtain lucrative commissions. At Christmas, “
there wasn't even any bread in the house, much less presents,” recalled Gustav's sister Hermine. Instability was constant. The family moved five times before Klimt was two, and in one home, they shared a single room. When he was twelve, his winsome five-year-old sister, Anna, died of a childhood illness. His mother collapsed. His beautiful, emotionally brittle older sister, Klara, had an attack of “
religious madness” and never really recovered. School was a humiliating daily ordeal. Gustav stayed out one year because he lacked proper pants. Another year a prosperous schoolboy's watch went missing, and Gustav believed his status as the poorest boy in class made him the prime suspect. He often suffered hurt feelings, rejection, and disappointment. But he loved to draw. When he finished his chores, he sketched the neighbor's cat, his younger brother Ernst, and his wan mother, slumped in her chair.