The Lady in Gold (6 page)

The Bauers' ambitions for Adele were the product of an era when “
in order to protect young girls, they were not left alone for a single moment,” noted Zweig, and “a female person could have no physical desires as long as they had not been awakened by man” in the sanctity of marriage. This cloistered social world believed “one could distinguish at a distance a young girl from a woman who had already known a man, simply by the way she walked,” Zweig wrote. “In Vienna in particular, the air was full of dangerous erotic infection.” A young woman had to be kept “in a completely sterilized atmosphere . . . until the day when she left the altar on her husband's arm.” A wealthy girl was like a jewel, to be locked away until her family found a worthy setting.

This was changing. Adele could see it happening, in the lives of the royal family, and even among her own circle. A childhood friend of hers, Alma Schindler, wanted to be a composer. Alma was the daughter of the late Austrian painter
Jakob Emil Schindler and the stepdaughter of the artist
Carl Moll, a friend of Gustav Klimt. Alma's family took her artistic ambitions seriously. Unmarried Alma would be allowed to enjoy the thrilling kisses of her music teacher, au courant bachelor Alexander von Zemlinsky,
whose sister Mathilde had married a promising young composer named Arnold Schoenberg. Alma would be left unchaperoned for heated assignations on the sofa of the family parlor with the brilliant conductor Gustav Mahler.

The empress Elisabeth, beloved in Austria
as “Sisi.” The empress was an excellent
horsewoman who detested the Vienna court
and found life a challenging search for meaning. (
Illustration Credit 5.2
)

For sheltered Adele to gain this kind of autonomy, she would have to marry.

Arranged marriage was an institution in upscale Vienna. Men sought love or passionate sex with mistresses. Such extramarital liaisons carried shame and stigma for lonely wives. Yet even this was changing, and the gender shift was being led by Empress Elisabeth, the unhappy defector from the best-known arranged marriage in the empire. Everyone in Vienna knew the story of how Elisabeth had traipsed happily through the woods with her brothers, and grown into an excellent horsewoman who loved art, literature, and Gypsy music. How her ambitious mother presented her older sister to Emperor Franz Joseph in the Austrian resort town of Ischl, but he couldn't take his eyes off sixteen-year-old Elisabeth. The teenager married
the emperor with the muttonchop whiskers, and enchanted Vienna with the little diamond stars she wore in her long, dark hair.

Gustav Klimt, “The King,” in tunic, sittling on a throne, and his fellow artists, spoof the Vienna Establishment with a satire of the solemn photographs of important men,
1902
. (
Illustration Credit 5.3
)

She was pronounced the most beautiful woman in Europe.

Elisabeth was also one of the most unhappy. Locked in the gloomy Hofburg Castle with a mother-in-law who controlled access even to her children, Elisabeth spent her empty hours working out on custom-made wooden gym equipment, developing a notorious aversion to the spiteful Viennese court. She wrote wistful poetry, yearning for a life unfettered, “
and when it is time for me to die, lay me down at the ocean's shore.”

Finally she fled the palace to wander Europe, leaving the Vienna aristocracy to speculate and gossip about her amorous adventures. Instead of being buried in scorn and scandal, this desperate royal housewife inspired popular sympathy. Ordinary Viennese adopted her as their own people's princess, affectionately referring to her by her nickname, Sisi.

Adele had just turned seventeen in September 1898, when the empress Elisabeth left a gathering at
Mathilde Rothschild's manor at Lake Geneva. Elisabeth was boarding a steamship when a twenty-five-year-old Italian anarchist stabbed her in the chest. “
How can you kill a woman who has never hurt anyone,” the emperor kept repeating. “You do not know how much I loved this woman,” he told their daughter.

Even Elisabeth's messy death failed to turn her into the predictable
warning for wayward women. Instead she was enshrined as a symbol of a lonely woman trapped in a loveless marriage.

Elisabeth could have been a cautionary tale for Adele, who still had not committed herself to Ferdinand when he attended Moritz and Jeanette's anniversary celebration in October.

The occasion required another syrupy poem. “
Hand-in-hand to the altar, you stepped through life's spring,” Adele read, with comic ceremoniousness. “Now you dwell amidst beloved children in a space full of bliss, like a sweet dream.” Ferdinand was charmed. He didn't mind that bad poetry was a cornerstone of the cozy Bauer
Gemütlichkeit
. Ferdinand was living an honorable but dull existence. The Bauers lived in the moment, and Ferdinand yearned to marry Adele and live there with them.

In November 1898, Gustav Klimt prepared to step into the spotlight.

Klimt and his fellow maverick artists were unveiling their palace dedicated to
Art Nouveau on the Ringstrasse. It was a monastic white building crowned by a dome of golden laurels, designed by architect
Joseph Maria Olbrich. All of Vienna paused to stare at this temple for those who believed art had the power to change the world. Here, Klimt and eighteen of Vienna's most talented artists would break away from the Establishment and fight for their “
art of the soul.”

Vienna artists were frustrated. Aesthetic tastes were dictated by a handful of upper-class patrons who had the money to buy and commission art. They preferred historic art, exemplified by
Hans Makart's neo-Renaissance painting of Romeo and Juliet, that endlessly repeated medieval or ancient Greek themes, mirroring the neoclassical architecture on the Ringstrasse. Vienna artists who had defected from the official Kunstlerhaus were electrified by
Vincent van Gogh and the French Impressionists. They wanted the freedom of
Pablo Picasso and
Henri Matisse. In Paris and Munich, the work of new artists hung alongside the old. But the staid Vienna establishment refused to display experimental work in major museums. In Klimt's view, state sponsors created a “
dictatorship of exhibitions” that showed
only “weak” and “false” art, and grasped “every opportunity for attacking genuine art and genuine artists.”

Even worse, the incestuous relationship between art dealers and some artists fostered a stale culture of art-for-hire that stifled innovation and had people buying “
paintings that go with the furniture,” as the critic Hermann Bahr complained.

The fight was on.

“
Business or art, that is the question of our Secession,” Bahr said. “Shall the Viennese painters be damned to remain petty businessmen, or should they attempt to become artists?” Those artists “who are of the opinion that paintings are goods, like trousers or stockings, to be manufactured according to the client's wishes,” should stay in the state-sponsored Kunstlerhaus, he said. “Those who want to reveal—in painting or drawing—the secrets of their soul, are already in the society.”

At the opening, the patrons walked under a credo, by
Ludwig Hevesi, painted over the door: to every age its art; to art its freedom. Throughout the building, the Secessionists repeated their vow to create art that reflected their moment in history. “
Let the artist show his world, the beauty that was born with him, that never was before and never will be again,” Bahr urged in a script wall text inside.

As the notoriety grew, Emperor Franz Joseph himself strode in with his entourage for an official appearance. Everyone turned to stare.

The city had provided the land for the building, and the imperial state would pay subsidies. The state wanted to be in on the ground floor, even if this art rebellion was aimed at them.

But the artists had the upper hand.

The emperor and his entourage had to come to them, to the debut exhibit of this Secession, to see what all the fuss was about.

Even the emperor couldn't upstage the charismatic Klimt.

“
How surprised the general public was,” wrote
Emil Pirchan, a young designer, “when it actually saw the artist himself: an energetic, large and powerful body with a head like that of an apostle on a strong bull neck—a head reminiscent of Dürer's
Peter . . .

“The eyes, melancholy and unworldly, gazed out from a hard, tanned face, framed by a dark, severe beard. That, and the unruly coronet of hair, sometimes gave him a faun-like appearance,” Pirchan wrote, alluding to the mythic Bacchus, the wine-loving, hedonistic satyr beloved in Vienna.

The empowered artists would later commemorate their triumph with a telling photograph.
Carl Moll, Alma's stepfather, lay on the floor of the
Secession great hall, on top of a rolled-up carpet. Gustav Klimt, their president, sat smugly in a thronelike chair wearing a long black artist's smock, handsome as a king. Koloman Moser sat at his feet, his eyebrows raised and mustache curled, with a picaresque, mocking smile. One artist is smoking. Two ordinary workmen in coveralls appear to be laughing. The photo was a mockery, a send-up of the self-important formal photographs of the bespectacled, graying members of the academy.

It was a provocation. The artists were thumbing their nose at the Establishment.

These artists named their Secession after the Parisian
Salon des refusés
—“exhibition of rejects”—reflecting their marginalization by pompous art officials. Now the Viennese Expressionist movement would have a home, along with the mad lucidity of the work of
Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch, whose
Shrik,
or Scream, would express the anxiety of his age. “
If you cannot please all through your art, please a few,” Klimt wrote. “To please many is immoral.”

Official guardians of propriety did not surrender so easily. In his poster announcing the opening of the Secession, Klimt portrayed Theseus, the warrior, in the nude, slaying the mythic Minotaur, a monster with a man's body and bull's head. Theseus represented the innovator, vanquishing the stale Old Guard of the official art world. But when the poster was printed, a Vienna official insisted Theseus's genitals be covered. Klimt was furious. Censorship already? Ridiculous! There was already a painting of Theseus by
Antonio Canova on prominent display, genitals and all, at the staid Kunsthistorisches Museum.

The prudishness seemed absurd in a Vienna in which sexual tensions seemed everywhere, from the notorious affairs of the Habsburgs to the army of prostitutes walking the cobblestones of the Graben. At a time when Freud was exploring repressed sexual urges embedded in the psyche, Klimt was embarking on his own exploration, with erotic drawings of his models, sexually aroused, or even pleasuring themselves. What did women want? Klimt seemed to know.

As Freud penned his
Interpretation of Dreams,
Klimt was launched on his own psychic interior voyage that would imbue his canvases with desire, childbirth, aging, and death. Both men were finding support among a small coterie of forward-minded Viennese, many of them Jewish.

For Klimt and his confederates, the Secession was more than a place for new artists. It represented a break with an outmoded past, and the creation of a more honest way of experiencing life. It meant opening minds and society.
As Klimt made drawings of a nude young woman for his painting of
Nuda Veritas,
or Naked Truth—a visual manifesto of the Secession—he idly wrote on one sketch: “
Truth is fire, and to tell the truth means to glow and burn.”

By the summer of 1899, Adele was betrothed to Ferdinand. Among those not impressed by Adele's “
hideous fiancé” was her friend Alma Schindler. Like Adele, Alma was still in her teens, and in no mood to be generous.

Alma was struggling with the desire aroused by the kisses and caresses of Gustav Klimt. She had been fantasizing about Klimt for months that spring when her mother mentioned that the sultry genius would be joining the family on a trip to Italy. Her mother pointedly warned that Klimt had “
at least three affairs running simultaneously” and was not to be viewed as a prospective suitor.