How Prison Changed Egon Schiele’s Portraits for Better or Worse

“Bürgerschreck!” rang the accusations in German at Austrian painter Egon Schiele in April 1912. This “shocker of the bourgeois” found his home rifled by local constables searching for evidence of the immorality locals suspected of a man who lived with a woman not his wife and invited local children to pose for him. The constables brought over one hundred drawings as well as Schiele himself to the local jail, where he sat for 24 days until a court trial during which the judge flamboyantly burned one of Schiele’s “pornographic” portraits in front of the chastised artist before releasing him. That experience changed the rest of Schiele’s life and art. Egon Schiele: Portraits at the Neue Galerie in New York City centers on this turning point in Schiele’s portraits, which remain some of the most psychologically penetrating and sexual explicit portraits of the modern age. Schiele’s capacity to shock today’s audience may have declined as modern mores finally catch up to him, but the power of his portraits to captivate through their unconventionality, sensitivity, and empathy never gets old. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Prison Changed Egon Schiele’s Portraits for Better or Worse."

The Sad, Strange History of “Degenerate Art”

“Crazy at any price!” read a sign above the modern art masterpieces at the Nazi-sponsored Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art,” in English) exhibition in Munich, Germany, in 1937. The fevered brainchild of art-obsessed Adolf Hitler, Entartete Kunst aimed at showing not only what “Jewish” and “Bolshevik” art looked like, but also arguing how the degeneracy of those artists and their work threatened the spiritual health of the German people, the “master race” Hitler believed would rule the world, with him as their leader. The Neue Galerie in New York City revisits that sad moment in modern art history with the exhibition Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937, which runs through June 30, 2014. The exhibition gathers together many of the “crazy” works labeled as degenerate, holds them up against examples of the Hitler-approved German art, and takes us down the long, strange road that led up to that Munich show. The result is a sad, strange history that will leave you shaking your head at the past, but will also make you wonder if it could happen, again, here and now. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "The Sad, Strange History of 'Degenerate Art.'"

How Vienna in 1900 Gave Birth to Modern Style and Identity

The Viennese Waltz differs from other waltzes in the speed of the rotation—a dervish-like dance in which the dancers are spun out of their normal existence. That dizzying disorientation helps turn their world upside down. At the turn of the twentieth century, Vienna stood at the heart of a similar kind of waltzing whirlwind in which artistic and cultural forces acted to disorient a whole generation and set the tone for a new, modern reorientation for all Western society. In Vienna 1900: Style and Identity, which runs at the Neue Galerie through June 27, 2011, we rediscover just how influential that city and time were for all that followed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Caught up in our own dizzying times, we can see much of our own disorientation (and perhaps solutions to problems of style and identity) in the amazing cast of characters assembled in Vienna 1900. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Vienna in 1900 Gave Birth to Modern Style and Identity."

[Image: Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951). Gaze, 1910. Oil on cardboard. Belmont Music Publishers, Pacific Palisades. Courtesy Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna. © 2011 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/VBK, Vienna. Photograph © Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna.]

[Many thanks to the Neue Galerie for the image above from, press materials for, and a review copy of the catalog to the exhibition Vienna 1900: Style and Identity, which runs through June 27, 2011.]

Irish Eyes

In college, I indulged my Irish heritage and took a course on Irish literature, learning about everything the Táin Bó Cúailnge to Buile Shuibhne to Seamus Heaney. Learning about the roots of Irish mythology gave me a greater appreciation of the poetry of William Butler Yeats, Ireland’s greatest poet of the twentieth century. It also gave me a finer appreciation of the art of his brother, Ireland’s finest painter of the twentieth century—Jack Butler Yeats. Born August 23, 1871, J.B. began his career as an illustrator, even delving into the world of comics and creating the first comic strip based on Sherlock Holmes, titled Chubblock Holmes. Like W.B., J.B. evolved as an artist throughout his career. Paintings such as Morning after Rain (above, from 1923) show J.B. still the realist illustrator yet beginning to use the thick impasto that would increasingly become his signature style. The river in the background is the Sligo, near where Yeats grew up and learned painting from his father John Butler Yeats. Everything in this painting speaks of what it was like to be Irish at that time and place, but soon Jack would explore the mythic and universal nature of his Irishness.

In his painting The Small Ring (above, 1930), J.B. lays the impasto on thick, muddying the surface of the painting while still allowing us to discern the young athlete standing over his fallen foe. Like George Bellows, George Luks, and other members of the Ashcan School in America, J.B. enjoyed the sport of boxing while also recognizing the almost mythic aspect of the pugilist warrior. In fact, J.B.’s father spent a great deal of time socializing with the Ashcan School in New York city at this time, helping John Sloan in particular rediscover his Irish roots. The Irish spirit always involves some degree of pugnacity—the eternal underdog of Europe fighting for a place in the sun and out of the shadows of encroaching empires. I like to think of the man in The Small Ring as a modern-day Cúchulainn, the Irish Achilles, taking on all comers.

If I had a better grasp of Irish mythology, I’d try to match up the mythic poetry of W.B. with the mythic paintings of J.B., such as The Death of Diarmuid, the Last Handful of Water (above, from 1945). In The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne, Diarmuid is wounded by a wild boar during a hunt. Her intended husband Fionn mac Cumhaill has the power to heal anyone who drinks water from his hands. Twice Fionn gathers water for Diarmuid in his hands and twice he intentionally lets it fall before reaching her. On the third and final trip he reaches her with a handful of water, but Diarmuid is already dead. By 1945, J.B. had seen too many years of willful self-destructiveness not only among the Irish people but the entire people of the world. Yeats became friends with the exiled German Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka during World War II and took on much of his thickly painted style and dark world outlook. J.B.’s famous father and brother often joked that he was the both the finest painter and poet in the family. In his paintings, Jack Butler Yeats managed to meld painting and poetry in creating images as beautiful and bittersweet as the long history of Ireland itself.

Self Exile

Compared with his old friends—Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka–Max Oppenheimer’s name has faded from the memory of all but specialists in German Expressionism. Born July 1, 1885 in Vienna, Oppenheimer, who later called himself “Mopp,” bounced around Europe, moving from Vienna to Prague to Zurich and finally fleeing from the Nazis to the safety of America. Schiele admired Oppenheimer’s work enough to paint a portrait of the artist in his signature skeletal style. Oppenheimer returned the favor, in a way, in his gallery poster (above, from 1912) borrowing from Schiele’s tortured take on the human figure while also fleshing out the depiction with some Kokoschka touches on the side. Like many other German Expressionists, such as Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oppenheimer created many graphic works, such as this advertisement for a larger exhibition of his work. Oppenheimer’s work may lack originality, but it does reflect the same raw, primitive quality of the Expressionist school.

Despite showing some talent, Oppenheimer matched his geographic rootlessness with a stylistic nomadic streak. It seems as if Oppenheimer tried out every style that came his way as easily as trying on a new hat, discarding each new fashion as quickly as he put it on. Before Schiele even died, Oppenheimer had moved on to Futurism in works such as The Klinger Quartet (above, from 1916), which does make innovative work of trying to link the worlds of music and painting. Reducing the musicians to a swirling vortex of hands and instruments, Oppenheimer’s painting seems like one of Picasso’s Cubist guitars caught in a blender. But Oppenheimer arrested even this promising development when he moved to Zurich and fell in with the Dada crowd, adopting the “Mopp” moniker probably just to fit in.

Because of his Jewish background, Oppenheimer fled from the Nazis in the early 1930s and moved to America, where he lived out his days in seclusion until 1954. In New York at Night (above, from 1951), Oppenheimer returns to his graphic arts roots but no longer in the Expressionist style. Instead, he works in a cleaner, almost Vorticist style of blacks and whites arranged in contrasting planes. After donning so many styles, Oppenheimer seems to want to leave all of them behind along with all his other unpleasant memories of Europe. Like so many European exiles of World War II, Oppenheimer idealized his adopted country, depicting a purer, cleaner, and more hopeful ideal rather than the everyday reality. In his final years, Oppenheimer allegedly tried his hand at the newfangled Abstract Expressionist style, reverting back to old form but in a whole new world.

Final Gestures

Titian, Nymph and Shepherd, c. 1570-1575. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum di Vienna. 149.7 x 187 cm.

Listen to the final works of Beethoven–the last string quartets or the Ninth Symphony—and you hear a wholly different composer. Whether that difference came from Beethoven’s encroaching deafness, a philosophical epiphany born of a lifetime of experience, or both will always be a subject for debate. In Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting, the last 25 years of Titian’s life undergo a similar debate. Did Titian’s new, freer brushwork originate from his failing vision and dexterity, the insights of age, both, or neither? Sylvia Ferino-Pagden edits this collection of essays accompanying a selection of works on display earlier in 2008 at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. Through the use of x-rays and infrared reflectography as well as cross-sections of the paintings, works such as Nymph and Shepherd (above) reveal not only the pentimenti (overpainted drawings) of such works but also the thought processes of Titian in his final years. In an essay examining Nymph and Shepherd as a classic case study of Titian’s final period, Elke Oberthaler writes, “As with no other painter, painting practice and technique in Titian’s late work have themselves been thematised and charged with meaning.” Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting recharges Titian’s works with meaning for a modern audience more receptive to such technique than Titian’s own contemporaries.

Titan, Allegory of Prudence, c. 1565-1575. London, National Gallery. 76.2 x 69.6 cm.

When a diplomat asked Titian why his later works differed so greatly from earlier ones, Titian answered that he gave up trying to match Michelangelo, Raphael, and others in refinement and beauty, aiming to make his mark with a new roughness of handling. “Thus, Titian’s visible brushwork is also his artistic signature,” Ferino-Pagden writes in her introductory essay. Titian’s Allegory of Prudence (above) visually depicts the artist’s concern with legacy. On the left, Titian paints himself as an old man, literally fading into the darkness. Titian’s son, Orazion, heir to the family painting workshop, dominates the center in the prime of his life, as Titian’s young nephew Marco appears on the right, full of youthful enthusiasm and indecision. The “prudence” allegorized here is more wisdom than caution, as Titian wisely recognized that his day had passed and his son’s sun was rising. Titian added the wolf, lion, and dog appearing below the portraits at a late stage, placing another layer of personalized mythology onto the image. Sadly, Titian and Orazion both died of plague in 1576, leaving the family workshop prey to looters and definitively ending the “school” of Titian.

Titian, Jacopo Strada, c. 1566. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum di Vienna. 125 x 90 cm.

Titian’s late style brought him more grief than joy. Giorgio Vasari, who included Titian in his Lives after meeting the artist in 1566, believed that these late works damaged his reputation, clouding over earlier success. Augusto Gentili writes that Titian’s Venetian contemporaries saw Titian’s rough style as “a gratuitous and presumptuous offense, not only to the figurative, but also the civic tradition of Venice.” Venice’s favored son metaphorically betrayed his home and its artistic tradition in going his own way. By the 1560s, Titian lost most church commissions to the rising generation of artists that included Tintoretto and Veronese. Fortunately, private clients and old admirers still provided Titian with work, mostly in the line of portraiture, such as the portrait of the art dealer Jacopo Strada (above). Thanks to x-ray and infrared cameras, we can see beneath the surface of this portrait multiple changes, including additional figures. Titian originally made Strada’s expression “slightly less proud,” writes Wencke Deiters and Natalia Gustavson, and altered the composition to be more vivid arrangement in which “diagonals dominate the structure, lending the scene an atmosphere of both instability and dynamism.” As time slowed Titian’s body down, his artistic vision sped up, injecting more and more movement and energy into his works.

Titian, Saint Jerome in the Desert, c. 1570-1575. Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. 135 x 96 cm.

Not only Titian’s style but also his religious sensibilities precluded him from much church work in his late period. In “Titian’s Prudent Dissent: Painting Religion in the Disciplinary Years,” Augusto Gentili sees Titian as “openly hostile to the bureaucratic rules and theological subtleties both of the ‘Papists’ and the ‘Lutherans.’” Titian, thus, “tends toward an immediately understandable, highly individualist religion that is inevitably disturbing because subject to increasingly impelling forms of control.” To resist all control, Titian, like many of his contemporaries, gets back to basics in a “highly sentimental, Christ-centered religion.” In Saint Jerome in the Desert, Titian lends the saint his own face, which is turned in adoration to a crucifix. In the barren desert, Jerome/Titian “has abandoned everything—but not Christ, not wisdom,” Gentili writes. In such images, the rough brushwork mirrors the rough simplicity of Titian’s faith, which has been tested by fate yet remains strong. Titian intended for his tomb a Pieta in which he again appears as Saint Jerome, humbly touching the body of Christ, but it remained unfinished at his death.

Titian, The Flaying of Marsyas, c. 1570-1575. Kromeriz, Archdiocese Olomouc, Archiepiscopal Palace, Picture Gallery. 212 x 207 cm.

Titian’s faith in the power of art, however, seems to waiver at the end. In The Flaying of Marsyas, Titian combines two tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and casts himself as King Midas witnessing the torture of Marsyas. Titian chooses to show Midas not using his golden touch but, instead, watching violence impotently. “By painting himself as Midas,” Fernando Checa writes, “Titian is not only practicing self-criticism of his position as a court painter who loves riches,” but also “expressing profound criticism of his own nature as an artist.” As Sylvia Ferino-Pagden later puts it, “The artist may here have reflected on the power and powerlessness of art as an instrument in changing the world.” Such pessimism comes before even the death of his son and the apparent conclusion of his reputation. Fortunately, artists such as Rubens, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Delacroix, and even moderns such as the German Expressionists and Oskar Kokoschka, came to see the beauty and power of Titian’s late works, rediscovering them as the final exclamation point on a long career rather than the sad ellipsis Vasari believed them to be.

Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting brings these amazing works to light with large, beautiful reproductions. A sense of Titian’s sensuality comes across not just in the poesia or eroticized mythological painting such as Nymph and Shepherd (top of post) but also in the lush, free gestures that give a sense of individuality that seems strikingly modern. Modern technology now allows us to look beneath the painted surfaces and glimpse into the mind of the artist himself, permitting us to know Titian’s thinking better perhaps than even his contemporaries did. The essays in the catalogue, ably translated from the original German and Italian, lose nothing in translation in terms of explaining the genius and continued relevance of Titian.


[Many thanks to Marsilio Editori for providing me with a review copy of Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting and to Civita for the images above.]

Hand to Hand Combat

Oskar Kokoschka extended the expressive power of German Expressionism to the very limits of his reach, his very fingertips. Born March 1, 1886, Kokoschka painted some of the most expressive hands in all of modern art. In Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat (above, from 1909), the art historian and his wife reach out to one another in the center of the picture but just fail to touch, as if fearing that a spark could jump from one person to another. The rough overall style of Kokoschka’s painting gets even rougher in the representation of the hands. When Kokoschka painted this work, Erica Tietze watched him put down his brushes and actually scratch into the surface of the paint with his fingernails. Such intensity comes through in much of Kokoschka’s work and makes him one of the most fascinating figures of late German Expressionism.

Kokoschka painted The Bride of the Wind (aka, The Tempest, above, from 1913) to commemorate the end of this tempestuous affair with Alma Mahler, the widow of the composer Gustav Mahler. A film of Alma’s life borrows its title from this painting. Kokoschka never stopped loving Alma, even going so far as to build a stuffed life-size doll to resemble Alma and help soothe his loneliness. Again, the hands tell a story by themselves. Kokoschka knits his fingers together nervously, anxious about the impending separation. Alma’s hands rest peacefully, confident that she has made the right choice. Kokoschka’s passion for Alma seems almost understandable in light of the power she held over artists throughout her life, from her flirtation with Gustav Klimt as a young girl to her marriages to Mahler, the architect Walter Gropius, and the novelist Franz Werfel.

Kokoschka didn’t take rejection well, either from Alma or the art community. When his paintings failed to succeed, he shaved his head and assumed the pose of a martyr. When the Nazis staged their “Degenerate Art” exhibition, eight of Kokoschka’s works made the list. After fleeing first to Prague in 1934 and then to England, Kokoschka painted his Self-Portrait as a Degenerate Artist (above, from 1937). Kokoschka paints himself with arms crossed, defying the Nazis and anyone else to deny his right to create. Behind him in the distance are a deer and a man, both running away, just as he ran away to safety. Kokoschka spent the rest of his life in exile from Germany, always an alien in every sense of the word.

A Greed for Life

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Self-Portrait with Red Hat, 1938, oil and charcoal on canvas, 50.7 x 35.5 cm. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, London

In Self-Portrait with Red Hat (above), the artist Marie-Louise von Motesiczky looks penetratingly at the viewer with her large, dark eyes and touches the brim of her hat, “as if in a gesture of farewell to the country she had been forced to leave behind,” writes Jill Lloyd in The Undiscovered Expressionist: A Life of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, the first biography and in-depth study of the woman Max Beckmann, mentor and friend, once believed could be Germany’s greatest female artist since Paula Modersohn-Becker. Motesiczky, forced to flee her native land to escape Nazi persecution, constantly finds herself in a state of semi-exile—from the aristocratic world of her lineage in her choice of the bohemian life of an artist yet also from the wilder excesses of modern art in the fundamental conservatism of her artistic practice. Caught between so many different worlds, Motesiczky provides a unique tale of the conflicts the modern woman artist faced in the early twentieth century.

Motesiczky descends from a long line of powerful, intelligent women. “These gifted women were undoubtedlyan inspiration to Marie-Louise,” Lloyd writes, “but their frustrations and resulting histories of depression and psychosomatic illnesses cast a shadow over her life.” Sigmund Freud treats one of her grandmothers among his earliest patients. Her father, a talented musician, allegedly plays with Brahms himself. Several of the women in her family history take illustrious writers as lovers, something Motesiczky herself does in a 40-year relationship with Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti. Although her family always surrounds itself with the great artists of Austria, Motesiczky maintains the essentially conservative values of her family, which lead to a life-long suspicion of “intellectual” abstract art. When Max Beckmann visits the family in 1920, however, Marie-Louise begins to see possibilities in a career in art.

After meeting Beckmann, Motesiczky travels to Holland and encounters the world of Van Gogh first hand. “It was Van Gogh’s sun which in the cold Hague spring was a revelation to me,” she writes in letters home. Like many German artists of the time, Van Gogh’s life story and strikingly powerful letters, newly translated into German, spark the imagination of Motesiczky. Lloyd does a great job in capturing the spirit of Van Gogh-mania in its early years, something she wrote on at length in the catalogue to the exhibition Van Gogh and Expressionism at the Neue Galerie last year (which I reviewed here). The expressive power of Motesiczky’s Self-Portrait with Red Hat owes much to Van Gogh’s own revealing self-portraits with hats and other accessories.

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, The Travellers, 1940, oil on canvas, 66.7 x 75.3 cm. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, London

In the late 1920s through the 1930s, Motesiczky lives in wild Berlin, thriving in the bohemian atmosphere that shocks her conservative family. A photo of Motesiczky frolicking topless shows just how far she had come from the staid halls of her family’s wealthy home. In The Balcony (painted in 1929) Motesiczky paints herself nude, peeling away the final layers of “respectability” and embracing the life of an artist free of all constraint. Around 1934, Motesiczky herself undergoes psychoanalysis, following which her paintings take on a more introspective feel. The increasing power of the Nazis may have also contributed to her increased thoughtfulness. After his inclusion in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in 1937, Beckmann flees Germany and Motesiczky follows a year later with her mother and childhood nurse in tow. The Travellers (above) captures some of the absurdity of this exodus from the life and traditions Motesiczky and her family knew. The nude figure in the center holds a sausage, as if it were a treasured possession. Landing finally in England, Motesiczky finds solace in the German artistic community already there, including the artist Oskar Kokoschka and the writer Canetti, whom she meets in 1939. Lloyd mines Canetti’s memoir Party in the Blitz for much of the feeling of what it was to be a German in England at that time. In the midst of all the uncertainty of homelessness, Canetti provides an anchor for Marie-Louise. “In the inauspicious circumstances of exile, her belief in Canetti’s powers as a writer seems to have filled the gap she perceived in her life,” Lloyd writes. Both Motesiczky and Canetti unwaveringly believe in art’s power to give meaning to the world and fervently hold on to that faith over the next 40 years of their life together—a relationship based largely on self-deception, as Canetti remained married to his wife Vera and then married another woman after Vera’s death rather than Marie-Louise.

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, The Old Song, 1959, oil on canvas, 101.7 x 152.6 cm. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, London

Motesiczky decides to remain in England after the war. Her mother, bedridden for much of her life, becomes one of her greatest subjects. In a sequence beginning in 1929, Motesiczky paints her mother over the course of the next 50 years in works such as The Old Song (above). Motesiczky paints The Old Song after an inspirational visit to the Louvre, deciding to make “allegories just as a pretext—and leaving the symbolic to look after itself.” In an honest, tender examination of the dynamics of aging similar to that of the self-portraits of Rembrandt, whom Motesiczky loved, Motesiczky paints her mother becoming more and more child-like and simple in spirit as well as appearance as the end nears. Throughout, Motesiczky strives, as she put it, “to capture mother’s yearning expression, that almost greed for life.” The joy of life behind so much of Motesiczky’s paintings, even in the face of displacement and failed affairs, proves that she too shared in her mother’s greed for living.

When Motesiczky’s mother finally dies in 1978, she finds herself completely “free” for the first time in her life at the age of 72. Marie-Louise gives “full rein in later years to the unconventionality that was part of her family tradition, taking advantage at last of the freedom that was her émigré status and advancing years afforded her.” Travels to India, Turkey, Egypt, and Israel add adventure to her later years. Although unable to identify with the feminist revolution of the 1960s, Motesiczky appreciates the modern woman’s sense of independence, perhaps wondering what she would have accomplished if she had been born in a different time and place.

Although some recognition comes to Motesiczky and other members of the so-called “lost generation” of German artists whose lives were interrupted by the Nazi era through exhibitions of the 1980s and the neo-Expressionism of the 1980s leads to renewed interest in the German Expressionists, Motesiczky’s art has remains undiscovered for the most part. Motesiczky founds the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust in 1992 to protect her legacy. The Trust owns most of her works and continues to promote her artistic vision today since her death in 1996.

Within German art, Motesiczky’s painting stands up against the finest of the male German Expressionists and certainly can challenge Modersohn-Becker or even Kathe Kollwitz for the title of greatest modern woman German artist. Lloyd analyzes Motesiczky’s works perceptively and places her within the larger context very well—quite a task due to the unconventionality of the subject herself and the male-dominated nature of German Expressionism. I found myself frequently comparing Motesiczky’s art to that of another unconventional woman—Frida Kahlo, born just one year after Motesiczky. Both artists celebrate their dual natures (bohemian and aristocratic for Motesiczky, Mexican and European for Kahlo) while also coming to terms with their own sexuality. Motesiczky never achieves the startling frankness of Kahlo, especially sexually, but few artists ever have. Motesiczky does, however, approach Kahlo’s more surreal moments in works such as The Travelers and The Old Song, but always avoids going all the way in her innate conservatism. Just as Kahlo’s finest art represents the nexus of so many conflicting tensions, Motesiczky’s finest works strike a balance of all the different components of her life. Motesiczky straddles so many worlds—old-world aristocracy and modern bohemia, conservative values and nascent modern feminism, just to name two—that her art provides a wealth of study that has Lloyd’s effort only begins to explore.

The Undiscovered Expressionist: A Life of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky adds another chapter to the ever-evolving story of German Expressionism and makes a significant contribution to the neglected female artists of that period. Female artists today can find a strong role model in Marie-Louise von Motesiczky’s life-long greed for life.


[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of The Undiscovered Expressionist: A Life of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky and to the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, London for permission to use the images shown above.]

Coming to America

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907; Oil, silver, and gold on canvas; Neue Galerie New York; This acquisition made available in part through the generosity of the heirs of the Estates of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer.

As Gustav Klimt watched the train carrying Gustav Mahler and his wife Alma pull away and begin their trip to America in 1907, he said a single word—“Vorbei!” (“It’s over!”). With their leaving, Vienna’s golden decade of the two Gustav’s ends. Thanks to the Neue Galerie in New York, however, Gustav Klimt’s coming to America marks a new beginning, specifically the grand celebration of the Neue Galerie’s acquisition of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (above), the finest example of Klimt’s personal golden age. After a long journey marked by the sadness of Nazism and the long struggle for restitution, Adele Bloch-Bauer I finally arrives in America in grand style as part of Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections, the biggest exhibition of the works of Klimt ever to be seen in the United States.

This show marks the culmination of Ronald S. Lauder’s long infatuation with “Adele.” In his introduction to the catalogue to the show, Lauder goes back to the day he first saw the painting thirty-seven years ago in Vienna, arriving eagerly at the museum just as the doors opened that morning. Thanks to the efforts of the estates of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer, the painting of Adele finally returned to its rightful owners after the Nazis stole it and other artwork during their conquest of Europe and oppression of the Jews. The heirs then sold it to Lauder in 2006 for approximately $135 million. Adele rightfully takes her place as the jewel of the Neue Galerie collection and helps erase the sadness of the past with this joyous celebration of the art of Klimt.

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), Hope II, 1907-08; Oil, gold, and platinum on canvas; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, and Helen Acheson Funds, and Serge Sabarsky

Renee Price, Director of the Neue Galerie, curator of the exhibition, and editor of the catalogue, traces the slow process of Klimt’s coming to America in her essay, “Gustav Klimt and America.” It’s hard to believe today, but Klimt was relatively unknown in America until the 1950s, not having a solo show until 1959. Once America “discovered” Klimt, however, it couldn’t get enough of him. Prices for his paintings rose quickly in the 1960s. Despite art critics in 1960s calling works such as The Kiss “the essence of the vulgar fraud that [Klimt’s] ‘art’ truly was,” Klimt became the poster of choice of college dorms across the nation. Celebrities such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Barbara Streisand collected his work, helping make Klimt a household name in America by the 1970s. “By the 1970s the American psyche was newly receptive to Klimt’s overt and covert messages,” such as that found in Hope II (above), writes Price. “The painter’s influence was seen in every level of creative and commercial endeavor, from the work of artists and designers to the mass-productions of trinket-makers.”

Price goes on the prove this pervasive influence of Klimt in several special sections later in the catalogue. “This is an intellectual sensuality—and sexuality—from which I learned a lot,” says the artist Vanessa Beecroft of Klimt’s influence on her art, just one of the examples of Klimt-inspired contemporary fine art shown. Klimt-inspired jewelry and high fashion by designers such as Alexander McQueen and Christian Dior demonstrate Klimt’s continued influence on women’s fashion. The examples gathered under “Klimt in the Popular Sphere”—including John Malcovich’s film Klimt, Klimt finger puppets, Klimt-quoting advertisements, and even Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Klimt-esque cover to A Kiss in the Dreamhouse–reinforce the power of Klimt on the modern imagination, especially in America.

View of Gustav Klimt’s studio on Josefstädter Strasse 21, Vienna, ca. 1912. Photograph by Moritz Nähr. Furnishings were designed by Josef Hoffmann and executed by the Wiener Werkstätte. The painting is Klimt’s Hope II (1907-08), now in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The Neue Galerie exhibition not only brings Klimt to the present day, but also brings the present day viewer back to turn of the century Vienna and the spirit of that age. A reconstruction of Klimt’s receiving parlor of his second studio, complete with original furnishings, allows you to step back into Klimt’s world. Klimt’s inner sanctum, which he only opened up to models, clients, and friends, reached mythic proportions in his day amidst rumors that the society ladies he painted became his lovers behind those doors and the legends of models would walking around the studio nude, waiting to be painted or serve a different “purpose.” Although Klimt was justly famous for his sexual appetite, the exhibition catalogue goes a long way in dismissing the myths surrounding Klimt and his women, especially the society women he immortalized.

Sonja Knips, the first society woman painted by Klimt in 1898 (with whom he did have a brief affair years before), emerges as just one of a series of strong women in Klimt’s life. Klimt opens up a world of art to Knips, who in exchange opens up the world of society to Klimt. The Lederer, Zuckerkandl, and Bloch-Bauer families, especially the wives, become Klimt’s greatest supporters “progress[ing] from being mere onlookers to becoming veritable protagonists in the cultural process,” writes Sophie Lillie in her essay. The stories of these collectors and their collections make for riveting reading—case histories of the course of art in war-torn twentieth-century Europe. The immolation of much of the Lederer collection by the retreating Nazis in 1945, which Lillie calls “the greatest single loss of Klimt works in history,” still stuns with its utter senselessness. After the war, “Masterpieces such as the golden portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer became icons of collective identity” for Austria, Lillie writes, “but the processes leading to the expropriations of such works were glossed over—just as Austria glossed over its own role in and responsibility for the Nazis’ atrocities.” Lillie’s essay not only uncovers those dirty little secrets, but more importantly introduces us to Adele Bloch-Bauer herself, the person behind the painting. Price’s interview with Marie Altman, Adele’s niece and one of those instrumental in the restitution process, further recovers the lost humanity of these great patrons and lovers of art.

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), The Black Feather Hat, 1910; Oil on canvas; Private Collection, New York, courtesy Neue Galerie New York


Despite the popular caricature of Klimt surrounded with easy women, the real-life Klimt sought the company of exceptionally strong women, as embodied by the woman painted in the pensive The Black Feather Hat (above). The art critic Berta Zuckerkandl becomes Klimt’s chief spokesperson. Fashion designer Emilie Floge served as a kindred spirit to Klimt, designing long, flowing gowns for women that Klimt would copy in his own painter’s smock. Klimt called for his “Midi,” his pet name for Floge, on his deathbed. The central figure in Klimt’s pantheon of powerful women, however, remains Alma Schindler. When Klimt met the teenage Alma, she was, as Alessandra Comini describes her, “shockingly outspoken, demandingly curious, widely if randomly read, trained in piano and composition, and possessed of a vibrant, willful personality that projected through intoxicating blue eyes.” Alma and Klimt’s shared fascination soon fell apart, setting the stage for the composer Gustav Mahler to meet and marry the dazzling Alma. Thanks to this “Alma factor,” the two Gustavs never become close friends, but do collaborate on the multimedia Beethoven tribute of 1902 that spawned Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze as set to the accompaniment of Mahler’s rescoring for wind and brass of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” movement from his 9th Symphony. Just as Alma served as a bridge between Klimt and Mahler (and later Oskar Kokoschka and Walter Gropius as she cut a romantic swath through all of the Germanic artistic geniuses), Alma and these strong women serve as a bridge to today’s viewer of Klimt, who can see Klimt as more than just a lover of women’s forms but also as an admirer of their minds and spirits.

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), Two Reclining Women Facing Right, ca. 1904; Pencil; Private Collection, New York, courtesy Neue Galerie New York

Klimt loved women’s bodies, of course. The many drawings with strong sexual content, such as Two Reclining Women Facing Right (above), prove just how long and intensely Klimt studied the female form. Marian Bisanz-Prakken writes at length on Klimt’s fascination with the nude female body as part of a larger phenomenon in European culture involving treatises on anatomy in the name of “science.” “Authors never tired of pointing out how educational the ‘pure’ observation of beautiful undressed people—above all women—could be,” she writes. This “education,” Bisanz-Prakken asserts, at least for Klimt, consists of a focus “on stages of erotic awareness and the associated emotional states of the woman,” manifested best in works such as The Virgin and The Bride. Taken in this context, Klimt’s works and their powerfully erotic content (a problem during his life as much as today) appear not as “dirty pictures” but as explorations into the human, specifically female, psyche. In a separate essay, Price links Rodin’s The Kiss and Klimt’s The Kiss (which he may have begun in response to indecency charges against drawings by Rodin in 1907), showing how Rodin’s portrayal of the psychological through the physiological influenced Klimt’s thinking. To focus on hands in Klimt’s works the same way one focuses on them in Rodin’s art is to see Klimt in a whole new, intriguing light.

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), Head of a Woman with Closed Eyes, Facing Right, 1913; Pencil; Serge Sabarsky Collection, New York

This exhibition and catalogue should open many eyes to a new vision of Klimt. Drawings such as Head of a Woman with Closed Eyes, Facing Right reveal Klimt as a master draftsman, reminding us of his power to inspire Egon Schiele and others in their own styles. Small details such as Klimt’s encounter with evolution and Darwinism, suggesting the possibility that the ornamental dots and squiggles of his paintings actually mimic life as seen under a microscope, bring Klimt himself into greater focus. Scholarly addendums listing the history of Klimt in exhibitions in the United States and cataloguing works by him in American collections combined with the lavish photography and insightful essays make this catalogue a must-have for any enthusiast of Klimt or German art in general. The man who said “It’s over!” one hundred years ago could never have known how wrong he was.

[Many thanks to the Neue Galerie for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue to Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections and the images from the exhibition.]