Thoughts on Gustav Klimt (Part 2)
The Vienna Secessionist’s life and legacy warrant a film—I mean a good one
After being disappointed by our visit last month to the Neue Galerie’s Gustav Klimt exhibit, my wife and I thought we’d avail ourselves of a documentary on the fin-de-siècle Austrian artist. A Google search came up with plenty, much of it recent. There are at least two filmic takes on one painting: The Kiss, of course (an episode of the BBC series The Private Life of a Masterpiece and Ali Ray’s 2023 Klimt & the Kiss). There’s a feature on the relationship between Klimt and the other great Vienna Secessionist to die an early death in 1918, Egon Schiele (Michelle Mally’s Klimt & Schiele: Eros and Psyche of 2020). The sad but compelling posthumous tale of Klimt’s work being stolen from its many Jewish owners by Nazis has received a lot of attention—in the documentaries Art of the Heist: The Lady in Gold, Adele’s Last Will and Stealing Klimt, and in the 2015 drama Woman in Gold, starring Helen Mirren—and given recent developments discussed in today’s New York Times, there may well be more to report on this in the future. There’s even an Austrian TV doc on Schloss Immendorf, the castle where a large number of Klimt pieces were stored during World War II and which was destroyed by fire in 1945. But a full-length nonfiction feature that goes deep into Klimt’s life and art from start to finish? There’s still an opening for that.
The closest I found to such a thing was an hour-long 2012 film by Herbert Eisenschenk that calls itself The Mysterious Gustav Klimt but doesn’t do much to dispel the mystery. Its structure is odd, only getting to Klimt’s early life toward the end. Like many Klimt-related films, it’s in German, with an English translation that leaves a lot to be desired. And its focal points, though all significant—the shock that the artist’s work administered to bourgeois sensibilities in the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the record-breaking prices that it now commands, the deep-bubbling controversies over his depiction of women—are also obvious and not handled with any real insight.
Oh, there’s a biopic as well: Raul Ruiz’s 2006 Klimt. It stars John Malkovich as the artist, which sounds like a great idea at first. But the more I learned about Klimt online, the less I thought I’d like it. A lot of the movie apparently takes place in a fever dream; at some point, I read, a couple of guys put on gorilla suits and freak out in a cage. Sorry, no sale.
Way too much of the available video on Klimt revolves around a rather pointless question: Was his work pornographic or not? In the context of early-1900s Vienna, a culture with a deeply disturbed attitude toward sex, in which prostitution and syphilis flourished but which viewed the artistic representation of female pubic hair as beyond the pale, you could very well argue that it was. In the context of 21st-century America, not so much. More to the point, and more worth exploring, is the question of Klimt’s general attitude toward women, in art and in life. In a 2023 review of Klimt & the Kiss, Andrew Pulver of The Guardian called Klimt out for his “undeniable sleaziness” and added, “Klimt may or may not be experiencing the cancellation brickbats currently being aimed at Picasso, but you wonder if something may erupt further down the line.”
If it does, it would certainly be fair play. The art may not be sleazy, but the artist is a different matter. Klimt’s life partner and muse was the fashion designer and entrepreneur Emilie Flöge, a fascinating figure in her own right. But they never married and one can understand why; it’s a matter of record that Klimt had trouble keeping his hands—and various other body parts—off women. The exact number of illegitimate children he fathered is uncertain, but it was definitely more than 10, possibly as high as 30, and a large percentage of the mothers in question modeled for him. Not behavior that most modern observers would call admirable.
Maybe all this explains why I prefer Klimt paintings that don’t have people in them. But there’s a little more to it. Whereas his underappreciated landscapes burst with life and imagination, the humans in much of his most famous work seem grim and creepy. Their often crude figuration is clearly intentional; depictions of male and female figures in early Klimt prove that he could be a virtuoso realist, but like Picasso, he consciously chose to move in a different direction. However, it’s not a direction I enjoy. The men and women of his “mature” paintings tend to be pale, awkward, one-dimensional sketches, overpowered by the phantasmagorical wallpaper world they inhabit. In The Kiss or Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I or Fulfillment, chairs and clothes and floor coverings are far more expressive, and interesting, than human beings.
Just what all this complicated furniture is expressing can be difficult, if not impossible, to determine. But though we may not understand the symbolism, the symbols themselves surely speak to us through the canvas—in alluring, mystical tones. It makes me wonder whether Wallace Stevens might have been thinking at least in part of Klimt when he wrote his magisterial late poem “Of Mere Being” (1954):
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze décor.
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
Copyright © 1967, 1969, 1971 by Holly Stevens
That bronze décor, those gold fire-fangled feathers … it’s all rather Klimtian, isn’t it? The “foreign song,” if you will, within a Klimt painting comes from somewhere beyond the last thought. Its essential foreignness makes anything too recognizably human within it seem out of place. It engages something in us that is not reason. And it takes us to the edge of space.