The Age of Insight

Chapter 1
 
An Inward Turn: Vienna 1900
 
In 2006 ronald lauder, a collector of austrian expres-sionist art and the co-founder of the Neue Galerie, the expressionist museum in New York City, spent the extraordinary sum of $135 million to purchase a single painting: Gustav Klimt’s captivating, gold-encrusted portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, a Viennese socialite and patroness of the arts. Lauder first saw Klimt’s 1907 painting in the Upper Belvedere Museum when he visited Vienna as a fourteen-year-old and was smitten by the image. She seemed to epitomize turn-of-the-century Vienna: its richness, its sensuality, and its capacity for innovation. Over the years Lauder became convinced that Klimt’s portrait of Adele (Fig. 1-1) was one of the great depictions of the mystery of womanhood.
 
As the elements of Adele’s dress attest, Klimt was indeed a skilled decorative painter in the nineteenth-century tradition of Art Nouveau. But the painting has an additional, historical meaning: it is one of Klimt’s first paintings to depart from a traditional three-dimensional space and move into a modern, flattened space that the artist decorated luminously. The painting reveals Klimt as an innovator and major contributor to the emergence of Austrian Modernism in art. The Klimt historians Sophie Lillie and Georg Gaugusch describe Adele Bloch-Bauer I in the following terms:
 
[Klimt’s] painting not only rendered Bloch-Bauer’s irresistible beauty and sensuality; its intricate ornamentation and exotic motifs heralded the dawn of Modernity and a culture intent on radically forging a new identity. With this painting, Klimt created a secular icon that would come to stand for the aspirations of a whole generation in fin-de-siècle Vienna. 1
 
In this painting Klimt abandons the attempt of painters from the early Renaissance onward to re-create with ever-increasing realism the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional canvas. Like other modern artists faced with the advent of photography, Klimt sought newer truths that could not be captured by the camera. He, and particularly his younger protégés Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, turned the artist’s view inward—away from the three-dimensional outside world and toward the multidimensional inner self and the unconscious mind.
 
In addition to this break with the artistic past, the painting shows us how modern science, particularly modern biology, influenced Klimt’s art, as it did much of the culture of “Vienna 1900,” or Vienna during the period between 1890 and 1918. As the art historian Emily Braun has documented, Klimt read Darwin and became fascinated with the structure of the cell—the primary building block of all living things. Thus, the small iconographic images on Adele’s dress are not simply decorative, like other images in the Art Nouveau period. Instead, they are symbols of male and female cells: rectangular sperm and ovoid eggs. These biologically inspired fertility symbols are designed to match the sitter’s seductive face to her full-blown reproductive capabilities.
 
the fact that the Adele Bloch-Bauer portrait was magnificent enough to fetch $135 million—the most ever paid for a single painting up to that time—is all the more extraordinary considering that at the beginning of Klimt’s career his work, although highly competent, was unremarkable. He was a good but conventional painter, a decorator of theaters, museums, and other public buildings who followed the grand historicist, conventional style of his teacher, Hans Makart (Fig. 1-2). Like Makart, a talented colorist who was called the new Rubens by the Viennese patrons of art who idolized him, Klimt painted large portraits dealing with allegorical and mythological themes (Fig. 1-3).
 
It was not until 1886 that Klimt’s work took a bold, original turn. That year, he and his colleague Franz Matsch were each asked to commemorate the auditorium of the Old Castle Theatre, which was about to be demolished and replaced by a modern structure. Matsch painted a view of the stage from the entrance, and Klimt portrayed the last performance at the old theater. But rather than painting a view of the stage or the actors on it, Klimt painted specific, recognizable members of the audience as seen from the stage. These members of the audience were not attending to the play but to their own inner thoughts. The real drama of Vienna, Klimt’s painting implies, did not take place on the stage, it took place in the private theater of the audience’s mind (Figs. 1-4, 1-5).
 
Soon after Klimt painted the Old Castle Theatre, a young neurologist, Sigmund Freud, began treating patients who suffered from hysteria with a combination of hypnosis and psychotherapy. As his patients turned inward, freely associated, and talked about their private lives and thoughts, Freud connected their hysterical symptoms to traumas in their past. The paradigm for this highly original mode of treatment derived from Josef Breuer’s study of an intelligent young Viennese woman known as “Anna O.” Breuer, a senior colleague of Freud, had found that Anna’s “monotonous family life and the absence of adequate intellectual occupation?.?.?.?[had] led to a habit of daydreaming”—what Anna referred to as her “private theater.”2
 
The remarkable insight that characterized Klimt’s later work was contemporaneous with Freud’s psychological studies and presaged the inward turn that would pervade all fields of inquiry in Vienna 1900. This period, which gave rise to Viennese Modernism, was characterized by the attempt to make a sharp break with the past and to explore new forms of expression in art, architecture, psychology, literature, and music. It spawned an ongoing pursuit to link these disciplines.
 
in pioneering the emergence of Modernism, Vienna 1900 briefly assumed the role of cultural capital of Europe, a role in some respects similar to that assumed by Constantinople in the Middle Ages and by Florence in the fifteenth century. Vienna had been the center of the Habsburg dynastic lands since 1450 and gained further prominence a century later, when it became the center of the Holy Roman Empire of the German-Speaking Nation. The empire comprised not only the German-speaking states, but also the state of Bohemia and the kingdom of Hungary-Croatia. Over the next three hundred years, these disparate lands remained a mosaic of nations that had no common unifying name or culture. It was held together solely by the continuous rule of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors. In 1804 Francis II, the last of the Holy Roman Emperors, assumed the title Emperor of Austria as Francis I. In 1867 Hungary insisted on equal footing, and the Habsburg Empire became the Dual Monarchy, Austria-Hungary.
 
At the zenith of its power, in the eighteenth century, the Habsburg Empire was second only to the Russian Empire in the size of its European landholdings. Moreover, the Habsburg Empire had a long history of administrative stability. But a series of military losses in the latter half of the nineteenth century and civil unrest in the early twentieth century diminished the empire’s political power, and the Habsburgs reluctantly turned away from geopolitical ambitions and toward a concern with the political and cultural aspirations of their people, especially the middle class.
 
In 1848 Austria’s liberal middle class became energized and forced the country’s absolute, almost feudal monarchy, dominated by the Emperor Franz Joseph, to evolve along more democratic lines. The ensuing reforms were based on a view of Austria as a progressive, constitutional monarchy modeled on those in England and France and characterized by a cultural and political partnership between the enlightened middle class and the aristocracy. This partnership was designed to reform the state, to support the secular cultural life of the nation, and to establish a free-market economy, all based on the modern belief that reason and science would replace faith and religion.