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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES 3

INTRODUCTION 4 Methodological Approach 7 Literature Review 9 Setting the Stage 11

CHAPTER 1: RELIGION FOR THE MODERN AGE 17 Spirit and Flesh 18 Sacred and Profane 22 Artist as Spiritual Leader 31

CHAPTER 2: KLIMT AND CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE 39 Exposure to Scientific Aesthetics and Theories 40 University Paintings 43 Ornament as Crime 55

CHAPTER 3: MODERNITY’S CRISIS OF SELF 60 Individual Identity 61 Collective Identity 69

CONCLUSION 83

FIGURES 89

WORKS CITED 102 3

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Gustav Klimt, Hope I, 1903, oil on canvas, 71” x 26”

Figure 2: Gustav Klimt, Hope II, 1907-1908

Figure 3: Unknown, Maria in der Hoffnung, Swabia, early 16th century

Figure 4: Koloman Moser, Cabinet in the back in the Waerndorfer’s home, 1906

Figure 5: Gustav Courbet, The Origin of the World, 1866

Figure 6: Joseph Maria Olbrich, Secession Building, 1897-1898

Figure 7: Gustav Klimt, Danae, 1907-1908

Figure 8: Detail from Klimt’s Danae compared with photographs of blastocysts seen by electron microscopy and light microscopy

Figure 9: Gustav Klimt, Philosophy, 1900-1907

Figure 10: Gustav Klimt, Medicine, 1900-1907

Figure 11: Gustav Klimt, Goldfish (To My Critics), 1901-1902

Figure 12: Ernst Haeckel, The Evolution of Man, 1879 & Illustrated Natural History of the Animal Kingdom, 1882

Figure 13: Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze, 1902

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INTRODUCTION

Simultaneously known as the golden age and the joyous apocalypse, fin-de-siècle

Vienna was a city mired in paradox. Frozen between stifling tradition and blossoming modernity, the city transformed into a battleground of clashing ideologies. It was during this era of uncertainty that Gustav Klimt produced art that responded to a multitude of destabilizing paradigm shifts. Although a significant amount of scholarship has extensively explored Klimt’s depictions of women, little attention has been dedicated to his recurring interest in pregnancy. In light of its relative obscurity in Western art overall, the impetus and meaning behind the pregnant body’s repeated presence throughout

Klimt’s oeuvre is worthy of further study.

My thesis examines how Gustav Klimt utilizes depictions of pregnancy as a vehicle to redefine the spiritual, scientific, and psychological divisions of society. In his disillusionment with the so-called progress of modernity under the aegis of masculine leadership, Klimt embraces the feared ‘feminization’ of fin-de-siècle society as a welcome reprieve from the failures of patriarchy. Despite his enthusiastic celebration of femininity, Klimt nonetheless relies heavily on traditional stereotypes of women. In the constantly evolving conversation between art and new paradigms of social order during the nineteenth century, Klimt proposes a feminine utopia wherein ‘Woman’1 is the savior

of a suffering humanity, with her womb serving as a site of redemption. Klimt positions

Woman not only as a spiritual savior and progenitor of the species, but also as a

metaphorical site where self-definition and social harmony can be achieved.

Even as recent as the early nineties, a nude and heavily pregnant Demi Moore,

1 By ‘Woman,’ I am referring to a generic or generalized concept. 5

featured on the cover of Vanity Fair, garnered intense criticism that served as a topic of

conversation on ninety-five television spots, sixty-four radio shows, one thousand five

hundred newspaper articles, and a dozen cartoons.2 Many stores outright refused to carry the issue, while others displayed it with an opaque wrapper, evocative of pornographic magazines, that left only her eyes exposed. When Klimt endeavored to exhibit Hope I, he was given a strikingly similar proposition to obscure the offensive nudity and leave only a fragment of the painting visible. Despite nearly a century of separation, the backlash that Demi Moore attracted in 1991 is remarkably reminiscent of that experienced by

Gustav Klimt when exhibited Hope I and Hope II in 1909. Clearly Gustav Klimt’s decision to paint a pregnant woman was an undeniably transgressive choice of subject matter at the turn of the twentieth century in Vienna.

Through his symbolic use of pregnancy, Klimt depicts a utopian world that references divisive social issues in order to encourage viewers to question their antiquated values. In chapter one, I discuss Klimt’s conflation of sacred and profane, and spirit and flesh as captured in Hope I and Hope II. Envisioning himself as a spiritual leader, Klimt preaches art as a new religion more suitable for the modern age. In the next chapter, I explore Klimt’s incorporation of scientific theories and imagery as a critique of humankind’s self-appointed place at the top of the animal kingdom. With allusions to

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and Ernst Haeckel’s Monism, Klimt locates the woman’s womb as the sole site where primordial unity can be achieved. In the third chapter, I investigate conceptions of individual and collective identity through the lens of nineteenth-century developments in psychology and sociology. Using the pregnant body

2 Carol Stabile, “Shooting the Mother: Fetal Photography and the Politics of Disappearance,” Camera Obscura (1992): 190. 6

as metaphor of ruptured binaries - between self and other, male and female, interior and

exterior - Klimt reveals that the similarities that humans share overshadow arbitrary and

superficial differences. Klimt turns to the influence of women as intuitors of the biological impulse, bearers of life, and agents of change in an ossified world.

Contrary to common definitions of utopia as a perfect society, Klimt’s version is

visualized through transgressive depictions of pregnant women, with the ultimate goal of

replacing the oppressive rationalism of civilization with the turbulent irrational instincts

of the body. I approach Klimt’s utopian vision in relation to Christine Buci-Glucksman’s

definition of a “transgressive utopia:”

A purely imagined space (hundertprozentigen Bildraums) which convulses established frontiers and forces people to think together a number of apparent opposites - catastrophe and progress, messianism and Marxism, feminine and masculine, novelty and repetition of the same.3

This is not necessarily a utopia defined by the elimination of suffering, but rather one in

which man rediscovers ‘oneness’ with all of humanity, and thus achieves a sense of

wholeness. Once this state of unity is achieved, individuals no longer have to face reality

alone, but now can share the common experiences of both euphoria and misery with the

rest of humanity. Moreover, the journey to reach this imagined space is not without strife.

One must destroy the current world in order to build anew, or as art historian Alois Riegl

stated: “Every coming-to-be determines a decaying, every life demands a death, every

moment occurs at the expense of others. An endless, restless struggle for

existence...Instead of rest, peace, and harmony, endless struggle, destruction."4 With this

3 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity (London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 1994), 94. 4 Matthew Rampley, The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847–1918 (University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2013), 110. 7

in mind, Klimt’s juxtaposition of the promise of new life with the haunting figure of

death may symbolize the death of the civilized body and the birth of a liberated self.

Klimt explores a utopianism grounded in the female body as a source of radical

change and social transformation. He posits Woman as the savior and source of a

renewed hope that will birth a new evolved humanity more attuned to the tenets of

femininity in its embrace of the irrational. Furthermore, his ideal world is one that

approaches time cyclically and dynamically in its constant adaptation to the needs of each

generation. By reconstructing the harmonious link between self and society, Klimt battles

against the malaise of modernity - the inescapable feeling of alienation.

Methodological Approach

My methodological approach is oriented toward an interdisciplinary cultural history that will include moral, physiological, psychological, and sociological approaches to the pregnant body. The psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud, particularly his notion of unheimlich, Lou Andreas-Salome, and other nineteenth-century psychologists are woven throughout this thesis. Drawing extensively from the feminist psychoanalytic theory of Iris Marion Young, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Adriana Cavarero, and Bracha

Ettinger, I explore abstract theories that encompass the philosophical, cultural, and corporeal experiences of pregnancy in relation to nineteenth-century ideas about pregnancy. In situating the maternal body as a site of origin, Cavarero draws on Hannah

Arendt’s concept of natality to reshape the model of human subjectivity as one defined by birth rather than death as the defining motive in the production of culture. Julia Kristeva’s essay ‘Stabat Mater’ offers a sophisticated meditation on pregnancy, wherein a mother’s 8

identity is irrevocably split in its simultaneous occupation of the roles of self and other.

Building upon on Kristeva’s work, Iris Marion Young similarly suggests that the pregnant subject is “decentered, split, or doubled in several ways.”5 I incorporate these feminist theories in my third chapter to interpret the pregnant body in Klimt’s work as a site of self-creation and of discomfiting dichotomies. The expansive research on the cultural history of pregnancy by Clare Hansen has also influenced my approach.

Although elements of Klimt’s artwork may relate to his biography and personal experiences, I am not pursuing an in-depth discussion of the life or unconscious impulses of the artist himself, which has already been accomplished. My approach will not be premised on biographical connections, but rather their common period of creation and thematic interconnections. In the absence of any significant writing by Gustav Klimt, the critical reception of his works that draw on the contemporary social and cultural discourses play an essential role in this analysis. Klimt was exceptionally reticent in speaking about his own work, famously saying “Whoever wants to know something about me as an artist, which alone is significant, they should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognize what I am and what I want.”6 I approach Klimt’s work in a manner similar to art historian Gal Ventura, exploring his artwork as a mirror of the general theories and opinions of society in turn of the century. Klimt’s paintings become instruments of social transformation because they represent bodies that question prevailing notions of spiritual, physical, and psychological identities.

5 I. M. Young, “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 9, no. 1 (February 1, 1984): 71, https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/9.1.45. 6 Christian M. Nebehay, Gustav Klimt: From Drawing to Painting (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 40. 9

Literature Review

One of the most influential accounts of Vienna’s culture at the turn of the century has been that of Carl Schorske, who attributes the profound development Viennese intellectual, artistic, and cultural life to the failure of liberalism. The demise of liberalism led to a loss of faith in man’s mastery over nature, resulting in a sense of unease exacerbated by rising tensions within a multiethnic empire, and the looming collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Accordingly, Schorske has interpreted Secessionist culture as a form of Oedipal revolt against the enlightenment values of the mid to late

1800s. Schorske attributes the emergence of aesthetic withdrawal from public life or its opposite, the rise of right wing nationalism, to the failure of the liberal bourgeoisie to successfully shape the political direction of the Austria. The retreat to the interior as a response to the putative political alienation of fin de siècle artists posited by Schorske must be tempered by the fact that many artists were indeed in dialogue with political and social developments.

The majority of recent scholarship on Vienna has been written in conversation with or as a critique of Carl Schorske’s seminal work. Many scholars frame Vienna as the capital of a decaying empire from which an enlightened and uniquely modern culture emerged unscathed and unencumbered by the crumbling past it abandoned. Such an insular approach fails to take into consideration the long and complicated legacy of a multi-ethnic empire long teetering on the verge of imperial dissolution. As Peter Gay suggests, “Vienna was not a real city at all, but an invention of cultural historians.”7

Although the depiction of women in the work of Klimt has been exhaustively

7 Peter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 10

explored, there is a paucity of scholarship focusing solely on their depictions of pregnancy. Several scholars have previously focused on Klimt’s personal relationship to

women in his life. Infrequently mentioned and merely in passing, pregnancy has been

explored in their work only when discussing individual artworks in isolation. Alessandra

Comini, among others, argues that the artists’ depictions of pare illustrative of licentious

lifestyle and personal intimate relationships.8 According to Klimt’s contemporary Arthur

Roessler, the artist’s inspiration to depict pregnancy originated from the artist’s request

for his favorite model to pose for him despite her ‘misfortune,’ whereas Nebehay believes

that Klimt depicted women that he himself impregnated.9 There has been no thorough

analysis on pregnancy as a recurring theme within their art.

My research was most inspired by the work of art historian Rosemary Betterton

on the depiction of the maternal body in the visual arts. Although Betterton does not

discuss Klimt, her extensive research on the maternal body within the context of Catholic

tradition informed my analysis of Klimt’s references to the Virgin Mary.10 Furthermore,

it was in Betteron’s work that I discovered the Maria in der Hoffnung tradition of

depicting the pregnant Virgin Mary. Art historian Emily Braun’s connection of Klimt’s biologically inspired ornamentation to a Darwinian view of humanity, wherein woman

has replaced God as the source of life, was heavily cited in my second chapter.11 I also

extrapolate from Esther Bauer’s view that Klimt’s depictions are critical of body politics

8 Alessandra Comini, Egon Schiele: Portraits (New York: Prestel, 2014), 87. 9 Christian M. Nebehay, Gustav Klimt: From Drawing to Painting (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 256.Nebehay, Gustav Klimt, 256. 10 Rosemary Betterton, Maternal Bodies in the Visual Arts (Manchester New York: Manchester University Press, 2014). 11 Emily Braun, “Ornament as Evolution (Gustav Klimt and Charles Darwin),” in Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections, ed. Price, Renee, accessed June 7, 2017, http://www.academia.edu/8641152/Ornament_as_Evolution_Gustav_Klimt_and_Charles_Darwin_. 11

and are thus gender-subversive in their construction of femininity that not only embraces

female corporeality, but also gives women control over their bodies.12

Setting the Stage

Commonly celebrated as the birthplace of modernism, Vienna counted among its inhabitants some of the most prominent intellectuals from virtually every field, who cultivated the cultural landscape in the final decades of the Habsburg monarchy. Yet,

Vienna’s unparalleled innovations coexisted with a staunch provincialism that rejected any deviation from the familiar. The metropolis on the Danube housed both radically revolutionary and deeply reactionary ideas and intellectual systems.13 The foundations of the spiritual, ethical, and psychological, cultural crises to which Klimt was responding lie in the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s inability to cope with the huge influx of immigration that led to a number of unprecedented challenges. The sudden wave of immigration led to mass unemployment, housing shortages, the proliferation of prostitution, and the rise of nationalist and anti-Semitic political rhetoric.

The Habsburg monarchy, a fossilized power structure trapped by tradition and intransigent to change, proved itself as incapable of adapting itself to the novel demands of its own evolving empire and those surrounding it.14 Emperor Franz Joseph (1830-

1916) served as a paradigmatic example of this resistance to change. He rejected use of

12 Esther K. Bauer, Bodily Desire, Desired Bodies: Gender and Desire in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Novels and Paintings (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2014). 13 Tobias G. Natter and Max Hollein, eds., The Naked Truth: Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka and Other Scandals (New York: Prestel, 2005), 10. 14 Allan Janik, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 30. 12

the telephone, automobile, typewriter, and electric light.15 As Allan Janik eloquently described:

The sensuous worldly splendor and glory apparent on the surface were the very same things that were its misery on a deeper level. Stability of society, with its delight in pomp and circumstance, was an expression of a petrified formality which was barely capable of dishing the cultural chaos that lay beneath it.16

Although a historically multi-ethnic empire, the sudden surge of largely Jewish immigrants gave birth to divisive nationalism and anti-Semitism. However, this immigration also resulted in an influx of intellectuals that contributed to the cultural flourishing for which Vienna is most well-known. Ground-breaking advances and innovations in the sciences and arts co-existed alongside regressive and intolerant political views.

With a population of over fifty million, the empire encompassed several dozen

constituent kingdoms and duchies from Bohemia and Serbia. Vienna’s population in particular was experiencing rapid population growth as a result of massive immigration, urban development, and industrialization. Following the removal of its medieval city walls in 1857 in order to build the Ringstrasse at the behest of Franz Joseph, downtown

Vienna was joined with its suburbs to create an expansive modern metropolis.17 The

Emperor commissioned the construction of a “new” Vienna between the years 1858-

1888, which included an immense tree-lined boulevard surrounding the inner city, a new

Imperial Palace, two new museums, a new Reichstag building, as well as a new Imperial

15 Janik, 41. 16 Janik, 37. 17 Brigitte Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 13

Opera House and Theatre.18 Thousands of destitute Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, and

Romanians, largely Jewish, migrated to Vienna either to escape persecution or in hopes

of finding work in the capital’s massive construction projects.19 In the course of ten years,

the population in Vienna doubled until it reached two million in 1910, transforming

Vienna into the fourth largest city in the world after Paris, London, and Berlin.20

Unfortunately, Vienna was not structurally prepared for this population explosion, which resulted in massive housing shortages, overcrowding, increased competition for employment, and rising poverty. The development of new apartments and social institutions could not keep pace with the demand, causing overcrowding in hospitals, schools, and universities.21

Alongside these pressing issues, inflation wrought further disastrous financial

strain on already struggling populations. Meanwhile, as the working class struggled to

subsist on meager wages, the bourgeois profited from the exploitation of desperate

underpaid and overworked laborers. Private luxury residences abutted the slums, and yet

the social classes remained more isolated and stratified than ever before, as the bourgeois

turned a blind eye to the suffering of their neighbors in their tireless quest to emulate the

aristocracy.22 An insurmountable disparity between the lower and upper classes

continued to widen, further heightening mounting class tensions. The grandeur of the

Ringstrasse attempted to overshadow the surrounding squalor, but its flimsy facade of

18 Julie Johnson, “Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele: Life and Death in the City of Paradoxes” (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2000), 9, http://search.proquest.com/docview/304644193/. 19 Charles, The Viennese Secession, 55. 20 Gemma Blackshaw, Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900 (London: National Gallery Company, 2013). 21 Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna. 22 Julie Johnson, “Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele: Life and Death in the City of Paradoxes” (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2000), http://search.proquest.com/docview/304644193/, 25. 14

affluence merely highlighted the deplorable living conditions encircling it.23 The escalating economic crises only further fanned the flames of xenophobia and exacerbated existing ethnic conflicts as immigrants ceaselessly flooded into Vienna.24 By the 1890's, close to fifty-five percent of Greater Vienna was of foreign birth.25 Violence markedly

escalated among various ethnic groups, which was reiterated and reinforced by

contemporary political rhetoric.

As a result of the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural pluralism, some politicians clung to the concept of national purity, which began to dominate public debate and political culture.26 The incessantly propagated threat of Überfremdung (domination by foreign influences) strengthened the radicalization of nationalist movements, particularly against the Jewish population, who served as the primary scapegoat for the ‘degeneration’ of

Austrian society. However, being identified with Judaism was not limited to religious or racial categorization. According to the influential Viennese philosopher Otto Weininger

(1880-1903), “the spirit of modernity is Jewish” and modern art was a “Jewish art” because it was international rather than rooted in purely Austrian or Germanic influence.27 Viennese modernism became the target of vitriolic attacks from the city’s burgeoning radical right wing because of its assumed ties with liberal politics, Jewish audiences and patrons, as well as indecorous sexual expression. Perceived as an ally to all of the radical right’s enemies, modernist aesthetics intertwined with discourses on disease

23 Johnson, 10. 24 Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna. 25 Heintzman Rebecca M., “Gustav Klimt : A Psycho-Historical Portrait of the Man and His Work Based on the Psychology of Carl G. Jung and the Theory of the Collective Unconscious” (University of Louisville, 1991), 11–12. 26 Gustav Klimt, Klimt’s Women, 16. 27 Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna, 228. 15

and degeneration. Because Jewish patrons frequently commissioned Gustav Klimt to paint their portraits, Klimt was inevitably categorized as, in the words of anti-semitic politician Georg Ritter von Schönerer (1842-1921), a “traitor of the German people” and

a “Jew slave .”28 In fact, many influential intellectuals and politicians felt that a Jewish

disease, ‘morbis judaicus’ was poisoning all of Austrian society that was “wasting away because of disastrous consequences of the horrible infection.”29

The perceived decline of the Habsburg empire deeply impacted the lives and

experiences of its citizens, particularly shaping the aesthetic preoccupations of Secession

artists. As a result, their artworks speak to the social, political and ethical context of their production.30 In this melting pot of ideologies, art served as a symbolic battlefield, an area for the confrontation of the most varied points of view.31 In Vienna, art served as a vehicle for cultural criticism and the questioning of current values.

The Secession artists at the helm of the avant-garde were determined to confront

conservative audiences with a free, sexually affirmative corporeality that challenged

Vienna’s hypocritical approach to sex.32 Rather than isolating himself from contemporary

debates, Klimt disseminated political agendas in highly subtle, yet remarkably poignant

ways.33 Often met with scathing criticism and acerbic reviews, his artwork provoked reactions in contemporary viewers that serve as evidence of the controversial and unsettling messages they conveyed.

28 Tobias G. Natter Klimt’s Women, 42. 29 Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna, 232. 30 Janik, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, 14. 31 Natter and Hollein, The Naked Truth, 10. 32 Natter and Hollein, 43. 33 Claude Cernuschi, Re/casting Kokoschka: Ethics and Aesthetics, Epistemology and Politics in Fin-de- Siècle Vienna (Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press: London, 2002), 15. 16

The clash between the creative potential of Viennese modernism and the city’s

‘anti-modern’ social climate found expression in the establishment of the Vienna

Secession in 1897.34 Nineteen artists, led by Gustav Klimt, seceded from the stifling

atmosphere of the traditional Künstlerhaus and founded the Vienna Secession. The group wrestled for the primacy of modernity by rejecting the historicism of academic art in favor of creating an art that was representative of their time. The Secessionists encouraged the coexistence of differing artistic styles and desired to educate their audiences by organizing exhibitions that featured both local and international avant-garde artists. Despite the reluctance of an unreceptive public and an unforgiving aristocracy, the

Viennese Secession forged new paths of creative expression. The motto emblazoned atop the Secession Building, their dedicated exhibition space designed by Joseph Maria

Olbrich, “To every age its art, and to every art its freedom” perfectly encapsulates the movement’s aims and aspirations. Due to diverging artistic interests and opinions, Klimt and a few other artists parted from the group in 1907.

Although its presence in the work of Gustav Klimt has scarcely been investigated, pregnancy nevertheless remains a significant recurring theme. As a symbolic recapitulation of social anxieties of the era, the impregnated body becomes a battleground for clashing ideologies. In his rejection of a society dominated by rationality, Klimt proposes a feminine utopia where humanity can find salvation.

34 Tobias G. Natter, ed., Klimt’s Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 14.Gustav Klimt, Klimt’s Women, 14. 17

CHAPTER 1: RELIGION FOR THE MODERN AGE

Gustav Klimt’s decision to paint a pregnant woman in Hope I (1903) and Hope II

(1907-08) was an undeniably transgressive choice of subject matter at the turn of the twentieth century in Vienna (Fig. 1 & Fig. 2). Klimt not only brings historically excluded bodies into public visibility, but also controversially depicts women who openly and unabashedly embrace their sexuality while simultaneously donning the traditional visual cues associated with images of the Virgin Mary. By utilizing Catholic symbolism, Klimt communicates in a familiar visual language that the predominantly Catholic audiences in

Austria would readily identify. However, Klimt distorts this religious iconography in a truly subversive manner by positing a new religious truth for his generation founded on a free and sexually affirmative corporeality. Through exposing Christianity’s contradictions and discrediting its outdated binary between good and fallen women, the artist reveals its inherent incompatibility with contemporary life. With subtle yet poignant references to the Virgin Mary, Klimt locates the modern woman’s womb, rather than that of the Virgin, not only as the common site of origin for mankind, but also as the site of modern salvation. Subsuming the spiritual into the physical and transposing the divine into mortal flesh, Klimt elevates the average woman to an icon worthy of worship.

Combining the spirit and the flesh, and the sacred and profane, Klimt deliberately destabilizes tradition and breaches taboos while proselytizing art as a new religion that provides morals more appropriate for the modern age.

18

Spirit and Flesh

At the turn of the twentieth century, female sexuality was an embattled concept that garnered extensive research and attention. Intellectuals from a wide variety fields placed sexual difference at the heart of their theories about modern life. The bodies of women had become increasingly contested territory. The collapse of distinct delineations between the feminine, with its suggestion of eroticism and bacchanalia, and the masculine, with its emphasis on excessive control and order, was viewed by many as culpable for the moral and national decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Regarded as a source of infinite possibility and of perilous danger, female sexuality was shrouded in intense anxiety. With its potential to release the instinctual and abandon the rational, the lasciviousness of women was conceived by many men as the gateway to chaos and anarchy. Disillusioned by the failures of progress and modernity, Klimt harnesses the transgressive nature of the feminine as an allegorical vehicle to represent the renewal of and opposition to a civilization dominated by male rationality. Despite Klimt’s open embrace of the feminine, his approach is nevertheless plagued by stereotypes that defined women as more closely connected to nature, the sensual, and the irrational, in order to serve as a foil to man, who was associated with culture, rationality, and intelligence.

In Hope I and Hope II, Klimt pursues a transgressive utopia wherein the spirit and

the flesh, as well as the sacred and the profane, are united. These paintings reference a latent heterodox tradition of Marian imagery while also defiling the symbol of the

Virginal-Maternal. The visual condensation of the sacred Virgin and the ordinary woman reveals the paradoxical expectations of fin-de-siècle Viennese women who straddled the binaries between sexual object and maternal subject, human and divine, and fertile and 19

virginal. It is significant that Klimt selected the German word Hoffnung for the title of both paintings,35 which can be translated as both ‘hope’ and ‘expectant,’ in place of the

more commonly used German word for pregnant, Schwanger. This titular choice alludes

to the Austrian tradition of depicting the pregnant Virgin Mary, known as Maria in der

Hoffnung (Fig. 3). In these representations, the Virgin typically stands proudly erect with

one or both hands protectively placed upon the conspicuous swell of her pregnancy, a pose strikingly similar to the woman in Hope I.36 Furthermore, the Maria in der Hoffnung tradition depicted the Virgin's role as Mater Omnium, Mother of All,37 which readily

aligns with my claim that Klimt viewed woman as the common site of origin for all of

mankind.

In Hope I, a nude pregnant woman with a swollen belly, milky white skin, and

fiery red hair stands to the right of a narrow, vertical composition. She clasps her delicate

hands beneath her small perky breasts and rests them above her disproportionately

distended womb. Her frail arms that lack any indication of musculature tuck in tightly to

her sides in a gesture that seems self-contained or protective. She makes no attempt to

cover her nude body and in fact, her gesture accentuates and draws attention to her

youthful figure. Her bold, self-confident gaze and the brazen display of her rounded belly

indicates that, despite the adversity surrounding her, she embraces her pregnancy without

feelings of shame, guilt, or fear.38 Such daring exposure represents an emancipation from

concealment. Klimt believed that by drawing attention to the naked body, he could reach

35 Klimt originally referred to Hope II as Vision, which is discussed later in the chapter. 36 Gerald James Larson, In Her Image: The Great Goddess in Indian Asia and the Madonna in Christian Culture (UCSB Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1980), 96. 37 Larson, 96. 38 Bauer, Bodily Desire, Desired Bodies, 55. Bauer interprets the pregnant figure in Hope I as confident, fearless, and without guilt or shame. 20

a level of truth previously obscured by religion in its encouragement of blind faith.39 In a way, this work embodies the inherent contradiction between the Catholic urge to confess, which reveals the forbidden, and the mandate to conceal that which is deemed shameful.

Here, Klimt’s nude is both a mother-to-be and a sexual being who appears to embrace her female corporeality instead of viewing it as a burden, which communicates a modern view of a self-confident and multi-dimensional femininity.40 Klimt attacked the

Christian concept of shame, which results from an inability to reconcile the life of the spirit with that of the flesh. Egon Schiele, a famous protegee of Klimt, proclaimed that

“the erotic work of art is also sacred.” This idea is clearly communicated in Klimt’s work.41 From a variety of perspectives, thinkers like Darwin, Freud, Schopenhauer and

Ernst Mach had recently challenged the distinction between the mental and the corporeal.

Taking these ideas to a logical conclusion, Klimt was positing a new religious truth for the modern age, wherein the spiritual and the physical might finally be joined.42 In the view of art historian Esther Bauer, the “empowering and ultimately even gender- subversive potential” of Klimt’s images of femininity fully embraced female corporeality and thus gave women unprecedented control over their bodies.43

In Hope I, the woman’s untamed, unruly, and voluminous wavy hair spills beyond

the confines of the composition, cascades down her back, and encircles her gaunt face

39 Christian M. Nebehay, Gustav Klimt: From Drawing to Painting (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 51.Nebehay, Gustav Klimt, 51. 40 Bauer, Bodily Desire, Desired Bodies, 55. Bauer posits that the woman embraces her female corporeality, which indicated a more modern conception of femininity. 41 Clemens Ruthner and Raleigh Whitinger, eds., Contested Passions: Sexuality, Eroticism, and Gender in Modern Austrian Literature and Culture (New York: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 2011), 41. 42 Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele’s Women (Munich: Prestel, 2012), 132. 43 Bauer, Bodily Desire, Desired Bodies, 55. 21

like a golden Byzantine halo, entirely obscuring any indication of her neck. Delicate and

wispy strokes of various orange tones delineate each tendril of hair, which is festooned

with a garland of erratically sprinkled forgot-me-nots.44 Known as the eyes of Mary,

forget-me-nots feature in a Christian anecdote wherein the Christ Child expressed his

wish that future generations could see his mother Mary’s beautiful blue eyes. After

delicately touching her eyes, he waved his hand over the ground, and blue forget-me-nots

miraculously sprouted from the Earth.45 The cerulean hue of the blossoms is mirrored in her wide-eyed stare that insolently and defiantly returns the prying gaze of the viewer.

The scandalous inclusion of a small tuft of red pubic hair controversially signals to the viewer that this is a real woman of flesh and blood, rather than an idealized type. In fact, many scholars have noted that this woman would have been readily recognized as one of Klimt’s regular models, Herma. The common perception held throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was that women who modeled for artists in the nude were sexually permissive figures, and many were indeed prostitutes, and thus modeling was associated with forbidden or deviant sexuality.46 Arthur Roessler, a contemporary and friend of Klimt, proclaimed that when Klimt found out that his favorite model Herma had fallen pregnant, he insisted that she come model anyway, and “made no effort to react against the hypocritical calumny, uncomprehending indignation, and jealous humiliation; he merely shrugged his shoulders and, ignoring the cackle, calmly worked on. The ‘misfortune’ of a simple Viennese model had inspired him to make a great work

44 Alfred Weidinger and Marian Bisanz-Prakken, eds., Gustav Klimt (München: Prestel, 2007). The flowers are explicitly identified as forget-me-nots in this painting. 45 Christian anecdote as recounted in Jack Sanders, The Secrets of Wildflowers: A Delightful Feast of Little-Known Facts, Folklore, and History (Guilford, Conn: Lyons Press, 2003). 46 Bauer, Bodily Desire, Desired Bodies, 48. 22

of art.”47 Other contemporaries, as well as subsequent scholars, have conjectured that

Klimt’s pregnant models were perhaps not merely models, but also among the fourteen women that proclaimed Klimt as the father of their illegitimate children.48 In either case, the supposition would remain that the model’s pregnancy was the result of an illicit sexual union, which stands in stark contrast with the virginal references that proclaim the innocence of chaste motherhood.

Sacred and Profane

Through his conflation of the sacred Virgin Mary and the profane prostitute,

Klimt forced Viennese audiences to confront their fraught relationship with sex and unveil the hypocrisy hiding behind the city’s façade of moral propriety. As the population of prostitutes continued to rapidly grow and thrive, Catholicism’s proclamation of woman’s intrinsic purity no longer appeared to be a valid claim. The discussion surrounding prostitution mirrored, in many ways, the societal contradictions of how women were judged.49 Cultural critic and satirist Karl Kraus astutely observed that the efforts to police the plague of prostitution that ostensibly violated middle-class morals was undermined by the tolerance, and even encouragement, of young men to have their early erotic encounters with these ladies of the night so as not to sully the purity of respectable bourgeois women.50 The patriarchal social order stringently imposed the

47 Arthur Roessler, Klimt und Seine Modelle, quoted in Nebehay, Gustav Klimt, 256. 48 Nebehay, 256. 49 Refer to Nancy Wingfield’s “Echoes of the Riehl Trial in Fin-de-Siècle Cisleithania,” Austrian History Yearbook 38 (2007): 36–47 on how the 1906 trial of an infamous procuress initiated dialogue on the regulation of prostitution not only in Vienna but throughout Cisleithania 50 Victoria Charles, The Viennese Secession (New York: Parkstone Press International, 2011), 4.Charles, The Viennese Secession, 4. 23

separation between the respectable women who, swaddled in innocence, were confined to

the safety of the bourgeois home, from the depraved prostitutes who freely roamed the

streets with unrestrained sexual energy. Many men, while expecting and enforcing

stringent standards of propriety, appropriate behavior, and sexual restraint for bourgeois

women, were meanwhile serving as the enthusiastic clientele of these vilified prostitutes.

This hypocrisy of Viennese society on sexual matters has also been described

extensively in Stefan Zweig’s autobiography The World of Yesterday, wherein he likens

the city’s “gigantic army of prostitution” to a dark vault containing the amoral underbelly

of Vienna, over which the immaculate façade of bourgeois society is erected.51 These prostitutes, who were “more difficult to avoid than to find,” “although incorporated into a

legally permitted profession, [were] still considered personally as outcasts beyond the

law.”52 Meanwhile, young respectable women “were hermetically locked up under the control of the family, hindered in their free development bodily as well as intellectually” and young men “were forced to secrecy and reticence by a morality which fundamentally no one believed or obeyed.”53 Although prostitutes were beholden to a degrading profession, they were nonetheless more free than their socially superior counterparts.

In both of Klimt’s Hope paintings, the absence of a male figure is striking in that

it leaves the traditional roles of begetter, protector, and head of family unoccupied.54 The purposeful elimination of the male partner places the image within the tradition of

Catholic iconography of the Virgin Mary and simultaneously suggests a woman

51 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, trans. B. W. Huebsch and Helmut Ripperger (Plunkett Lake Press, 2011), 84–85. 52 Zweig, 84. 53 Zweig, 87. 54 Natter and Hollein, The Naked Truth, 22. 24

impregnated outside of wedlock. Here, the fruit of this womb is certainly not the outcome

of ‘immaculate conception,’ but rather the undeniable result of a physical encounter, perhaps with Klimt himself.55 The viewer is made unflinchingly aware that this is the

consequence of a sexual union, of sexuality made flesh. The painting of an oxymoronic pregnant virgin in the nude consciously breaks with art historical traditions in order to

question the century old distinction between ‘Madonna’ and whore,’ or ‘good’ and

‘fallen’ women. Klimt was determined to confront the Viennese bourgeois with a free,

sexually affirmative corporeality to challenge the hypocrisy of a society that was

simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by sex, with a new revolutionary, and quite

literally, naked truth.56

A collection of nefarious and threatening figures looms behind the woman. One

of Klimt’s most outspoken supporters, journalist Ludwig Hevesi (1893-1910), describes

the artwork as:

…famous, or should we say infamous, Hope by Klimt, of the extremely pregnant young woman whom the artist dared to paint in the nude. One of his masterpieces. A deeply moving creation. The young woman walks along in the holiness of her condition, threatened on all sides by appalling grimaces, by grotesque and lascivious demons of life...but these threats do not frighten her. She walks unperturbed along the path of terror, spotless and made invulnerable by the ‘hope’ entrusted to her womb…Naturally the muse of prudery has banned this painting and condemned the artist to a hundred thousand years in purgatory. At the Klimt exhibition two years ago the painting could not be shown; superior powers prevented it.57

55 Natter and Hollein, 22. 56 Natter and Hollein, 43. 57 Ludwig Hevesi quoted in Johannes Dobai, “Gustav Klimt’s ‘Hope I,’” National Gallery of Canada Bulletin, no. Bulletin 17 (1972), https://www.gallery.ca/bulletin/num17/dobai1.html. My italics for emphasis. 25

The fantastical tadpole-like monster with yellow beady eyes and a row of threateningly

sharp teeth coils its sinuous tail around its prey in preparation to strike. The slithering

serpentine creature gliding against her ankles is reminiscent of the tradition of depicting

Mary crushing the head of the serpent who tempted Eve, which references her own

controversial Immaculate Conception that proclaimed her as born free of sin. This same

scene also appears in the Immaculate Virgin figure topping the prominent victory column

in Am Hof square in Vienna. Interestingly, in Klimt’s painting, the woman allows the

serpent to slither by rather than symbolically stepping upon its head, perhaps in

recognition not only of her mortality as a modern woman, but also of the ‘sinful’ act that

resulted in her impregnation.

And yet further dangers lurk in the background. Klimt juxtaposes this woman burgeoning with life with the threat of death, embodied in the skeletal visage clothed in a long, diaphanous blue cape embroidered with sharp triangular forms pointing towards the woman, threatening puncture. Behind the figure of death, a disembodied head lingers with bloodshot and drooping eyes that peer despondently from discolored and decaying flesh. An emaciated and contorted mask-like visage bares his teeth in a menacing sideways grimace. A pallid female face cloaked by her coal colored hair appears demonically possessed or in a state of trance as her eyes roll backward. The complex and intricate weaving of ornamentation also seems to indicate a hostile environment.

Arabesque swirls articulated in gold echo the curves of the woman’s body and form circles linked by a single shimmering strand. Mottled tentacles, reminiscent of the umbilical cord that connects mother to child, slither through the flood of orange gestural strokes that emerge from behind the complimentary blue layer. Klimt provides an 26

alternate reality ruled by women who keep leering monsters at bay with a self-assured

confidence in their own capabilities.

Although intended to be exhibited in in Klimt’s 1903 retrospective, Hope I was

removed at the request of the Minister of Education for fear of a public outcry. Although

a compromise was proposed whereby the offensive nudity would be concealed, leaving

only a fragment of the painting visible, Klimt unequivocally objected to this censorship.

Many critics readily recognized the religious references, but those who defended his

work considered it an asset rather than a flaw. Critic Franz Servaes observed the sacred in

the work, but failed to mention the profane when he wrote, “Some find it

cynical, whereas I get the impression there is an aura of sanctity about it.” (italics

added)58 Austrian art critic Berta Zuckerkandl described the painting as done “in a sacred

manner…a glorification of motherhood, of her unconscious heroism, shown with the

most honorable and artistic mastery” and situated it within the venerable tradition of

Christian art that could be found in cathedral doors, church altarpieces, and public

museums.59 Supportive critics like Zuckerkandl, who was indignant that Klimt was forced to withdraw Hope I from the exhibition, described the work only in reference to its religious foundations while electing to entirely ignore the issue of her nudity and how that combination impacted the meaning of the work.60 Perhaps this elision was an effort

to quell the controversy surrounding the painting in order to discourage its censorship.

Klimt does not appear to suggest her hope is in vain, but assures viewers that the

58 Franz Servaes quoted in Colin B. Bailey, Gustav Klimt: Modernism in the Making (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 105. 59 Braun, “Ornament as Evolution: Gustav Klimt and Charles Darwin,” 150. 60 Szabo, Franz, “Gustav Klimt: The Beethoven Frieze and Controversy over Freedom of Art,” in Gustav Klimt: The Beethoven Frieze and the Controversy over the Freedom of Art, ed. Stephan Koja (New York: Prestel, 2006), 146. 27

generative forces of woman are the hope of contemporary life in the face of pain and

death. As Arthur Roessler observed, the painting “shows a pregnant young woman; not,

however in the usual discreetly hinting ‘family way’ style, but stark naked, a living

receptacle where the hope of mankind, sheltering in the warmth of the maternal body,

awaits the day when it will emerge from the mysterious depths into the light of the

world.”61 When it was ultimately exhibited in the 1909 Wiener Kunstschau, it caused

quite a controversy, and served as a key topic of gossip "that nourished all the coffee

houses and 'five o'clocks.'"62 Critical reviews replayed scenes of anxious mothers

shielding their innocent daughter’s eyes from the sight of this transgressive tableau. One

contemporary commentator in Das Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt insisted that “it is really

not essential that every unsuspecting viewer, or our wives or daughters, see this picture."63 The self-confident nakedness of Klimt’s portrayal stood in stark contrast with

the female spectators contained within confining corsets and extravagantly swathed bodies. Hope I is both an homage to Eros represented in the feminine, and a critique of body politics that restrains this erotic life force.64

To avoid offending visitors, the painting’s first owner Fritz Waerndorfer purposefully concealed it from visitors behind two folding doors in a custom cabinet

designed by Koloman Moser (Fig. 4).65 Art historian Thomas Natter interprets this

cabinet as “analogous with the womb of the protagonist of Hope I, which shelters the life burgeoning within” and “reminiscent of ‘old altarpieces,’” prompting “associations with

61 Arthur Roessler quoted in Nebehay, Gustav Klimt, 256. 62 Dobai, “Gustav Klimt’s Hope I.” 63 Natter and Hollein, The Naked Truth, 23. 64 Szabo, Franz, “Gustav Klimt: The Beethoven Frieze and Controversy over Freedom of Art,” 145–46. 65 Nebehay, Gustav Klimt, 256. 28

the reliquaries of liturgical practice.”66 This sentiment is echoed in an interview with

Klimt in 1903, when the interviewer Hans Koppel observes how the “frame with fold- back doors, as used for altarpieces” is utilized in order “to keep away profane eyes.”67 As reported by guests invited on various occasions to the Villa Waerndorfer, a ritual had evolved around Klimt’s painting for those “deemed capable of grasping the essentially

‘sacred’ character of the image.”68 Lili Waerndorfer would escort her guests to the picture

gallery, where a servant would be waiting with a red velvet case containing a silver key.

As she opened both doors of the cabinet, she revealed the picture within and provided her

guests with privileged access to ‘this most intimate of images.’ In addition to the

theatricality of its display, a woman had assumed the role akin to that of Keeper of the

Holy Grail.69

This method of display, or rather concealment, is strikingly reminiscent of how

Gustav Courbet’s Origins of the World (1866), with its explicit and uninhibited depiction

of female genitalia, was hidden behind a green curtain that was only removed for a select

few at the behest of the original owner, Khalil Bey (Fig. 5).70 Despite the vast difference

in the intensity of carnal content and the distance of almost four decades between these

two paintings, Klimt’s Hope I is nonetheless treated with the same severity of censorship.

Although Vienna was considered particularly prudish, this level of concern

66 Natter and Hollein, The Naked Truth, 24. 67 Bailey, Gustav Klimt, 105. 68 Christoph Grunenberg and Tobias Natter, eds., Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life (London: New York: Tate, 2008), 118. 69 Natter and Hollein, The Naked Truth, 24. 70 Marilyn August, “Courbet’s ‘Origin of the World’ Displayed At Orsay Museum,” AP News, June 1995, https://www.apnews.com/610ebd7914cdbca11ce58d8e868f2c83.Marilyn August, “Courbet’s ‘Origin of the World’ Displayed At Orsay Museum,” AP News, June 28, 1995, https://www.apnews.com/610ebd7914cdbca11ce58d8e868f2c83. 29

communicates that this painting was controversial for more than just its depiction of

nudity without the guise of mythology, the taboo of which had already been breached by

several of Klimt’s predecessors nearly half a century earlier, as in Edouard Manet’s 1863

Olympia. Given the amount of outrage that this painting invited, Klimt’s rebellious act

lies not in its nudity, or even its depiction of pregnancy, but in its conflation of the sacred

and profane that directly challenged Austria’s puritanical expectations of women.

Painted four years later, Hope II (1907-1908) once again explores the theme of pregnancy with the same aura of "holiness" that Hevesi observed in Hope I. Other titles

were allegedly also in parallel circulation, with Berta Zuckerkandl referring to it as “the

small Madonna, called Vision.”71 Standing in profile, her pose duplicates that of the

figure in Hope I, but here her burgeoning belly is concealed beneath a patterned swath of fabric. Her partial nudity, with only her breasts exposed, is likely the reason that this painting did not receive as much critical attention when displayed alongside Hope I at the

1909 Wiener Kunstschau exhibition. The complex conglomeration of circles and spirals that embellish her crimson robe, are symbolic of the womb, fertility, and the cyclical nature of life, accentuated by the inconspicuous skull nestled next to the incipient life growing within her. A photograph of the painting in Klimt’s studio reveals that the curiously foreshortened halo emanating from behind the woman's head was originally a more traditional and imposing halo. Within that same photograph, a Madonna and Child statue from Klimt’s personal collection sits in a cabinet directly within the sightline of where Hope II hangs. Her statuesque and columnar figure that dominates the composition, while also being elevated both physically and spiritually on the shoulders of

71 Tobias G Natter, Gustav Klimt: The Complete Paintings (Cologne: Taschen, 2017), 551. 30

the worshippers below, recalls the previously mentioned prominent victory column in

Am Hof square in Vienna crowned with a sculpture of the Immaculate Virgin. Inspired by the gilded backgrounds found in portraits of saints and rulers in Byzantine mosaics,

Klimt sculpts a mottled golden space that transports the figures into the shimmering

sphere of the divine. While bowing her head and closing her eyes, seemingly absorbed in

a moment of deep meditation, she lifts her right hand in a gesture of blessing.72 The three women supplicating at her feet with their hands lifted as if in adoration or prayer recall the oran figures frequently found in religious Byzantine mosaics, which were

representations of women posed with their hands open and raised to shoulder height.

Interestingly, this is a pose commonly associated with a type of iconography of the

Virgin Mary known as the Lady of the Sign or Platytéra. In this visual tradition, an image of the Christ child is enclosed in a round aureole imposed upon Mary’s breast, representing the moment of conception in the womb of the Virgin. Once the Virgin

shelters the Creator of the Universe within her womb, she becomes Platytera ton

ouranon, meaning "more spacious than the heavens."73 The Maria in der Hoffnung

tradition in Austria described earlier was, in fact, derived from precisely this Byzantine precedent. By possibly referencing this particular iconography, Klimt emphasized the

womb as the site of salvation. However, as it is believed that Herma once again served as

a model for this painting, it is not the womb of the Virgin Mary that holds the promise of

redemption, but that of the average modern woman.74 Klimt’s interpretation of pregnancy

72 Johannes Dobai identifies the woman’s hand position as a gesture of blessing, 56. 73 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Department of Medieval Art and the Cloisters, “The Cult of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, October 2001, 32, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/virg/hd_virg.htm. 74 Werner Hofmann, Gustav Klimt (Greenwich, Conn: Little Brown & Co, 1972), 47. 31

emphasizes both its religious sublimity and ‘common humanity’ while also elevating

motherhood to the status of an icon shrouded in allegorical accessories that radiate the

mysterious and pseudo-sacral. Arthur Roessler proved the most insightful of Klimt’s

contemporaries when he described Hope I as the “High Priestess” of modern man: “In her

naked womb lies the future. She is the keeper of coming generations, creator of a new

humanity, enabler of a sort of immortality.”75 Thus, it is not only art, but also the womb

of modern woman, that holds the promise of humanity’s salvation.

Artist as Spiritual Leader

Gustav Klimt and his Secessionist peers proffered art as a surrogate religion that

offered refuge from modern life. According to historian Hans Brisanz, the “genius-cult”

of the artistically inclined promoted by Richard Wagner, Arthur Schopenhauer, and

Friedrich Nietzsche was met with widespread enthusiasm around 1900 in Vienna, particularly among the artists of the Secession, who considered themselves a “knowing

minority of elect, who consider it a sacred duty to teach the unknowing majority through

their actions.”76 Many seminal figures of the 20th century intellectual elite could be categorized in this group: Schnitzler, Hoffmansthal, and Rilke in literature, Wittgenstein in philosophy, and in the realm of the visual arts, the revolt of the visual arts was led by

Gustav Klimt. The artist ‘poet-priest’ endeavors to confront us with the truth, which is only accessible to those willing to shed archaic preconceptions. As described by historian

75 Arthur Roessler quoted in Bailey, Gustav Klimt, 105. 76 Han Bisanz, Peter Altenberg: Mein Ausserstes Ideal. Altenbergs Photosammlung von geliebten Frauen, Freunde, und Orten (Vienna: Christian Brändstatter, 1987), 13, quoted in Whalen, Sacred Spring, 272.Robert Weldon Whalen, Sacred Spring: God and the Birth of Modernism in Fin de Siècle Vienna (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2007), 272.Brisanz is citing an observation by Marian Brisanz- Prakken.. 32

Carl Schorske, the younger generation was embroiled in an Oedipal revolt that desired to

discard the values of their fathers and create their own morals more suited to the realities

of contemporary life.

The establishment of the Vienna Secession in 1897, led by Gustav Klimt, rejected

the traditionally favored historicism in order to create an art that was rooted in

contemporary life, closely adhering to their motto, emblazoned beneath the golden laurel

dome of the Secession Building, “To every age its art, and to every art its freedom.” (Fig.

6). Conceived according to the Secessionist belief that art should provide modern man

asylum from the pressures of contemporary life, Joseph Olbrich constructed the building

with a stated mission “to erect a temple of art which would offer the art-lover a quiet,

elegant place of refuge.”77 Functioning as a shrine dedicated to art, the new Secession building was described by Ludwig Hevesi as “a sacred space, an ambience with the mood

of a temple.”78 A reviewer for Neue Freie Presse also referred to the building as a

“temple” with a mausoleum-like reserve and symbolic ornamentation on the exterior that

“gave the impression of a mysterious cult sanctuary for new art.”79 The church-inspired

architectural structure with three naves and apses further imbued the building with an

aura of holiness. The exhibition space itself was a work of art that intended to give

visitors the opportunity to aesthetically elevate their lives and find refuge from the

adversity of everyday life. The Secession building became a place of worship devoted to

the romantic belief that creative subjectivity had the capability to create superior social

values.

77 Joseph Olbrich, “Das Haus der Sezession,” Der Architekt, V, January 1899, 5. 78 Ludwig Hevesi as quoted in Natter, Gustav Klimt, 50. 79 Anna Harwell Celenza, “Darwinian Visions: Beethoven Reception in Mahler’s Vienna,” The Musical Quarterly 93, no. 3–4 (October 1, 2010): 522, https://doi.org/10.1093/musqtl/gdq002. 33

Throughout the duration of the Secessionist exhibition program, the art became

increasingly sacralized and took on an echo of the divine.80 The German composer and theorist Richard Wagner, an icon and major influence in the Secessionist artistic circles, laid the foundation for a spiritual approach to art in his 1880 essay “Religion and Art:”

One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion by recognizing the figurative value of the mythic symbols which the former would have us believe in their literal sense, and revealing their deep and hidden truth through an ideal presentation.81

According to Richard Wagner, art had the same spirit as religion in its capability to

communicate truth.

The Secessionists were also inspired by Richard Wagner’s concept of

Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, in the design of the Secession building and other

associated architectural projects, which strove to create an immersive environment so

infused with various art forms that the separation between the art and everyday would be

obliterated. The Secessionists, influenced by Richard Wagner, were determined to

confront the increasing fragmentation of the arts with work that would unite all creative

forces in the service of a single, central artistic idea. Wagner felt that only through the

medium of art could ‘poet-priests’ show humanity its basic unity with all living things.82

The Secessionists echoed Wagner’s desire to create a total work of art that expanded beyond a mere aesthetic enterprise in its lofty endeavor to educate and redeem humanity by means of art.

80 Whalen, Sacred Spring, 15. Whalen’s argument throughout the book is the increasingly religious function art took on in fin-de-siècle Vienna. 81 Whalen, 136. 82 Stephan Koja, Gustav Klimt: The Beethoven Frieze and the Controversy over the Freedom of Art (Munich; New York: Prestel, 2006), 86. 34

As the father of the Secession, Klimt was foremost among the ‘poet-priests’

espousing the revolutionary gospel of Secessionist art. Klimt’s work expressed a moral

conviction that necessitated the formation of an alternative morality informed not by the past, but by the present. His devoted followers envisioned him as a spiritual leader who

sacrificed all for the greater calling of art in order to bring enlightenment to an

uninformed public. Whether or not the notoriously taciturn and reclusive Klimt embraced

the role of preacher leading a flock of disciples, he certainly looked the part. His ascetic

appearance, with his signature painting smock that resembled a monk's robe, tonsure-like balding, and “the beard and hair of Saint Peter,” earned him the monikers St. Peter and

"the monk of modern art" in the public imagination.83 In an obituary by prominent art historian Hanz Tietze, he commemorates Klimt as follows:

…what really made this recluse the leader of the Secession was his unshakable belief in the sanctity of art; the essence of innovation seemed to him to be not a new technique, but a new attitude. He visualized a sort of Nazarene brotherhood in which selfless devotion to art took precedence over all other interests.84

This cult-like association of artists led by Klimt saw their art as a panacea for the ills of

modern society.

Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze (1902) in particular stands as a profound philosophical

statement of the artist’s sacred mission to communicate ‘the truth’ to the masses (Fig. 13)

As in his other works, and particularly his Hope paintings, Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze

attacks the moralistic and often hypocritical lifestyle of the previous generation. Like

Nietzsche’s suggestion that the artist had the power to guide society out of its rational

83 Alessandra Comini, Egon Schiele (New York: Braziller: George Braziller, 1976), 12. 84 Christian M. Nebehay, Gustav Klimt: From Drawing to Painting, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 51. 35

decadence, The Beethoven Frieze also placed great responsibility on the shoulders of

artist, represented by the figure of the Knight, to lead society to a more profound

understanding of itself.85 Based on Wagner’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Ninth

Symphony, the frieze depicts the human desire for happiness in the battle against both

external evil forces and internal weaknesses. Forming a cohesive linear narrative, the

fresco opens with floating female figures that symbolize humanity’s longing for

happiness. They are followed by ‘suffering humanity,’ a naked kneeling couple and a

standing girl, that beseech the heroic Knight to undertake the struggle for happiness on

their behalf. The subsequent section is devoted to the Hostile Forces that the Knight

must overcome: three furies of sickness, madness, and death; the monster Typheus; and personifications of lust, lasciviousness, excess, and nagging care. In the final panel, the

yearning for happiness finds repose in the arms of a woman surrounded by a choir of

angels in the kingdom of the ideal. The final panel’s reference to Schiller’s Ode to Joy,

and in particular ‘this kiss for the entire world’ with its idea of bringing nations

together was very attractive for open-minded contemporaries confronted with the

growing tensions created by nationalism.86 For others, it was the promise of a new

culture for mankind. In either case, it is the embrace of the woman that alleviates all pain, saves mankind, and serves as the key to happiness. One of the artist’s central aims

was to express his belief in the fundamental and redemptive role of women in life.87

Further heightening Klimt’s emphasis on woman as savior, Carl Schorske

interprets the space surrounding the embracing couple as a womb where erotic

85 Timothy Hiles, “Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, Truth, and the Birth of Tragedy,” in Nietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts, ed. Salim Kemal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 162. 86 Koja, Gustav Klimt, 96. 87 Koja, 101. 36

consummation takes place. Building upon Schorske’s identification of the womb in the

last panel, historian Franz AJ Szabo believes that all of the panels of the Beethoven

Frieze are tied together with womb imagery.88 Commencing with the left wall, Szabo

observes that the armored knight, along with the allegorical figures of Ambition and

Compassion that nurture his determination to save suffering humanity, are enveloped in a

womb-like space that emphasizes the separation of the external motivation propelled by

suffering humanity and his own internal aspirations. In the central panel, the knight

encounters an elemental world governed by the instinctual and the sensual in a second

womb-like image. While there is clearly a menacing dimension depicted, Szabo contends

that there is also an unmistakable focus on what he refers to as the “generative

imperative” through the stylized representation of erect penises and red mouthed vulvas.

Redheaded with sprigs of blue cornflowers in her hair, the figure of Lust is strikingly

similar to the central figure of Hope I. Szabo’s conclusion that Klimt’s allusion to the

womb in this panel is representative of the “feminine principle” to which even the most

aggressive hero must submit is particularly persuasive. Traversing this dangerous terrain

forces the knight to recognize that sensuality, and especially sexuality, with all its

frightening dimensions, as the driving force of the world. Unable to subdue this world,

the knight acknowledges that man is not the master of nature that traditional Christian beliefs claimed. Rather than fighting against the world of instinct and unconscious desire,

the knight sheds his armor and surrenders himself to the allure of Eros. The human spirit

cannot evade these ‘hostile forces’ because it precisely the tragedies of life contained

within this “womb of solace, but also the womb of self-recognition, the womb that gives

88 Ibid. 149–50. Quoting Franz AJ Szabo. 37 birth to a new sensibility, which can take us past the nagging care of our little existence to

the golden and redemptive world of art.”89 If Szabo identifies the knight as the

Nietzschean Übermensch, then the female redeemer is undeniably the Überfrau. The

redemptive power of art is not accessible to conquerors of nature, but only those who

submit to the transformative power of Eros. Ultimately, it is not the knight who rescues

humanity from the hostile forces, but rather the feminine force that can only be reached

through art.

The third womb-like image in the final panel finds the hero stripped of his now useless armor because he has discovered salvation in the embrace of a woman. Although some scholars have interpreted the hair coiled around the man’s feet as a dangerous ensnarement, Szabo’s interpretation that he is happily immersed and unified with his female companion is more persuasive. Although the final female figure is hardly discernable behind the naked knight, she retains the dominant role in the Frieze because she alone exists in harmony with the world. Only by feminizing his sensibilities, by succumbing to the embrace of the eternal feminine, can man aspire to fulfillment of his longings.90 The ‘truth’ that is woven into Klimt’s complex visual vocabulary is recognition of the generative force of women that serves as the foundation of human existence. Only within the womb of woman can humanity find salvation.

In Klimt’s oeuvre, the generative force of women precedes the creative force of the artist, reinforcing the male as culture, and the female as nature dichotomy, while also acknowledging that the male occupies a lower place on the moral scale. The female

89 Koja, 150–51. 90 Ibid. 151. 38

undeniably assumes primacy in Klimt’s worldview. His passage suggests that the woman

in Hope I represents the procreator of the Nietzschean Übermensch, described by the philosopher as the next step in the evolution of mankind, who will create new values. The

conviction that art could transmit ethical values, even purify people, was just as deeply

felt as the image they had created of themselves as heroic warriors of the avant-garde.91

Klimt uncovers the reality that religion is no longer relevant to contemporary life.

Klimt is seeking to overturn the outdated and stringent moral order that continued to dominate Catholic Austria in order to permit society to evolve from what many deemed to be suffering from creative and moral stagnation. Klimt is advocating for a rebirth of mankind and a radical revolution of spirituality that is not circumscribed by puritanical ideals.

91 Ibid., 90. 39

CHAPTER 2: KLIMT AND CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE

Although Gustav Klimt and his Secessionist compatriots were deeply committed to the creation of a spirituality more suited to the modern age, they also shared an enthusiasm for both the theories and aesthetics of the biological sciences. Although Klimt pursues a more instinctive, emotional, and even mystical side of human nature, his work is nonetheless still deeply informed by the developments and discoveries of contemporary science, even if it only functions to undermine them. By incorporating rational science into his decidedly feminine universe ruled by irrationality, the conflict between both sides of modernity – the one side ‘enlightened’ and devoted to logic and law, and the other side critical of a world that negates the importance of instinct – reaches an apotheosis in Klimt’s University paintings. In his allegorical depictions of the academic disciplines of Philosophy and Medicine, Klimt undermines all sense of certainty and calls on society to rethink and recreate their own independent values.

Klimt incorporates identifiable signs of evolutionary biology in order to emphasize a unity of origins while also questioning man’s mastery over nature. Klimt’s indiscriminate combination of the rational and irrational defines man neither by his relationship to God nor by his dominance over nature, but as a mammal no more privileged than any other in an indifferent universe. In response to the potential existential despair resulting from this realization, Klimt once again preaches that art is the only path to truth. And that truth is that only women can provide redemption, not only because she is central to the life cycle and procreation, but also because she is the source of all life. Creation lies within the bodies of women and not within the hands of God. 40

Exposure to Scientific Aesthetics and Theories

Characterized by the continual interaction between artists and scientists, fin de siècle Vienna served as a breeding ground for innovation, leading to the cross- fertilization of ideas from vastly different fields of knowledge. These tight-knit and interconnected circles of intellectuals from both the arts and sciences frequently encountered each other and enthusiastically exchanged ideas in coffee houses and salons.

Salons in particular operated as a primary site of cross-disciplinary dialogue. Typically held in the private homes of prominent female socialites, salons often included an impressive guest list composed of the most renowned artists and scientists of the day.

From the last decade of the nineteenth century until 1938, Berta Zuckerkandl led a popular salon in Vienna that attracted a particularly prominent crowd, including

Gustav Klimt. Through his frequent appearances at her salon, Klimt developed a close friendship with Berta Zuckerkandl, as well as with her husband Dr. Emil Zuckerkandl, a renowned professor of anatomy at the University of Vienna medical school with an expertise in embryology. Through Dr. Zuckerkandl, Klimt gained access in 1897 to the dissecting room to draw cadavers, where he was likely to have encountered pregnant corpses due to Dr. Zuckerkandl’s research in embryology.92 This unveiled vision of the intricacies of female anatomy provided Klimt with an intimate understanding of the female form that facilitated his stylistic transition from classical idealization to the unsparing veracity of the figures featured in his paintings.

Inspired by his insightful interactions with Dr. Zuckerkandl, Klimt requested

92 Fritz Novotny and Johannes Dobai, Gustav Klimt: With a Catalogue Raisonne of his Paintings (London/New York: Thames and Hudson, 1968), p. 383, chronology for 1897 mentions: “Anatomical studies under Emil Zuckerkandl in the dissecting room.” 41

his participation in a series of lectures on anatomy and biology that the artist organized

for an audience of fellow artists, writers and musicians at the medical school’s Institute of

Anatomy. Berta Zuckerkandl claimed explicitly that Klimt's palette was enriched and

influenced by the microscopic anatomy shown at Emil Zuckerkandl's evening lectures,93

which she described in her memoir:

Stimulated by Gustav Klimt, my husband started to hold scientific evening lectures for artists. On these evenings, the Anatomical Institute in the Währingerstrasse was filled with a mood that you meet elsewhere at sensational theatre premieres. The auditorium was densely packed. Painters, novelists, and musicians were there, or sent representatives.94

In these riveting lectures, Dr. Zuckerkandl introduced his novice audiences to one of the great mysteries of life: how a single cell, the human egg, is fertilized and develops into a fetus, and then through various stages into an infant.95

Through this exposure to the visual world of histology, Klimt witnessed the fundamental structures of life, including the internal forms of the germ cell nuclei that eventually develop into either sperm or ovum. These germ cells take the visual form of an expansive field filled with irregularly shaped concentric circles that crash and collide, forming a complex organic pattern reminiscent of the ornamentation found in Klimt’s paintings.96 Braun comprehensively describes how a variety of the cellular structures were translated into Klimt’s paintings:

93 Lesky, E. Die Wiener medizinische Schule im 19. Jahrhundert. (Graz-Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1965) 94 Zuckerkandl, Berta. Österreich intim. Erinnerungen 1892-1942. Edited. by Reinhard Federmann (Frankfurt: Propyläen,1970), 133-134. 95 Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present (Random House, 2012), 32. 96 Emily Braun, “Ornament as Evolution,” in Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections, ed. Renée Price (New York: Prestel, 2007), 162.Emily Braun, “Ornament as Evolution,” in Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections, ed. Renée Price (New York: Prestel, 2007), 162. 42

Organic patterns of concentric circles, pulsating with color like coronae radiatae, proliferate in his allegories of nature’s fecundity. He also treated the blooming landscape like a woman, Berta Zuckerkandl observed, just as florescent ova are indistinguishable from flowers in Hope II and several other canvases. The bodies of women are clothed by these fertile symbols or surrounded in a field of germinating eggs and seminal fluid as seen in The Three Ages of Women. In one picture, Water Serpents I, the biological ornament progresses from a single-cell motif to a chain of complex membranes, whose networks of patterns metamorphose from magnified human epidermis into snakeskin. The flattened circles here and elsewhere are internally articulated by two long parallel shapes, alluding to the design of chromosomal division that had been discovered in the late nineteenth century.97

Klimt was particularly attracted to stylized sexual organelles, to which he was exposed by

Emil Zuckerkandl, as well as Darwin’s theory of evolution and the illustrations of sperm, eggs, and embryos by Ernst Haeckel.98

Klimt’s biological inspiration, specifically male and female reproductive cells, are incorporated into his 1907 painting Danae (Fig. 7). Based on Greek mythology, Klimt’s

Danae captures the moment that a golden stream floods between Danae’s legs, resulting

in her impregnation. The myth begins with Danae’s father, King Akrisios, who fears that

the prophecy of his death at the hands of his grandson would come to fruition. His

solution is to lock his daughter, Danae, in a chamber beneath his palace to ensure that she

would not bear any children. Despite these extreme measures, Danae nonetheless does become pregnant by Zeus, who transforms himself into a golden rain shower that seeps

into her subterranean chamber and into her womb. Paralleling the impregnation of a

mortal virgin by a divine source, the story of Danae was viewed in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries as a prefiguration of the Immaculate Conception, which relates

97 Emily Braun, 162–63. 98 Kandel, The Age of Insight, 115. 43 back to Klimt’s use of Christian iconography discussed in the previous chapter.99

Conception, the very act that King Akrisios so feared, is visualized by the deluge of gold

"chromosome-like biological shapes"100 or "gilded spermatozoa,"101 that saturates

Danae’s diaphanous purple robe, decorated with circular biomorphic forms that

developmental biologist Scott F. Gilbert identified as embryonic cells, specifically

mammalian blastocysts (Fig 8).102 The circular space can barely contain Danae’s

compressed body, with her knees tucked into her chest in a pose akin to the fetal position.

Art historian Werner Hoffman refers to this spherical shape as a "closed embryonic oval”

that mirrors the fertilization process occurring within her own womb. 103 By distilling sexual intercourse down to its cellular parts, Klimt redefines sex as a biological fact, rather than an immoral act. This separation of sexuality and morality is further evidenced in Klimt’s reference to a pre-Christian culture that was not beholden to puritanical

Christian beliefs. However, as in his Hope paintings, Klimt cleverly utilizes mythology that erases any visual evidence of the male role in the biological act of procreation and privileges the woman as central to reproduction of the species.

University Paintings

His interest in contemporary scientific knowledge first appeared in the infamous

99 Identifies the myth of Danae as a prefiguration of the Immaculate Conception. Helene E. Roberts, ed., Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography: Themes Depicted in Works of Art (Chicago: Routledge, 1998), 748. 100 Schorske, Carl. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Politics and Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. p. 272 (1980). 101 Néret, Giles. Klimt. (Köln: Taschen Verlag, 2006), 64. 102 Gilbert, Scott F. & Brauckmann, Sabine. "Fertilization Narratives in the Art of Gustav Klimt, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo: Repression, Domination and Eros among Cells." Leonardo, vol. 44 no. 3, 2011, 225. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/431863. 103 Hoffmann, W. Gustav Klimt und die Wiener Jahrhundertwende. (Salzburg: Verlag Galerie Welz, 1970/2008) 44

University paintings, which also marked a major stylistic shift for Klimt from his more

traditionally academic and classical approach, such as the government commissions for

the Burgtheater and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, upon which his early reputation was built. Expecting the refined style typical of the so-called Ringstrasse painter, the Austrian

Ministry of Culture commissioned Klimt to design three ceiling paintings in 1894

representing the fields of philosophy, medicine, and jurisprudence for the ceremonial hall

of the University of Vienna. Despite Klimt’s directive to depict the “the triumph of light

over darkness” to glorify science and its vital contributions to the improvement of

society, the artist emphatically denied any inclusion of the irrational.

In the first of the University paintings, Philosophy (1900-1907), Klimt depicts the

discipline not as an intellectual path to understanding the complexities if life, but rather

as a mysterious struggle in nature over which mankind seemingly has no control (Fig. 9).

An entangled mass of accumulated bodies floats upward into a viscous void from which

materializes an enigmatic sphinxlike figure cloaked in the clouds of the cosmos. The

immaterial apparition, identified by the exhibition text as representative of “the riddle of

the universe,” and the emphatically corporeal column of flesh, symbolic of the life cycle,

“genesis, reproduction, and decay,” are anchored by a sinister looking female figure

emerging from murky depths.104 This woman, peering from the shadows with eerily luminescent eyes and encircled by her thick mane of black hair and, is identified as the

“illuminated figure of knowledge.” Contrary to the expectation of a scene more akin to

Raphael’s School of Athens where the learned men of antiquity contemplate the nature of the existence, Klimt confronts audiences with an allegorically opaque universe that

104 Emily Braun, “Ornament as Evolution,” 152. 45

explicitly rejects any ties to the rational world. Although man may appear helpless in the

hands of omnipotent nature, seemingly trapped in a current he cannot escape, he does not

face it alone. While misery may be an unavoidable aspect of life, the journey is

nonetheless more tolerable when one views it as a universal experience that intimately

connects us to one another and is shared by all. However, viewers found no solace in the

underlying unity through shared suffering. His unorthodox and bewildering approach was

immediately met with opprobrium from all sides. Expressing the collective dismay with

Klimt’s rendition of philosophy, Wilhelm von Neumann, the rector of the University,

criticized his work as a cryptic fantasy that did not accurately reflect philosophy’s

devotion to the truth found in exact sciences.105

However, as a variety of criticisms reveal, the controversy of this piece did not only reside in its failure to depict the “truth” of the sciences, but also in Klimt’s inclusion of a Darwinist worldview that denied man’s connection to a divine creator, as well as his mastery over nature. In addition to embryology, Dr. Zuckerkandl also introduced Klimt to Darwinian evolution and its subsequent interpretation by Ernst Haeckel. As art historian Emily Braun has documented, Klimt avidly read Darwin’s work and owned all four volumes of Ernst Haeckel’s Illustrated Natural History of the

Animal Kingdom (1882-84) in his personal library.106 Darwin’s On the Origin of Species

(1859) introduced the revolutionary idea that humans were biological creatures that

evolved from simpler animal ancestors. His bold assertions assailed prevailing currents of

thought regarding creationism, effectively eradicating the possibility of a connection

105 Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 233. 106 Although some art historians don’t believe that Klimt read Darwin directly, most agree that even if he did not, he was indeed introduced to Darwin’s ideas through Dr. Zuckerkandl, or more indirectly, through his discussions in intellectual circles 46 between mankind and a divine being. Furthermore, when Darwin claimed that the primary biological function of any organism is to reproduce itself, and that human behavior is motivated by the same instincts as our primordial ancestors, he positioned sex

as central to society.107 Darwinism stressed the female's procreative capabilities, inclinations, and obligations.

Building upon a foundation of Darwinism, Klimt seems to propose than man instead should define himself by his relationship to Woman. According to Braun, Klimt was inspired by the revelation that Woman, and not a divine creator, is the only progenitor of humanity. As the embodiment of the irrational and erotic side of mankind, women were thought to be more intimately connected to reality than man’s relentless pursuit of progress. Klimt’s embrace of the irrational over the rational destabilized the certainties upon which Viennese society was built. The belief in the linear progression of history and man’s mastery over nature was being actively undermined by the emergence of evolutionary theories that claimed time was governed by the cyclical forces of nature over which the individual has no control. In a city so committed to the tenets of rational progress and enlightenment principles, Klimt’s violent displacement of long-held social values encountered obstinate opposition.

Rife with allusions to evolutionary science, Klimt’s University paintings struck a nerve with both religious and scientific audiences, resulting in a petition to revoke the commission signed by eighty-seven faculty members, as well as a flood of furious letters for and against the painting submitted to newspapers. The uproar that this painting caused was so extensive that Hermann Bahr was able to compile all of the newspaper articles

107 Kandel, The Age of Insight, 12. 47

that attacked Klimt into a published book in 1903. The antagonism with which these paintings were met resurfaced debates over evolution that had been simmering for well

over a decade. Many petitioners objected to Klimt’s vision of philosophy in terms of “an

eternal struggle for existence” governed not by the laws of the church, but by the tenets

of Darwin’s science.108 The principles of natural selection promoted by Darwin attacked the Christian belief in the existence of a divine Creator and immortality of the soul.

However, the vehement protests were not limited to religious viewers. Klimt also managed to offend the overly rational educated elite who were appalled at the suggestion that man was neither a rational creature nor the undisputed master of nature. For them, the presence of man in, rather than above nature evoked anxious visions of human and animal parity. Friedrich Joldl (1849-1914), an academic philosopher who resolutely believed that scientific morality should be untethered from religious dogma, was also an adamant opponent of Klimt’s work. For Jodl and his fellow rationalists to find themselves on the same side as their historical enemies, the censorious clericals, was an undeniably embarrassing alliance.109 Whether from a religious or a philosophical point of view, the commonality of the two resisting camps resides in their discomfort with Klimt’s seemingly indiscriminate combination of the irrational and rational sides of mankind and his equalization of man with all other forms of life.

Although criticisms of Philosophy were based on a variety of different reasons,

nearly everyone detected the clear allusion to Darwinism. The Vienna correspondent

for Die Kunst für Alle, an influential arts magazine published in Munich, wrote a

108 Anna Harwell Celenza, “Darwinian Visions: Beethoven Reception in Mahler’s Vienna,” The Musical Quarterly 93, no. 3–4 (October 1, 2010): 524, https://doi.org/10.1093/musqtl/gdq002.Celenza, “Darwinian Visions,” 524. 109 Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 234. 48

description of the painting’s Darwinistic leanings that also references Haeckel’s ‘riddle of

the universe’:

The painting shows how mankind, seen as part of the universe, is nothing more than a dull weak-willed mass which, in the service of eternal procreation, is driven, in happiness and sorrow, lost in a dream, from its first stirrings to its limp descent into the grave. In between, there lies a brief delirium of loving coming together and a painful drifting apart. Love is a disappointment both as happiness and as a discovery. Destiny always remains the same. Mankind stands apart from cold, clear knowledge, and from the eternally veiled riddle of the universe, in its struggle for happiness and knowledge, and always remains a mere tool in the hands of Nature, which uses it for its unchanging purpose, reproduction.110

Art critic Franz Servaes (1862-1947) also characterized Klimt’s work as the fruit of a

“profound, serious outlook on life, the quintessence of the age of Darwin.”111

In an effort to separate himself and his coterie from the more conservative religious group, Jodl positioned their complaint as founded not on the basis of morality, but of aesthetics. Jodl’s claim that “we’re not opposed to nudity or artistic freedom, we’re against ugly art” was met with a strong response from art historian Franz Wickhoff

(1853-1909), who gave a polemical lecture entitled “What is Ugly?” Presenting to the

Philosophical Society of Vienna, Wickhoff suggested that the idea of the ugly had deep bio-social origins in primitive man, who judged forms that seemed harmful to continuation of the species as ugly. And, this primitive impulse is still operative in

Klimt's antagonists, who although prestigious, are nonetheless classified as “second-class minds” due to their inability to recognize beauty in anything other than the work of the

110 Review quoted in Stephan Koja, Gustav Klimt: The Beethoven Frieze and the Controversy over the Freedom of Art (Munich ; New York: Prestel, 2006), 36.Koja, Gustav Klimt, 36. 111 Franz Servaes quoted in Celenza, “Darwinian Visions,” 524. 49 past.112 Consequently, according to Wickhoff, those who see modern art as ugly are those who simply cannot face the truth of the modern age. Later Vienna school art historians built on these foundational ideas, characterizing anti-classicism as an artistic response specific to eras of cultural chaos, and connecting the purported ugliness of modern art with psychological and spiritual truth. The intensity of the reactions to Philosophy and the positions taken by its defenders and opponents reveals how deeply the crisis of rationalism was embedded within the Austrian elite.

The scandal surrounding the University paintings did not end with Philosophy, but instead intensified when Klimt delivered his second composition, Medicine (1900-

1907), at the 1901 Vienna Secession exhibition (Fig. 10). Once again defying expectations of celebrating the achievements of science, Klimt confronted audience with a vision of medicine as a compressed and contorted stream of bodies that remain passive in the flow of fate. Klimt suggestion that academic intervention is ultimately futile recalls the words of Viennese feminist Rosa Mayreder (1858-1938), who described rational man as an “impotent puppet, dangling from the cords of illusion and jerked and pulled about by the universal will of in conformity with its own ends.”113 Klimt’s omission of any reference to the preventative and healing powers of medicine demonstrated his lack of hope and faith in the restorative power of modern medicine. The rational methods of medicine appeared to offer no solace from the cosmic drama of life and death. It was

112 Antonela Corbin, “The Goldfish and Other Klimtian Reactions to Viennese Art Criticism,” Hermeneia: Journal of Hermeneutics, Art Theory & Criticism, no. 13 (2013): 30–31, https://search-proquest- com.libproxy.tulane.edu/openview/1b9dd2f9b78c6f8dbac94da0389644df/1.pdf?pq- origsite=gscholar&cbl=1106344. 113 Rosa Mayreder, A Survey of the Woman Problem (London: W. Heinemann, 1913), 114. 50 precisely his challenge to the dominance of rationality that so grated the men of the university.

In the hands of Klimt, medicine attests more to the suffering and decay of the human body than its healing. The goddess of health and medicine, Hygeia, the only explicit reference to medicine of any kind, dominates the lower portion of the composition. Hygeia’s origins as a snake transformed out of the primordial swamp, symbolized by the snake that coils around her arm, exemplifies the kinship of evolutionary theory with myths of metamorphosis.114 The most ambiguous of creatures,

the snake is widely considered a phallic symbol with bisexual associations, as well as a

great dissolver of boundaries: between land and sea, man and woman, and life and

death.115

Nowhere is evolutionary challenge to Christian theology and contemporary

gender conventions more apparent than in Medicine’s revisionist views of genesis.

Perhaps this is the reason that the painting was described as an “offense against public

morals.”116 The spectral female figure standing apart from the tangled mass of bodies,

towering above, belittling, and seemingly taunting the viewer aroused some of the most biting commentary. Reaching out to the suffering swirl of mankind, this nude young

woman suggestively thrusts forward her pelvis to an audience positioned far beneath her.

In a provocative allusion to Michelangelo's Creation of Adam and Eve, wherein God

reaches out his hand to touch Adam’s, Klimt portrays the outstretched arms of a mortal

114 Emily Braun, “Ornament as Evolution,” 153. 115 Julie Johnson, “Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele: Life and Death in the City of Paradoxes” (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2000), 64, http://search.proquest.com/docview/304644193/.Johnson, “Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele,” 64. 116 Quoting contemporary reviews. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 242. 51

man and woman whose union is relegated entirely to chance. In contrast to

Michelangelo’s vision, here it is not the divine creator, but the woman who bears the

generative power of life.117 Instead of the billowy cloud of drapery that buoyed God in

the Sistine Chapel, a transparent swath of fabric that Ludwig Hevesi described in 1901 as

“a blue-colored uterus motif, enveloping an infant or late-stage embryo” floats at the feet

of this woman.118

In detailed photographs of Medicine, which unfortunately are all that remains of

the painting as a result of its destruction by fire in 1945, one can see that the womb-like

shape envelops an infant, or rather an embryo. Sheathed by a transparent vellum lining,

Klimt’s interpretation of the womb resembles Haeckel’s widely published images of the

human fetus in utero.119 Medicine created the biggest uproar due to its disrespect for the field of medicine and for its putative ‘pornographic’ elements, which were soundly castigated by Vienna’s moral majority. If there is any hope toward which the knot of humanity can reach, Klimt seemed to say that it will not be found in the hands of doctors or science, but within the generative power of women, who are the only ones capable of saving humanity. Despite complaints from some officials that Klimt captured chaos rather than controlled science, his incorporation of the latest scientific research into his imagery was apparent to many viewers, as evidenced by criticisms that claimed his art

117 This is the thesis of her article. Emily Braun, “Ornament as Evolution,” 153.Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 242. 118 Ludwig Hevesi quoted in Anna Harwell Celenza, “Darwinian Visions: Beethoven Reception in Mahler’s Vienna,” The Musical Quarterly 93, no. 3–4 (October 1, 2010): 525, https://doi.org/10.1093/musqtl/gdq002.Celenza, “Darwinian Visions,” 525. 119 Johannes Dobai, “Gustav Klimt’s ‘Hope I,’” National Gallery of Canada Bulletin, Bulletin no. 17 (1971), https://www.gallery.ca/bulletin/num17/dobai1.html.Dobai, “Gustav Klimt’s ‘Hope I.’” 52

represented “the specific medical field of gynecology” and was better “suited for an

anatomical museum,” the “Vienna General Hospital,” or “the Kraft-Ebbing Institute.”120

However, the figure consistently considered the most offensive and shocking to viewers was the partially obscured figure in the upper-right corner, a visibly pregnant woman in the nude. Despite the relegation of her body far to the periphery of the composition and her partial concealment behind a horde of helplessly drifting bodies, her brazenly bulbous belly appalled audiences and attracted the ruthless ridicule of critics. In

fact, the pregnant body was deemed so scandalous that when a sketch of Medicine was published in the Secession’s official publication, Ver Sacrum, the newspaper Wiener

Morgenzeitung prominently mentioned that “the figure of a pregnant woman” justified

the confiscation of the issue by authorities due to “offense against public morality”.121

Critics in Plein-Air echoed the thoughts of many viewers and further chastised the poor

taste of the artist: “Due to the audacity of depicting a pregnant woman, we do not think

highly of the painter.” 122 Understandably, Klimt was frustrated and infuriated by the public’s outdated prudery and the aggressive attacks on his artistic vision.

The prolonged debates and public obloquy concerning the panels for the university, along with the repeated refusal to appoint him as Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts despite him being elected in 1893 and 1901, clearly aggravated Klimt. As a result, Klimt in his typically taciturn manner addressed his critics not with a verbal, but a visual response. Originally titled To My Critics (1901-02), Klimt depicts a red-headed nude,

120 Braun cites several published contemporary reviews of Medicine. Emily Braun, “Ornament as Evolution,” 152. 121 Bahr compiled a collection of criticisms about Klimt that was originally published in 1903. Hermann Bahr, Gegen Klimt (Kromsdorf: VDG Weimar, 2009), 77. 122 Bahr, 83. 53

reminiscent of the woman with her pelvis thrust forward in Philosophy, insolently baring

her nude bottom to his critics (Fig. 11). Klimt expressed his animosity further when he

stated that his favorite model “has a backside more beautiful and intelligent than the face

of many others,” particularly more so than those who dared insult his work. In a similarly

defiant gesture, Klimt’s Hope I isolates the pregnant woman featured in Medicine that had so profoundly offended the moral majority.123 Klimt positions his model in a

revealing profile view, which rendered the already scandalous depiction of a naked pregnant woman even more revolutionary.

In Hope I, Klimt once again alludes to the evolutionary theory that many found offensive, but this time in the language of one of history’s most famous proponents of

Darwinism, Ernst Haeckel. Emily Braun interprets the primitive sea-creature that swims alongside the pregnant woman in Hope I as a manifestation of Klimt’s exposure to

Haeckel’s detailed illustrations of human embryos that demonstrated Haeckel’s infamous

claim that “ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny” (Fig. 12). In other words, Haeckel

hypothesized that the stages of embryonic growth compressed the whole history of the

evolution of the species, meaning that human embryos initially possess gills and tails,

like their primitive fish-like ancestors, that gradually disappear as they develop.124 Ernst

Haeckel expanded on Darwin’s theories and created his own formulation, a new

Weltanschauung, that connected science to spirituality, which he termed Monism.

Haeckel’s 1899 best-seller, The Riddle of the Universe, which Klimt explicitly references

123 According to Johannes Dobai, the earlier inclusion of a pregnant woman in Medicine reveals that Arthur Roessler’s romantic anecdote about Klimt’s motivation to paint Hope I due to the unforeseen pregnancy of his favorite the earlier inclusion of a pregnant woman in Medicine makes is likely untrue. Johannes Dobai, “Gustav Klimt’s ‘Hope I,’” National Gallery of Canada Bulletin, Bulletin no. 17 (1971), https://www.gallery.ca/bulletin/num17/dobai1.html. 124 Emily Braun, “Ornament as Evolution,” 151. 54

in the exhibition text that accompanied Philosophy, presented the idea that art, like

science, could create novel ways of connecting mankind to the natural world. In fact,

cultural critic Hermann Bahr solidified this correlation in his proclamation that Klimt

“paints our Monism…he is the painter of Haeckel.”125

Like Haeckel, Klimt sought to discover a spiritual awareness contained within an evolutionary genealogy that unifies the origins of all living things. Klimt pursued similar explorations about man’s unity with nature, his origins, primal states, and transitional forms of life. For example, in the undifferentiated mass of humanity depicted in his

University paintings, the great unity of mankind and the feeling of a macrocosmic whole is evoked. Hermann Bahr interprets Klimt’s paintings in a similar fashion:

That this life is transitory is something every Austrian knows (a profound truth within our misunderstood ‘gaiety’), and no one has brought this truth before our eyes with more grace than Klimt…Each thing is everything…this inter- relatedness of everything, this sense that nothing exists on its own, but everything shares in existence, this absorbs him.126

A critique cited earlier in this chapter read Klimt’s Philosophy as representative of

mankind’s struggle for happiness that “always remains a mere tool in the hands of

Nature, which uses it for its unchanging purpose, reproduction.”127 However, for Klimt, it

is Woman, not nature, who controls reproduction. Therefore, mankind’s pursuit of

happiness depends only on her. Man is displaced from the top of Haeckel’s genealogical

tree and replaced with Woman. The commonality of origins that connects all of mankind

lies within the womb of Woman.

125 Celenza, “Darwinian Visions,” 526. 126 Hermann Bahr quoted in Kevin Karnes, A Kingdom not of this World: Wagner, the Arts, and Utopian Visions in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 142-142. 127 Stephan Koja, Gustav Klimt: The Beethoven Frieze and the Controversy over the Freedom of Art (New York: Prestel, 2006), 36. 55

Haeckel was also well known for his proposal that ornament was an inherent

quality of nature. His multicolored illustrations of exotic flora and fauna in Die

Radiolarien (1862) and Kunstformen der Natur (1899-1904) demonstrate the diversity of

organic patterns found nature. These illustrations heavily influenced the geometric patterns and serpentine ornamentation of Jugendstil artists.128 Klimt in particular was deeply influenced both by the theories and aesthetics of Haeckel’s illustrations.

Stylistically, Klimt conveyed Monist unity through the decorative patterning incorporated into his paintings based on the biological and microscopic forms of cells. His simple shapes of repetitive concentric circles, identical to single cells, proclaim a unity of mankind through networks of interconnections within nature. While Braun’s belief that the scandalous reception of Klimt’s work derived from his flamboyant vision of ornament as evolution is convincing, I disagree with her ultimate conclusion that it was caused by the discomfort of the realization that the aesthetic sense was commonplace in the animal kingdom and no longer considered exclusive to humans. I contend that Klimt’s use of ornament as evolution was controversial because it positions women at the center, and ultimately in control of the progression of mankind.

Ornament as Crime

Despite its basis in cellular structure and Haeckel’s illustrations, the scientific imagery throughout Klimt’s paintings can be read as merely aesthetically pleasing decorative patterning. Denigrated as superficial, deceptive, and irrational, the purely decorative was fundamentally opposed to the emerging discourse of functionalism that

128 Celenza, “Darwinian Visions,” 520. 56

adhered to the philosophy that ornament is only to be utilized in service of the object’s

function. The negative characteristics that were attributed to the decorative arts echo the

same stereotypical language that was typically employed to describe women. Meanwhile,

the realm of the functional, essential, and rational were correspondingly coded as

masculine. Therefore, to devalue ornament was to reinforce a misogynistic discourse that

deemed women inferior.129 The ostensibly feminine features of ornamentation so bemoaned by the emerging functionalists were precisely the qualities most celebrated by

Klimt and other Secessionist artists. Liberated from practical necessity, adornment invigorated sensory pleasure, providing welcome reprieve from an overly ordered and rational Viennese culture. In his uninhibited deployment of ornament, Klimt subverts the dominance of male reason and reasserts the primacy of feminine irrationality. However, by assigning a positive valuation to the same purportedly negative characteristics of ornament, and thus of femininity, Klimt ultimately perpetuates, rather than undermines female stereotypes. By translating the language of science into that of ornament, Klimt subsumes masculinity under the umbrage of femininity. This imposition of feminine decoration upon masculine form also destabilizes the dichotomy between the two perceived opposites and undermines the certainty of science. In Klimt’s universe, science is no longer the superior dominion of men, but rather subordinate to the instincts of women.

Although the origins of ornament’s close association with femininity can be

traced all the way back to Cicero, the level of contempt that ornament stirred at the turn

129 Llewellyn Negrin, “Ornament and the Feminine,” Feminist Theory 7, no. 2 (August 1, 2006): 219, https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700106064421. 57

of the century attracted renewed attention to this connection.130 In an era when many

theorists feared that the increasing feminization of society would culminate in cultural

collapse, the stakes were high to establish a modern art form that would propel Austria

toward progress. Much of the criticism in Vienna was provoked by the city’s predilection

for baroque exaggeration and excessive embellishment that defined its historic

architecture, as well as its contemporary art. This decadent and overwrought aestheticism

largely contributed to Vienna’s demeaning reputation as a distinctively feminine city.

Nowhere was the protest against effeminate style more pronounced than in the

writings of Adolf Loos (1870-1933), a pioneering functionalist who advocated for a more

minimalist aesthetic. In his 1908 essay, "Ornament and Crime," Loos proclaimed that the

decorative urge was not only inherently feminine, but also intimately tied to eroticism,

irrationality, infantilism, primitivism, and even criminality, all of which imperiled the

linear progression of civilization. Loos believed that a predilection for decorative effects

was particularly characteristic of women, exemplified by their sartorial preference for

overly embellished fashion. Loos even references Haeckel’s theory that ‘ontogeny

recapitulates phylogeny when he states that “The human embryo goes through all the

evolutionary stages of the animal kingdom while still inside the womb” in order to

compare the decorative impulse as a regression to a lower state of humanity that we all

experienced before birth.131 Adolf Loos believed that the eradication of ornament, and all

of its associated characteristics, was a precondition of the progress of civilization.

130 Gombrich traces the existence of the connection of femininity and ornamentation back to classical antiquity, specifically Cicero’s observation that the qualities irrationality, unnaturalness, and femininity can be found in decorative flourishes. E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (New York: Cornell University Press, 1984), 19-23. 131 Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, ed. Michael Mitchell and Adolf Opel (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1997), 103. 58

According to Loos “the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal

of ornament from utilitarian objects.”132 Those who, like Klimt, indulged in ornament

were considered “stragglers [who] slow down the cultural progress of nations and

humanity; for ornament is not only produced by criminals; it itself commits a crime, by

damaging men's health, the national economy and cultural development.”133 For Loos,

ornament was far from harmless decoration, but rather the source of anarchic, pre-rational

impulses, linked to the feminine, that threatened to disrupt the social order.

The increasingly elaborate ornamental surfaces of Klimt’s paintings, combined with his often erotic subjects, could easily serve as virtual illustrations of precisely the same qualities that Loos denounced. Whereas Loos demands the suppression such impulses, Klimt wants to amplify and embrace them. Klimt’s paintings drew tightly together the strands of the decorative, the feminine, irrationality, and a self-sufficient female sexuality. As evidenced by Klimt’s complex reference material for his deceptively simple patterns, his aesthetic choices were carefully considered. For Ludwig Hevesi, ornamentalism had no connection to artifice because it was ‘born under the dictates of life,” which made “the life-force visible.”134 As historian Jacques Le Rider argues,

Klimt’s ornamentation was laden with profound meaning because it expressed man’s

original link with the world.

For Klimt, femininity corresponds to a state of fusion symbolized by

ornamentation. Klimt turns to the influence of women as intuitors of the biological

132 Ibid. 133 Ibid., 105. 134 Ludwig Hevesi quoted in Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity, 73.Jacques Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-De-Siecle Vienna, trans. Rosemary Morris (New York: Continuum Intl Pub Group, 1993), 73. 59

impulse, bearers of life, and agents of change in an ossified world. Although he does rely

on stereotypical characteristics of women, Klimt still manages to incorporate novel

representations of women’s power. His references to the developments of biology,

specifically embryonic and single cell organisms, imbues women with unprecedented power. In the constantly evolving conversation between art and new paradigms of

humanity Klimt propose a feminine utopia wherein all of humanity is connected through

their shared origins – within the wombs of women.

60

CHAPTER 3: MODERNITY’S CRISIS OF SELF

The economic, political, and social progress associated with modernization challenged both collective cultural identities and individual subjective identities. In fin de siècle Vienna, individuals began to increasingly identify themselves, or be identified by others, in terms of their gender, class, ethnicity, religion, national origin, linguistic groupings, sexual orientation, age, or other such markers. This period of conflict and uncertainty resulted in a fragmented and compartmentalized sense of identity that required a reshuffling of the self. Alongside other intellectuals of his generation, Gustav

Klimt's disenchantment with and detachment from the prevailing social and moral order resulted in a critical questioning of self, both in terms of exterior social belonging and interior psychological mining.

Alongside his exploration of society through the lens of the spiritual and the scientific, Klimt also investigated the psychological interior as a site of self-origin. Klimt visually manifests this pervasive identity crisis through his incorporation of the pregnant body as symbolic of the ruptured binaries that individuals typically employ to define themselves: self vs other; male vs female; interior vs exterior. By complicating these long-established boundaries in a period plagued by mounting tensions, Klimt destabilizes dichotomies that contributed to seemingly insurmountable inequality in his advocacy for social unity. In so doing, he reveals that the similarities that humans share overshadow arbitrary and superficial differences. In his vision of a feminine utopia, Klimt positions

‘Woman’ not only as a spiritual savior and progenitor of humanity, but also as a metaphorical site where self-definition, social harmony, and human equality can be 61

achieved. The parturient women that Klimt depicts capture a particularly poignant

historical moment defined by both an individual and collective identity crisis.

Individual Identity

Rapid urbanization and the slow and seemingly inevitable decay of the Austro-

Hungarian Empire left many Viennese feeling profoundly unmoored. In a similarly liminal state, the pregnant woman simultaneously occupies the role of self and other, which when found within Klimt’s work, recalls this fragile sense of self that defined fin- de-siècle Vienna. This lack of distinction between self and other would have been perceived as particularly problematic in an era when many Austrians, disoriented and full of despair, sought solace in identifying themselves in opposition to an imagined ‘Other’ in order to more clearly define themselves. Simultaneously one and two, a ‘container’ for another being as well as ‘herself,’ the gravid woman’s bodily experience dissolves the ostensible unity of self, thus complicating the supposedly simple distinction between self and other.135 This concept bears a striking resemblance to German psychoanalyst Lou

Andreas-Salome’s (1861-1937) conclusion that women were more deeply rooted in

“original wholeness” due to their procreative abilities, resulting in a less pronounced

division between subject and object, and soul and body. To her, this was proof of the

superiority of women over men, whose modern condition only accentuated “his

rootlessness and intellectualization to a pathological degree.” Klimt adheres to Andreas-

Salome’s idea of the artist who she identifies as closer to Woman and more in touch with

135 Clare Hanson, A Cultural History of Pregnancy: Pregnancy, Medicine, and Culture, 1750-2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 12–13. 62

reproductive and creative sexuality. She envisions the artist as capable of resurrecting

what has been relegated to the unconscious and reactivating the all-embracing primal

unity of childhood to create a social structure that is “poetically rather than practically

oriented.”136

Viennese audiences would have likely viewed this physical conflation embodied by the pregnant woman as inherently problematic. Neither fully herself nor her child, the mother’s compromised identity during this transitional condition obliterates the psychological and physical boundaries of her body. Radically rupturing these seemingly secure borders, the pregnant woman is a socially unstable anomaly. Representations of her body can be interpreted as both dangerous and transgressive in an era when the distinction between self and other was integral to social identities, which is why Klimt defiantly includes the gravid body in his visual repertoire.

Klimt’s depictions of pregnancy caused the audience profound discomfort both for his questioning of the boundaries between self and other, as well as his iconoclastic exposure of a body characteristically concealed from public view. In Klimt’s time, the further along a woman’s pregnancy progressed and became visible, the more she was relegated to the confines of the home and refrained from going out in public. Although pregnancy itself was not deemed offensive, once it became conspicuous, it was considered inappropriate to be seen in public. As Mary Russo aptly stated, ‘in the everyday indicative world, women and their bodies, certain bodies, in certain public framings, in certain public spaces, are always already transgressive – dangerous and in

136 Ban Wang, “Memory, Narcissism, and Sublimation: Reading Lou Andreas-Salome’s Freud Journal,” American Imago, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Summer 2000) 226. 63

danger.’137 Given these prudish parameters for proper behavior, Klimt’s nearly life-size paintings of pregnant women - and in the nude no less – monumentalized in a public

exhibition, blatantly violated Viennese moral and social propriety. Klimt

unapologetically breached the cultural taboo concerning visual encounters with an

expectant maternal body that conceptually and physically pushes the private into public

space.

The perceived radical fracturing of self that results from pregnancy closely

corresponds to Freud’s contemporary psychological theories about the duality of modern

man’s psyche split between conflicting psychological forces, the conscious and

unconscious mind. The conscious mind, according to Freud, is the aspect of our mental processing that is rational, whereas, the unconscious mind harbors our most irrational and

deeply buried thoughts. Freud rejected the postulation that man was inherently rational

and revealed that many of his actions are largely driven by unconscious motives. Human behavior is a product of the interaction between rational (conscious) and irrational

(unconscious) processes. This duality prompted a radical rethinking of how we view

ourselves and our place in the universe.

Freud’s contemporary Klimt also discovered and explored new aspects of the

unconscious mental life. In neuroscientist Eric Kandel’s The Age of Insight: The Quest to

Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present,

he posits that Klimt understood women better than Freud, particularly the nature of

women’s sexuality and maternal instinct. Klimt and his disciples encouraged viewers to

look at art and within themselves to develop a more emotionally introspective approach

137 Quoted in Rosemary Betterton, “Prima Gravida: Reconfiguring the Maternal Body in Visual Representation,” Feminist Theory 3, no. 3 (2002): 261, https://doi.org/10.1177/146470002762491999. 64

to their conception of self that would illuminate the unconscious anxieties and

unconscious drives present in us all. One visual manifestation of this influence can be

seen in Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. According to historians Sophie Lillie and Georg

Gaugusch, the pattern that ornaments Adele’s dress is composed of ovoid sexual

symbols, which they argue reveals her instinctual drives and offers “a compelling visual

expression of Freud’s theory that emotions buried in the subconscious rise to the surface

in disguised form.”138 With the goal of educating the public about a new view of the

human mind, especially women’s minds, Klimt hoped to liberate both men’s and

women’s emotional life and lay the foundation for sexual freedom.

This duality also corresponds to the exterior self that we present to the world

through our consciousness, in opposition to the internalized self that we conceal from

others, even oftentimes to ourselves. Freud believed that the contents of the unconscious

were composed of difficult or unpleasant feelings that people were reluctant to confront.

As a result of this avoidance, the unconscious mind becomes riddled with repressed

desires. This repression was fundamental to criticisms put forth by Klimt and his peers

regarding the hypocrisy of Vienna, a city that hid its obsession with sex behind a façade

of propriety and prudishness.

Many of Klimt’s dream-like scenes are haunted with symbolically similar ‘hostile forces,’ such as the monstrous figures that hover behind the woman in Hope I. Rather than being a unified ego, the pregnant woman renews connection to the repressed and straddles the spheres of conscious and unconscious realms. The woman’s undaunted expression in spite of the ominous figures surrounding her can be interpreted as the

138 Quoted in Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present (Random House, 2012), 118.Kandel, The Age of Insight, 118. 65

tension between the conscious external version of self with the internal turmoil inflicted by the unconscious. The monsters, representing unconscious repressed desires, appear to

have escaped from the unconscious to freely inhabit physical space, further emphasizing

the fluidity between interior and exterior. Pregnancy itself, according to Young, renders

fluid the boundary between what is within a woman’s body, and what is outside and

separate, experiencing her insides as the space of another, yet her own body.139 But, as a

scene originating from the interior imagination rather than external reality, Klimt further

complicates evidently stable separations and confronts the viewer with “a diffuse sense

that all is in flux, that the boundary between ego and world is permeable…[that] the firm

traditional coordinates of ordered time and space were losing their reliability, perhaps

even their truth.”140 Hermann Bahr also addresses this tension between our interior and exterior selves as a result of the destabilizing conditions of modernity in his 1890 essay

“The Modern,” which appears to reference Freudian thought:

Life has been transformed down to its very foundations, and every day it is continually changing into something new, restless, and unsatisfied… For hundreds of years the body had feuded with the spirit…It created drives and desires, previously unknown and still not understood today…We want to obey the external laws and our inner longing…We have but to make the outer into the inner, so that we are no longer strangers and can inherit what belongs to us.141 (italics added)

Bahr appears preoccupied with the same concerns as Klimt and proposes a fusion of

interior and exterior as a means to stabilize our sense of self in the face of an unstable

world. Through his images of pregnancy, Klimt wanted to reveal the truth behind our

139 Quoted in Hanson, A Cultural History of Pregnancy, 151–52. 140 Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 345. 141 Emphasis added. Hermann Bahr quoted in Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger, eds., Art in Theory, 1815-1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford, UK ; Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 909. 66

misguided conception of a unified self in order to recognize their instinctual side and

embrace it rather than repress it as society currently encourages. Only once we recognize

this duality within ourselves can we find peace. Bahr’s polemic writing and Klimt’s

mystifying paintings express the overwhelming Endzeitgefühl, a fateful sense of societal

decline, combined with the promise of a new beginning, that so enchanted the Viennese.

By giving visual form to a customarily concealed body, Klimt imbues the pregnant woman with a sense of subjectivity not usually awarded to women, particularly

while pregnant. In Klimt’s paintings, Woman becomes a speaking subject rather than an

object possessed by the male gaze. Inhabiting a body that is both hers and not hers, the pregnant woman overturns the conventions upon which the patriarchal representations of

women rest. The split subject of pregnancy confounds paradigms of male consumption of

female sexuality by means of the possessive gaze. Her sexuality does not lend itself

easily to appropriation by the male gaze because of the socially enforced separation between maternity and sexuality.142 While the expectant belly inherently references

heterosexual intercourse and female sexuality, the Viennese felt compelled to separate pregnancy from sexual intercourse, the source of its creation, as a matter of social

decorum. Although usually conceived as hidden and internal, pregnancy is a rare moment

when the existence of female sexuality becomes visible and nearly impossible to conceal.

However, in Klimt’s paintings, the pregnant woman’s sexuality is not for the benefit of

the audience, but rather for herself as independent and in control of her own eroticism.

Iris Marion Young claims that:

Patriarchy is founded on the border between motherhood and sexuality. Woman is both, essentially - the repository of the body, the flesh that he desires, owns and

142 Sandra Matthews and Laura Wexler, Pregnant Pictures (New York: Routledge, 2000), 21. 67

masters, tames and controls; and the nurturing source of his life and ego. Both are necessary functions, bolstering the male ego, which cannot be served if they are together, hence the border, their reification into the hierarchical opposition of good/bad, pure/impure.143

The extrication of sexual availability from the functions of motherhood sustains the patriarchal order. According to Young, freedom for women involves dissolving this separation. Purposefully traversing the taboo territory between maternity and sexuality,

Klimt removes the boundary between these male-imposed separations.

The complexity of these taboos was connected not only to the embarrassment inspired by visible signs of female sexual activity, but also with the fact that the woman refutes possession by the male gaze. Art historian Pamela Allara, in her article about

Alice Neel, discusses the ways in which maternal sexuality interferes with the viewer’s gaze: “No fantasies of possession are possible when her very condition indicates a prior claim to this property. Because her sexual history is inscribed on her body, the male gaze cannot penetrate her.”144 Klimt's images of pregnancy are persistently resist familiar

strategies of visual objectification. Although Klimt ostensibly presents her nude body as

an object to be surveyed and scrutinized, her pregnant state refutes the erotic gaze and

thus awards her a sense of subjectivity that dominates the viewer with her gaze and

desire. With her eyes unrelentingly fixated on the viewer, the pregnant woman in Hope I

radically reverses the male gaze by aggressively confronting and deflecting its path, thus

challenging the passivity culturally associated with women and pregnancy. She seems to proclaim her erotic independence and assure the audience that she does not exist for the

143 Iris Marion Young quoted in Matthews and Wexler, 13–14. 144 Pamela Allara, “‘Mater’ of Fact: Alice Neel’s Pregnant Nudes,” American Art 8, no. 2 (April 1, 1994): 10, https://doi.org/10.1086/424213. 68 pleasure of the male viewer. Her pregnant belly implies an already spoken-for sexuality

that refuses to submit to the viewer's voyeuristic mastery. By reconfiguring the pregnant body outside of the maternal ideal, Klimt offers ways of thinking about the pregnant

woman not as a vessel, nor as a thoroughfare for a new life, but as an independently

embodied subject and, further, one that fundamentally disturbs the model of the

disembodied unitary self. They are attempts at more adequate representations of female

ontology that may help to create, as literary historian Mary Russo suggests, a “new social

subjectivity.”145

By foregrounding the woman's subjectivity, Klimt positions the creation and definition of self in direct relation to the mother. In contrast to the dominant theories of

Freud that positioned the phallus as central to self-identity, Klimt proposes the womb as crucial for developing the ego. By inverting the predominant sexual paradigm, Klimt imagines a restructured utopian society that prioritizes the production of women over that of men. As feminist philosopher Moira Gatens argues in Imaginary Bodies, “the self emerges in opposition to (on some views, in relation with) an other…the (m)other.”146 self dissolves,” thus the pregnant subject becomes decentered or doubled between “her body as her self and not her self.’147 Moira Gatens argues that the socially constructed notion of ‘the self emerges in opposition to (on some views, in relation with) an other…the (m)other.”148 By reworking the self and other relationship from the

145 Mary Russo quoted in in Betterton, “Prima Gravida,” 266. 146 Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (Psychology Press, 1996), 32.Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (Psychology Press, 1996), 32.Gatens, Imaginary Bodies, 32. 147 I. M. Young, “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 9, no. 1 (February 1, 1984): 45–62, https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/9.1.45.Young, “Pregnant Embodiment.” 148 Gatens, Imaginary Bodies, 32. 69 perspective of birth, the female becomes the center around which the rest of society must

revolve. The fact that all of humanity has emerged from the womb of a woman is a

universal truth of common origins that unites humanity. As Adrienne Rich famously proclaimed, we are all “born of woman.” With recognition of this as a universal truth, pregnancy is positioned as integral to our understanding of what and who we are. In this

model, the womb is not a container or a simple organ of reproduction, but a space where

subjectivity is shaped. Through this process of co-emergence between the part-selves and part-(m)others, multiple paths to connectedness can be uncovered. Klimt’s recognition of

mankind’s shared site of origins may enhance the capacity for understanding and

accepting Otherness, as well as the stranger within oneself, in ways that challenge that

arbitrary division between self and other.

As twentieth-century psychoanalysts have argued, pregnancy creates a crisis of identity in terms of both psychological and physical perceptions of the self. The body-ego is compromised, and the pregnant subject is ‘decentered, split, or doubled in several ways.’ Therefore, Klimt’s choice to paint pregnancy can signify a significant philosophical intervention that extends and challenges thinking about subjectivity and bodily identity. As such, pregnancy offers a model for a new understanding of identity and social relations.

Collective Identity

Viennese society, largely organized around the enlightenment ideas of rational thinking and the contained ego, had previously solidified the object-subject distinction and proclaimed an isolated view of the self that provided little space for the empathizing 70

with the ‘Other.’ In his embrace of stereotypical feminine qualities and refutation of

‘masculine’ progress, Klimt clearly subscribed to an alternate view of how the self relates

to ‘other.’ As a body that symbolically unites self and other and calls for new

intersubjective relations, Klimt’s use of the pregnant woman’s body can be read as

commentary on and refutation of the persistent social ‘othering’ to which ethnically non-

German inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were subjected. Like the porous borders between Austria and the empire’s other constituent nations, the pregnant body’s

autonomy has been similarly invaded by an ‘other.’

Delicately perched at the intersection of multiple borders, Vienna had always been a city straddling several ethnicities and nationalities. Unable to negotiate the

insoluble tension between a destination of mass migration and nationalist politics, the political landscape was riddled with anxieties concerning the instability of national and

cultural identity. By the 1890's, close to fifty-five percent of Greater Vienna was of

foreign birth.149 Violence markedly escalated among various ethnic groups, which was reiterated and reinforced by contemporary xenophobic political rhetoric. Despite the 1867 national constitution’s clause that proclaimed, “all ethnic groups in the nation have equal rights, and each ethnic group has an inalienable right to preserve and cultivate its nationality and language,” this was not the reality for ethnic minorities.150 Austria was a nation composed of eleven different ethnic groups that were in constant conflict with one another. The diversity and irreconcilable desires of each nationality represented in

149 Heintzman Rebecca M., “Gustav Klimt : A Psycho-Historical Portrait of the Man and His Work Based on the Psychology of Carl G. Jung and the Theory of the Collective Unconscious” (University of Louisville, 1991), 11–12.Rebecca M., “Gustav Klimt : A Psycho-Historical Portrait of the Man and His Work Based on the Psychology of Carl G. Jung and the Theory of the Collective Unconscious,” 11–12. 150 Brigitte Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna., 91. 71

Parliament, where there was no established official language, stagnated any hope of

harmony or progress. The struggle between the multitude of ethnic groups and German-

speakers haunted the Empire from the 1870s until its dissolution after the First World

War. In this melting pot of ideologies and ethnicities, art served as a symbolic battlefield,

an area for the confrontation of the most varied points of view.151

In an attempt to define their nation through cultural production, Klimt and the

Secession at large aspired to create an Austrian identity that embraced its multi-ethnic and diverse population. Berta Zuckerkandl, closely associated with Klimt and the

Secession, had explained her commitment to the aims of Secession movement as “a question of defending a purely Austrian culture, a form of art that would weld together all the characteristics of our multitude of constituent peoples into a new and proud unity.

For to be Austrian did not mean to be German; Austrian culture was the crystallization of the best of many cultures.” (italics added)152 Secession artists envisioned a harmonious nation that, like the pregnant body, would serve as a site of unification, albeit limited to the confines of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, between self and other.

Secession artists endeavored to create art that would connect all the different ethnicities of the empire under one unified Austrian identity. Klimt’s art in particular was seen as instrumental in defining what it meant to be Austrian. In the eyes of Hermann

Bahr, Klimt’s paintings accurately captured the very essence of Austrian culture:

“Austria has become a nation, I say, we are different from the Germans, we have our own identity… how can one ‘define’ it? But you can see it in Klimt’s painting of Schubert!

151 Tobias G. Natter and Max Hollein, eds., The Naked Truth: Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka and Other Scandals (München ; New York: Prestel, 2005), 10. 152 Emphasis added. Berta Zuckerkandl quoted in Stephan Koja, Gustav Klimt: The Beethoven Frieze and the Controversy over the Freedom of Art (Munich ; New York: Prestel, 2006), 16. 72

That quiet, mild gaze, the radiance combined with the bourgeois modesty - that is the

very essence of our Austrian nationality.”153 Art’s potential to transcend Austria’s

nationality conflict was also recognized by those outside of Klimt’s inner circle. The

Minister of Culture who created the Arts Council in 1899 believed that “although every

development is rooted in national soil, works of art speak a common language, and

entering into noble competition, lead to mutual understanding and reciprocal respect.”154

Although said in jest, satirist Karl Kraus (1874-1936) also detected allusions to Austrian identity when he interpreted Klimt’s University Paintings as an allegory of the language situation in the empire, all chaos and confusion.155 In an era when languages fiercely struggled for primacy in the streets and in parliament, many viewers found a source of reprieve in artworks that transcended the limits of linguistic differences and spoke a collective Austrian language. Support for Klimt and participation in the Viennese avant- garde provided a sense of belonging that embraced Austria’s diversity and provided reprieve from the contentious tenor of political and social debates.

Since the Austrian monarchy had lost it political hegemony within German speaking countries as a result of the war with Prussia in 1863, the question of an

“Austrian nation” had been crucial.156 Languishing in the shadows of Germany’s rapid rise to power, Austria gained a reputation as the “Lesser Germany,” a more diminutive and feminine counterpart. “The cult of the feminine is part and parcel of Austrian culture” stated Julius Meier-Graefe, a famous German art dealer and cultural historian in

153 Hermann Bahr quoted in Tobias Natter, Klimt’s Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 67. 154 Quoted in Koja, Gustav Klimt, 16. 155 Paraphrased comment by Karl Kraus in: Kevin Karnes, A Kingdom not of this World: Wagner, the Arts, and Utopian Visions in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 142. 156 Tobias Natter, Klimt’s Women, 67. 73

his 1904 treatise, Das Neue Wien.157 Perceived as decadent with a predilection for

extravagant aestheticism, Vienna was gendered as feminine not only in comparison to

Germany, but also in contrast to other urban centers of the Empire that sustained an

appetite for military conflict and political dissidence.158 A nation described as feminine

not only implied weakness, but was also associated with social degeneration and

‘Jewishness.’ In its desperate desire to reassert its power on the national stage and

disprove its putative femininity, Austrian politics adamantly reasserted patriarchal order

and the early rumblings of dangerous nationalistic rhetoric emerged.

Social, national, and gender issues became inextricably linked in Vienna. Women played a crucial role within the chaos of these ethnic tensions because many believed

only they could preserve the racial and cultural purity of the nation through their

offspring. The womb, as a space that generates future citizens, became contested terrain

in the struggle for state power. Woman was increasingly regarded as the essential link between the present generation and the next, and late nineteenth-century social theorists

repeatedly stressed her ‘natural’ profession as bearer and nurturer.159 The nationalists,

who promoted union with Germany and the creation of an ethnically ‘pure’ German race,

took an intense interest in the “woman question.” Austrian women were thrust into the

role of protectors of the nation, responsible for the procreation of the subsequent

generation that would preserve the crumbling empire. Therefore, the women’s

157 Ibid., 205. 158 Agatha Schwartz, ed., Gender and Modernity in Central Europe: The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and Its Legacy (Ottawa, ON: University of Ottawa Press, 2010), 30. 159 See Karin Hausen, "Family and Role-Division: The Polarization of Sexual Stereotypes in the Nineteenth Century-An Aspect of the Dissociation of Work and Family life," in The German Family, 63- 64. 74

movement, which inspired women to abandon their roles as bearers of meaning for that

of makers of meaning, was viewed as a particularly egregious affront to the prosperity

and longevity of the nation. The emancipation efforts of Austrian women provoked an

adverse reaction from men, who feared a loss of power in the midst of an already

disorienting identity crisis. Gender parity threatened to unravel the human progress that

had been purportedly achieved under the aegis of male dominance, thus resulting in the

rapid degeneration of the entire nation.160 Nationalist publications, such as Franz Stein’s

Der Hammer, opined that the emancipation of women would inevitably result in “an

intermingling of races which leads to degeneration and threatens to destroy all sound

humanity” and called upon ethnically German women to become “true priestesses of patriotic love” because their “fatherland’s inner greatness and unity, and even its outer

strength, utterly depend on you.”161

This instability of gender roles fueled conservative attitudes and erupted in virulent misogynistic discourse. Fueled by anxieties about national and ethnic survival, many argued that the only appropriate role for women was as progenitors, and that to fight for anything more was not only an overestimation of women’s abilities, but also treachery. Self-proclaimed ‘men’s rights activist’ and Hitler’s mentor, Lana von

Liebenfels, argued against women activists as “poor child bearers and bad mothers” and that women’s desire for social, economic, and political independences was “hostile to

160 Agnes Husslein-Arco editor et al., The Women of Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka (New York: Prestel, 2015), 59. 161 Franz Stein quoted in Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna, 368–69. 75

culture-yes, even more than that…hostile to life.”162 Women in their quest for independence were perceived by many as a disruptive force to the delicate social order.

Definitions of and differentiations between femininity and masculinity were

among the most controversial topics in fin-de-siècle Vienna because of their intimate link

to fears of a cataclysmic cultural crisis. The ‘woman question’ dominated discourse in the

academic, medical, intellectual, and artistic spheres. The shifting gender roles weakened

the strict polarity of the sexes, which according to many, resulted in masculine women

and effeminate men who threatened the ‘natural’ order of patriarchal society. Women’s

liberation was denounced as a definitive sign of cultural degeneration, claiming that “the

decline of states and peoples has always started with the rule of manly women and

effeminate men.” Max Nordau, writing about ‘degeneration,’ identified its source as precisely this ‘feminization’ of men and the ‘masculinization’ of women.

The controversy that erupted over women’s bodies and their place in society

transformed them into figures upon which men projected upon many broader existential

anxieties. By exploiting these social fears about women, Klimt challenges their validity.

Klimt capitalizes on woman’s status as the all-purpose ‘Other’ in service of his revolt

against rational order and convention. For Klimt, the use of the feminine as an allegorical

vehicle communicates an opposition to the marginalization of women as ‘Other.’ By

unleashing the subversive power represented by the feminine ‘other’ in his visual

celebration of irrationality and instinct, Klimt calls into question the efficacy of rational

masculine control. As human sexuality scholar Ruth Westheimer claims in her book on painting and sculpture, The Art of Arousal, Klimt’s paintings can be interpreted “as

162 Agnes Husslein-Arco editor et al., The Women of Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka, 16.Agnes Husslein- Arco editor et al., The Women of Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka (Munich ; New York: Prestel, 2015), 16. 76

expressing an increasing awareness of women’s sexual self-sufficiency. That awareness

led naturally, but all too slowly, to a greater independence of women in all spheres of

life.”163 In a social climate consumed with concern about woman’s national duty to produce racially pure offspring, the unprecedented and shocking presence of pregnancy

in Klimt’s paintings would readily conjure anxieties of social degeneration because he

unleashes her self-sufficient sexuality.

Klimt mobilizes the pregnant body as a site of rethinking subjectivity, not only by blurring the binary categorization of self and other, but also of male and female.164

Although pregnancy is an exclusively female experience, the gestation process transpiring in her body defies conventional understandings of gender. Contained within the pregnant woman’s body are both the male-gendered sperm and the female-gendered ovum, as well as single or multiple embryos of one or both sexes. By possessing these male and female components, the pregnant woman’s body transmits an ambiguous gender. Although the woman is definitively gendered as female, within one and the same flesh is a fetus that may be male or female. The womb is conceptualized as a place where gender has yet to be crystallized. Pregnancy is in this sense a liminal state, confounding customary social boundaries and cultural categories. Because of this “gender trouble,” to use Judith Butler’s term, images of the pregnant woman invoke a heterogeneous, multiplied sense of personhood that does not usually fit the usual understanding of a single-sexed subject. By confronting audiences with a disturbing fusion of male and

163 Quoted in Kandel, The Age of Insight, 93-94. 164 Silver discusses how pregnancy in general blurs the boundaries between genders, not in relation to Klimt. Catherine B. Silver, “Womb Envy: Loss and Grief of the Maternal Body,” The Psychoanalytic Review 94, no. 3 (June 1, 2007): 41, https://doi.org/10.1521/prev.2007.94.3.409. 77

female bodies, Klimt undermines the gendered power dynamics that dominated popular

thought.

This type of conflation and confusion of gender was perceived as a direct consequence of the women’s movement. Klimt confronts male viewers with gender chaos and transports it from the realm of the imaginary to the dreaded reality. Emblematic of the vicious misogynistic discourse that erupted in reaction to these anxieties is the iconic and contentious Sex and Character by Viennese philosophy student Otto Weininger. This first and only work produced by Weininger165 achieved notoriety for its vilification of

femininity in which he ascribed to “woman” all the negative characteristics plaguing the

modern age. He set out to prove that “the greatest enemy of women’s emancipation is

woman herself.”166 Weininger’s book, albeit in an extremist tone, articulated the prevailing male fears of social feminization in the wake of women’s suffrage movements,

women entering the workforce, and an amoral aestheticism in the arts. Weininger’s philosophical inquiry into male and female differences relies upon the biological boundaries of gender that he himself establishes and identifies sexuality and reproduction

as inherently feminine and thus something to be avoided.

Weininger also designates Jews in particular as infected with femininity. In fact,

he and other theorists of the time closely associated femininity, ‘Jewishness,’ and

modernist art. Proclaiming that “our era is not only the most Jewish, it is also the most

feminine of all eras,” Weininger believed that the disintegration of modern culture and a

loss of wholeness would soon come to pass.167 Weininger defined woman, and by

165 Weininger committed suicide shortly after the publication of Sex and Character. 166 Susan C. Anderson, “Otto Weininger’s Masculine Utopia,” German Studies Review 19, no. 3 (1996): 433, https://doi.org/10.2307/1432526. 167 Otto Weininger quoted in Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna, 228. 78

extension Jews and modern art, as full of an ambiguity and multiplicity that obscured boundaries. Woman served as a foil, an object against which he defines and delimits his

conception of self-contained manhood. The negative characteristics attributed to

femininity upheld the superiority of men and thus the patriarchal order.

Evidenced by the popularity of his work, Weininger’s ideas, although extreme,

reflected the era’s intense angst surrounding issues of gender. Published in 1903, the

same year that Klimt painted Hope I, Weininger’s theories found a receptive audience.

Weininger’s vision of a male universe that completely annihilates any trace of the feminine lies in stark contrast to Klimt’s vision of a feminine utopia. Whereas Weininger disparaged the feminization of their era, Klimt appears to openly embrace and celebrate the future as female. In response to the widespread unease surrounding gender relations,

Weinginer proposed a super-rational masculinity, whereas Klimt offered a super- irrational femininity, as the remedy for the cultural malaise of their era. Klimt seems to completely reject Weininger’s misogynist assumptions. Precisely the same attributes that

Weininger denigrated in an attempt to arouse contempt for the feminine, Klimt transforms into characteristics worthy of veneration.168 Depictions of men remained rare

within his repertoire and were hardly ever granted the primary role. By painting women

as if in perennial homage to the superiority of the female, Klimt seems to find truth and

salvation in the arms of a woman.

Klimt’s glorification of femininity, and in particular maternity, expressed the

desire to discover a refuge from troubled reality and the unitary truth underlying the

divided world. According to Lachance, the mother has culturally functioned as an "all-

168 Eva di Stefano, Gustav Klimt: Art Nouveau Visionary (New York: Sterling, 2008), 16. 79 powerful, all-enveloping womb, as a place of utter peace.”169 The idealization of life in

the womb could be understood as a reaction, especially by males, to an increasingly

competitive, cold, and materialistic modern world.170 What the uncanny demonstrates so powerfully, according to art historian Alexandra Kokoli, is the powerlessness of reason in the face of both the individual and cultural unconscious.”171 This provides an apt description of what may have fascinated Klimt about pregnancy. For Klimt, the womb encompasses these aspects, but most importantly contains his vision of a utopia wherein the primordial unity of all people takes precedence over our differences. Psychoanalysts such as Freud analyzed this unconscious desire to return to the womb as a melancholic attachment to an idealized wholeness and fundamental state of being that we have all known and to which we yearn to return.

Womb-like spaces that recall repressed uterine memories, intrauterine existence, being buried alive, the mother’s genitals, and the womb as the entrance to the former home are all enumerated by Sigmund Freud as unheimlich 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny.’

Unheimlich exactly translates to ‘unhomely’ and is more commonly referred to as

‘uncanny.’ This concept developed by Freud describes the experience of disorientation at the moment when the environment in which we once felt at ease suddenly appears foreign, alienating, or threatening. Describing the pronounced discomfort one feels as the seemingly familiar transforms into the unfamiliar, the uncanny dissolved the boundaries between the real and imagined and brings to light what should have remained hidden.

169 Sarah LaChance Adams and Caroline R. Lundquist, eds., Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 39. 170 Silver, “Womb Envy,” 427. 171 Alexandra M. Kokoli, The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 17. 80

Through an exploration of complex and uncertain borders, Freud reveals that the

strangeness that one often perceives in oneself and in the world around oneself is a direct

result of a profound ‘otherness’ that disrupts our sense of self. As a result, the subject’s

sense of wholeness is exposed as illusory and the familiar self is eternally at risk of not

knowing itself.172

Of all the bodily organs, Freud views the womb, the ‘former home,’ as the most definitively uncanny.173 The common comedic refrain, ‘love is homesickness,’ Freud

analyzes as “whenever a man dreams of a place or a country…we may interpret this place

as being his mother’s genitals or her body.”174 Freud equates the yearning for home, whether a place or country, with a desire to return to his first familiar home; the mother’s womb. As a concept and desire that expresses a bounded and secure identity, the idea of home is projected onto the female body as a nostalgic longing for the lost wholeness with the mother. According to Freud, this desire to return to the womb is an expression of wanting to be fully taken care of and protected that provides a psychic sense of safety outside of Oedipal logic.175 In such a framework, the womb is a place where one can

return to a state of stasis that repairs the separation between the self and (m)other. Far

from being ‘abnormal,’ this seems to uncover the pervasive feelings of alienation and

dislocation at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This analysis of women’s wombs was not unique to Freud, but rather was

contemplated by several of Vienna’s most prominent psychoanalysts of that era. Sándor

172 Barbara Creed, Phallic Panic (Carlton, Vic., Australia: Melbourne University Press, 2005), 29. Creed discusses Freud’s uncanny in depth. 173 Creed, 18. 174 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 244. 175 Silver, “Womb Envy,” 415. 81

Ferenczi (1873-1933), in his 1924 article Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, argues that

coitus reflects men’s desire to return to the mother’s womb to achieve a state of bliss and

security. Otto Rank categorizes birth as a traumatic separation from intrauterine ecstasy

that results in a lifelong craving to return to paradise and primal pleasure of the womb.

Although all of humanity has experienced an intrauterine existence and subsequently

suffered the loss of this symbiotic state, only women have the opportunity to relive this

condition through their own pregnancies.176

Considering that Klimt was closely associated with scientific circles and many of his close friends socialized with Freud, Klimt may have been exposed to Freud’s theories.

Although Klimt’s Hope paintings preceded the publication of Freud’s essay on the uncanny, his artwork nonetheless captures similar ideas that were circulating in the same city. Even Freud himself acknowledges that artists seemed to have instinctively known "a great deal of what [he] was trying to find out; they anticipated him, and yet they were not fully aware of the riches of their own thought."177 As a subject that the male symbolic order considered ‘unfamiliar’ and ‘strange, the nude pregnant woman adheres to Freud’s characterization of the uncanny as something “that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.”178 The variety of taboos that surround pregnancy suggests

that the uncanny will emerge when these taboos are lifted. Theorist Rosemary Jackson

argues that the uncanny has a radical potential to uncover those things that the dominant

culture preferred to keep hidden and "functions to subvert and undermine cultural

176 Ibid., 415. 177 Richard Kuhns, Psychoanalytic Theory of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 4. 178 Freud, The Uncanny, 224. This is one of Freud’s explanations of the uncanny concept generally. 82

stability” by giving rise to “fantasies of violating these taboos.”179 In Klimt’s Hope paintings, the transgressive power belongs to the female who challenges social mores and the authority of the phallic order.

Alongside Vienna’s prominent psychologists, Klimt explores the womb as a site of social and psychic anxiety. Klimt’s controversial depictions of pregnancy reflect

Vienna’s preoccupation with the formation of individual and collective identities. The blurring of boundaries that pregnancy elicits is what so disturbed audiences about Klimt’s paintings. As fundamental to self and national definition, the separation from the ‘other’ was essential, and to dissolve this unity of self was perceived as blasphemous. In Klimt’s proposition for a feminine utopia that refutes the masculine order, Klimt directly confronted male viewers with the vision of the world they most feared: a future defined by femininity.

179 Rosemary Jackson quoted in Creed, Phallic Panic, 14–15. 83

CONCLUSION

In the absence of any concrete or detailed remarks from the artist himself, Klimt’s

allegorical paintings, riddled with a highly personal and elusive symbolic language, have

withstood an endless array of interpretations. Klimt was infamously reticent regarding his

art, stating:

I am fluent in neither the spoken nor written word, and certainly not when I am supposed to express something about myself or my art…Whoever wishes to know something about me – as an artist, the side of me which alone is significant –should look at my pictures attentively and try from them to recognize what I am and what I intend.180

Often perceived as either misogynistic or proto-feminist, Klimt’s depiction of women is a

consistently contentious topic. With little direct insight into the artist’s intentions, any

assessment of Klimt’s art, as art historian Clare Willdson stated, “clearly needs to take

account of the complex ferment of ideas which would have surrounded its genesis and

shaped the attitudes of its viewers.”181 An intensive mining of primary-source critiques of

Klimt’s work, both from his supporters and opponents, reveals the ideas and themes that

colored contemporary audiences’ perceptions of his paintings.

Issues concerning the flagrant display of female sexuality, reference to religious

iconography, Darwin’s theory of evolution, Haeckel’s monism, and Freudian psychoanalysis were all derived not from my personal interpretation, but from evidence

culled from a multitude of sources that discuss Klimt’s work. The direct references of

contemporary critics to the religious iconography found in his Hope paintings, as well as

180 Gustav Klimt quoted in Gottfried Fliedl, Gustav Klimt: Die Welt in Weiblicher Gestalt (Köln: Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1998), 10. 181 Clare A.P. Willsdon, “Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze: Goethe, Tempelkunst and the Fulfilment of Wishes,” Art History Vol. 19, No. 1 (March 1996), 45. 84

the writings of Klimt’s peers that discussed art as a form of spiritual redemption, I

concluded that Klimt envisions himself as a spiritual leader proffering a new religion for

the modern age that combines the spirit and the flesh, thus allowing for a liberation of

female sexuality.

In the second chapter, critiques of Klimt’s University paintings that mention the influence of Darwinian evolution and Haeckel’s monism, alongside the scholarship of art historian Emily Braun that outlined Klimt’s exposure to scientific theories through Dr.

Zuckerkandl, led me to interpret Klimt’s inclusion of cellular imagery as an expression of the primordial unity only found within the wombs of women.

The substance of the third chapter derives from a combination of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century psychological theories of Sigmund Freud and some of his influential professional peers, with late twentieth-century feminist scholarship that addresses the phenomenology of pregnancy. Although seemingly an anachronistic inclusion, the feminist theories discussed directly respond to and build upon Freudian psychoanalysis. Through the inclusion of these theories, I conclude that Klimt’s

incorporation of the pregnant body destabilizes dichotomies - self vs other; male vs

female; interior vs exterior; conscious vs. unconscious - in his advocacy for social unity.

Ultimately, all of these ideas uphold my interpretation of Klimt’s paintings of pregnancy

as representing a feminine utopia that positions ‘Woman’ not only as a spiritual savior

and progenitor of an evolved version of humanity, but also as a metaphorical site where

self-definition, social harmony, and human equality can be achieved.

Alongside contemporary critiques and theories, the enormous body of secondary

literature on Klimt, which encompasses a variety of interpretations and opinions 85

regarding his representations of women, has informed my approach to the material and is

referenced throughout. From these substantive foundations, I interpret his images of pregnancy as a desire for a utopia defined by feminine values as a rebellious response to

the perceived failures and disappointments of patriarchy. Although some may disagree

with this analysis, and particularly to the idea of his depictions of women being progressive, several other scholars (such as Esther Bauer, Jacques Le Rider, and Eva Di

Stefano) have also described his images of women as transgressive and detected a

utopian vision within his work. My argument diverges from these scholars in its focus on pregnancy in relation to his utopian visions, and in particular, his reference to the womb

as a site of redemption. My contention that Klimt’s representations of pregnancy uphold a

strong ideology informed by a complex conglomeration of theories has been drawn from

the language used by both late-nineteenth century critics and today’s scholars. Thus, I believe that these paintings can bear the philosophical weight that I have placed upon

them.

Although Klimt’s celebration of ‘Woman,’ primarily in connection to her sexual

and procreative abilities, may not be considered revolutionary by today’s standards, it

largely echoed sentiments expressed by the incipient women’s movement in Austria, particularly those of the General Austrian Women’s Association founded in 1893. At the

helm of this movement were the voices of powerful feminists such Rosa Mayreder, Irma

Troll-Borostyáni, and Grete Meisel-Hess, who regarded a woman’s pursuit of

motherhood as noble, but also fought for women to be more visible in the public sphere

and to be gatekeepers of their own sexuality. Klimt arguably accomplishes both of those

feminist desires by providing public visibility to the insistently private and invisible 86

figure of the pregnant woman and by endowing her with sexual autonomy that refutes possession by the male gaze.

Intimately interwoven with issues of morality, prosperity of the nation, and self- identity, the stakes were high to satisfactorily resolve the ‘woman question.’ The elusive nature of femininity and the role of women in modernity served as the foundation upon which the Viennese crisis of masculinity was built. With ‘woman’ as a yet unresolved, and thus a threatening figure, Klimt’s persistent inclusion of women in his work serves as a revolt against the masculine-led phenomena of modernity. Carl Schorske’s discussion of Oedipal revolt as a defining feature of the fin-de-siècle generation applies to Klimt’s invocation of the feminine as a more attractive alternative to the failures of his father’s generation. Klimt’s imagining of a feminized world aspired to reinvent the reigning social order. This is further supported by art historian Gottfried Fliedl, who claimed:

Not only are Klimt’s paintings shot through with the antagonism between rationalism and irrational nature, between liberal culture and the aesthetic rebellion of its ‘sons,’ but Klimt was also fascinated by the tension between patriarchal culture and chaos, for which he used femininity as an allegorical vehicle. It was both a rebellious world view, opposed to things of the past, and a vision of the future, with a totally different, feminine culture.” (Fleidl 81)

The vision of the future to which Fliedl refers is what I have termed a feminine utopia.

Although his visions of redemption and utopian harmony are often haunted by troubling or disturbing figures lurking in the background, they also capture Edenic spaces that transcend the divisions between self and other, and spirituality and sexuality. Many of Klimt’s works, according to historian Kevin Karnes, “counter visions of darkness and psychic tensions with glimpses of heavenly, peaceful bliss, of states of mind that might be attained only if we could affect such utopian negation of the negatives of human 87

existence.”182 Only when man is able to embrace his fundamentally irrational nature,

which Klimt designates as decidedly feminine, can he reach the height of ecstasy that

Klimt’s utopian world would provide. Jacques Le Rider interprets similar utopian

aspirations when he states that Klimt’s paintings depict “The ‘decadence’ of the old human race [which will] bear the promise of a new humanity in harmony with life; and this utopian better life is inseparable from femininity.”183 Perhaps as art historian Silvia

Eiblmayr interprets, “These pictures do not document man’s surrender to the power of

Eros or indeed his attempt to come to terms with an alien femininity. Rather they are projections of a male femininity.”184 In other words, this is an expression of masculinity

seeking something absent from its prescribed territory; a deeper connection to a sense of

wholeness defined by a spiritual, social, and psychological unity.

In his embrace of what Karl Kraus satirically termed a “vaginal epoch,” Gustav Klimt

rejects the excessive rationalism of the reigning patriarchy.185 Jacques LeRider rightly interprets

Klimt’s vision as a desire to return to the very matriarchal system that anthropologist JJ

Bachofen (1815-1887) derided as sexually promiscuous, noting that in Klimt’s paintings, “Bachofen’s prophecy that the scepter of Apollo might fall into the hands of

Dionysus, and that the sensual chaos and primitive barbarism of matriarchy might resume their

ascendancy, sweeping away the cultural gains of masculine, patriarchal civilization, seems to

come true.”186 Klimt’s paintings propose a feminine utopia wherein women are not only the

182 Kevin Karnes, A Kingdom Not of This World: Wagner, the Arts, and Utopian Visions in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 94. 183 Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity, 108. 184 Fliedl, Gustav Klimt: Die Welt in Weiblicher Gestalt, 202. 185 Kallir, Egon Schiele’s Women, 32. 186 Jacques Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-De-Siècle Vienna, trans. Rosemary Morris (New York: Continuum Intl Pub Group, 1993), 88.Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity, 88. 88 procreators of a new nation, but of a new generation composed of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or perhaps in Klimt’s universe, the Überfrau.

Cultural critic Hermann Bahr (1863-1934) aptly describes the generational

sentiments to which Klimt felt compelled to respond:

A terrible agony rends our times and the pain is no longer bearable. A call for the Savior is heard on all sides... Is this the great death that is overcoming the world? It may be that we are at the end of an exhausted humanity, and that what we witness around us are merely death rattles. But it might be that we are at the beginning, that we are witnessing the birth of a new humanity… Perhaps we will ascend into the divine or perhaps we will fall into night and annihilation. But we will not remain unchanged. That somehow salvation will come from suffering, that grace will come from despair, that day will come again after this terrible darkness, that art will be reborn - belief in this glorious and holy rebirth, that is the faith of the modern.187

Klimt indeed has the “faith of the modern” and proposes Woman as the only savior capable of giving “birth to a new humanity.”

187 Hermann Bahr quoted in Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger, eds., Art in Theory, 1815- 1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford, UK; Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 909. 89

FIGURES

Figure 1: Gustav Klimt, Hope I, 1903, oil on canvas, 71” x 26” inches, National Gallery of Canada 90

Figure 2: Gustav Klimt, Hope II, 1907-1908, oil, gold, and platinum on canvas, 43.5” x 43.5” in, National Gallery of Canada

91

Figure 3: Unknown, Maria in der Hoffnung, Swabia, early 16th century, Linden wood, Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, Frankfurt, Germany 92

Figure 4: Koloman Moser, Cabinet in the back in the Waerndorfer’s home, 1906, photograph, Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna 93

Figure 5: Gustav Courbet, The Origin of the World, 1866, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

94

Figure 6: Joseph Maria Olbrich, Secession Building, 1897-1898, Vienna, Austria

95

Figure 7: Gustav Klimt, Danae, 1907-1908, oil on canvas, Private collection

96

(a) (b) (c)

Figure 8: From left to right, Detail from Klimt’s Danae (a) compared with photographs of blastocysts seen by electron microscopy (b) and light microscopy (c)

97

Figure 9: Gustav Klimt, Philosophy, 1900-1907, Ceiling panel for the Great Hall of Vienna University, destroyed by fire in 1945 98

Figure 10: Gustav Klimt, Medicine, 1900-1907, Ceiling panel for the Great Hall of Vienna University, destroyed by fire in 1945 99

Figure 11: Gustav Klimt, Goldfish (To My Critics), 1901-1902, oil on canvas, 71” x 26” Swiss Institute for Art Research, Zürich, Switzerland 100

(c)

(a) (b)

Figure 12: Ernst Haeckel illustrations from left to right: The Evolution of Man, 1879 (a), Illustrated Natural History of the Animal Kingdom, 1882 (b &c)

101

Figure 13: Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze, 1902, Secession Building, Vienna, Austria

First panel, left side wall

Third panel, center wall

Fifth panel, right wall 102

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