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Gustav Klimt's Depictions of Pregnancy

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Gustav Klimt's Depictions of Pregnancy Scanned with CamScanner 2 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 4 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.
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