Chapter 1 15

Chapter 1 Modernism’s Byzantium’s Modernism

Robert S. Nelson

In the winter of 1903, the two painters Gustav Klimt and Maximilian Lenz trav- eled from Vienna to Italy, stopping first in northern Italy at Udine, Venice, and Padua. Lenz preserved a record of the trip. He remembered the nasty weather in Padua and complained of the rain and illness in Venice, but then they came to : “the true goal of the trip… Gustav Klimt’s hour of destiny…. The made an immense, decisive impression on him. From this comes the resplendence, the stiff decoration of his art.” Klimt bought photographs and picture postcards, and on May 9, he sent a postcard with a view of the interior of S. Vitale to his mother.1 At the end of 1903, Klimt returned to northern Italy, again visiting Venice, Padua, and Ravenna. About the latter he wrote, “Lots of miserable things in Ravenna—[but] the mosaics are unbelievably wonderful.”2 Alma Mahler decreed that the work Klimt produced after the Italian trip was Byzantine. Among the finest examples of this period is his first portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (Fig. 1.1). For some decades the treasure of the Belvedere in Vienna, the painting now hangs in the Neue Gallerie in New York, thanks to Holocaust restitution and resale. The standard comparison made to it is the sixth-century of the Empress Theodora from the church of S. Vitale in Ravenna, here shown in a detail of the Empress’s retinue (Fig. 1.2). Klimt prob- ably knew the image from reproductions before he saw the original on the north wall of the bema. Of all the Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna, the Theodora panel attracted the most attention of modern artists and art historians in the early twentieth century. Vasily Kandinsky illustrated the Theodora mosaic from S. Vitale in his manifesto, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerting the Spiritual in Art), of 1911, as did Clive Bell in his Art of 1914.3 While the Theodora

1 Christian M. Nebehay, Gustav Klimt Dokumentation (Vienna, 1969), 495–96. 2 Colin B. Bailey, ed., Gustav Klimt: Modernism in the Making (New York, 2001), 203. 3 The full-page illustration appears at the end of the second chapter, “The Movement”: Vasily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst: Insbesondere in der Malerie (2nd ed. Munich, 1912), between pp. 16 and 17. I agree with Lisa Florman [Concerning the Spiritual—and the Concrete— in Kandinsky’s Art (Stanford, CA, 2014), 13, 182, n. 7] that the placement of the image here is significant and not causal, as it has been claimed. Clive Bell illustrates the same mosaic before his chapter “The Rise of Christian Art,” which recounts the decay of Christian art down to pictures at “the Tate Gallery or the Luxembourg.” “To the sixth century belong the most ma-

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004300019_003 16 Nelson

Figure 1.1 Gustav Klimt. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Neue Galerie, New York. Photo: Art Resource, NY. panel does not explain everything about the Klimt portrait, it does provide a similar tableau of brilliant color out of which emerge the pale faces and hands, especially in the case of the empress’s female attendants. In the portrait and the mosaic, the women have long, rubbery fingers, and unnatural joints. For medievalists, the differences between the two images are manifold, but Klimt was not a scholar, whose eye had been trained by years of studying , but an avant-garde painter. It is the vision of such artists that is my princi- pal concern in this overview of modernism’s Byzantium and Byzantium’s mod- ernism, and my time frame will be the first three decades of the twentieth century. Looking at the Ravenna mosaic from Klimt’s perspective, it is not hard to see why he would have been attracted to the Theodora panel, and why he went to

jestic monuments of Byzantine art…. Since the Byzantine primitives set their mosaics at Ravenna no artist in Europe has created forms of greater significance unless it be Cezanne.” Clive Bell, Art (London, 1914), 129–30.