The Lady in Gold (11 page)

A best-selling book of the era, Otto Weininger's
Sex and Character,
spelled out the social punishments for female individualism. “
The sexual impulse destroys the body and mind of the woman,” Weininger wrote. Women lacked the capacity “
not only of the logical rules, but of the functions of making concepts and judgements,” he believed; “a real woman never becomes conscious of destiny, of her own destiny.” Passivity was not just a virtue for women, it was a “natural” state, and “waiting for a man is simply waiting for the moment when she can be completely passive.”

“
There is no female genius, and there never has been,” said Weininger. Normal women, in his view, “have no desire for immortality.”

In a hypocritical society hostile to women in general, and fearful of female sexuality in particular, Klimt's studio was a haven of sensuality for women whose most elemental feelings and aspirations were pathologized as “degenerate.”

The “degenerate” label was soon applied to the artists and composers whom Klimt's female patrons supported. “
The degenerates babble and stammer instead of talking,” sneered
Max Nordau, of the
Neue Freie Presse.
“They draw and paint like children who with useless hands dirty tables and walls. They make music like the yellow people in Asia. They mix together all artistic genres.”

The racially loaded culture wars of turn-of-the-century Vienna were on. It was only a matter of time before “degenerate” would be aimed at Jews. Turn-of-the-century Vienna was governed by opposing forces. As artists and intellectuals pushed ahead with new ways of seeing, giving birth to Austrian modernism, the old Vienna, conservative and hidebound, pushed back. Innovation from Klimt was met with hostility. The rise of Jewish patrons was heckled by persistent anti-Semitism. In
another generation, these reactionary forces would prevail, absolutely, in a crushing triumph.

Adele, too, adopted the chic flowing dresses favored by emancipated women and immersed herself in Klimt's artistic world.

Even music was dangerous now. The disturbing atonal concerts of
Arnold Schoenberg moved men to fistfights. Art forced people to see differently, listen differently, and feel differently. Adele was no longer an aspirant, but a member.

For her growing library, she commissioned a bookplate, or ex libris, by a well-known
Secession artist, Koloman Moser, a close friend of Klimt's. Moser drew a lithe, naked princess with long, black hair and a golden crown, holding her gown over her nude body as she emerges from a lily pond and encounters a frog croaking on a rock. The image seemed to sum up the prevailing view of Adele as the princess who had kissed the frog. Poor Ferdinand.

Klimt and Adele were now involved in a close relationship that would last the rest of their lives, much of it conducted in a hushed studio that was a haven for artistic creation and heated trysts. Neither of them left a written record of what occurred.

The indiscretions of the Vienna intelligentsia were open secrets, though in public, decorum was as rigid as the crust of Klimt's golden mosaics. The Viennese playwright
Arthur Schnitzler, who knew Freud, mapped out the tensions of this social schizophrenia in an erotic thriller,
Dream Story,
where masked Viennese indulge their sexual fantasies at a costume ball. In this confusing milieu,
Sigmund Freud became the confidant for the sexual anxieties of a generation of Viennese women, and Klimt's studio became a refuge for Adele and her friends.

Those who wondered whether Adele and Klimt were lovers looked for clues in his paintings.

Some art historians suggest that Klimt had met Adele years before, perhaps in the company of Alma, when she was a theatrical unmarried teenager,
eager to throw herself into Vienna's cultural whirl. If so, it would mean Adele met Klimt at his most amorous moment, a time he was unapologetically passionate, not for one, but for many. Alma may have told Adele of her struggle with her desire to surrender to Klimt.

One thing is strikingly clear: Klimt's first portrait of Judith bears an almost photographic resemblance to Adele. Klimt envisioned Judith as a bare-breasted sexual provocateuse, a mysterious, dark-haired Salome with a golden choker and a triumphant smile playing on her lips. She was not so much a temptress but an aroused conqueror, holding the severed head of Holofernes with the self-satisfied look of a femme fatale who has won the upper hand. Art historians were not the only ones left to sort out the waltz of intimacies. When Klimt unveiled his sexually charged
Judith
at the
Secession in 1901, it was not just the heated eroticism that raised eyebrows. This Judith seemed familiar.

As Adele rose from the bed she shared with Ferdinand and sipped her
coffee from their fine porcelain, she would have had to take interest in
Felix Salten's suggestion that this Judith was walking among the Viennese, in the form of a smoldering society belle.

Klimt's portrait of the newly married Adele Bauer, ca. 1907, brought them together on a regular basis for more than three years. (
Illustration Credit 13.1
)

“
In his Judith,” Salten wrote in a review, Klimt

Salten was adding fuel to a popular Vienna guessing game: Who was the model for this achingly sensual Klimt painting? Salten seemed to hint that he knew.

Years later, some art historians would argue that Klimt's 1901
Judith
was the young Adele.

As Klimt slowly developed her portrait, Adele was settling into a marriage in which something was clearly missing. She was possessed by the same desires as Alma. But she had failed to hold out for a grand passion. Now she found herself in the embrace of a homely man twice her age who had never been confident with women. And she was spending vast amounts of unstructured time with Klimt, whom Alma, and many other women, found arousing.

This would go on for three years.

What occurred between Adele and Klimt as he worked on the portrait is left to the imagination. Klimt revealed little of his complicated personal life in his limited correspondence, and only a few of Adele's papers have ever been recovered.

What might have happened was written by
Arthur Schnitzler, a member of Adele's circle who used the thinly disguised personal lives of people he knew as the fodder for his plays. Schnitzler knew Klimt, had watched
him flirt with women at Berta's salons, and had bought two drawings from him. Schnitzler had dreams in which Klimt appeared.

Klimt's
Judith,
1901
. (
Illustration Credit 13.2
)

Schnitzler wrote
The Comedy of Seduction,
a play about a fictionalized Klimt and a beautiful society woman whom he calls Aurelie—from the Latin word for “golden.” His Klimt character implores Aurelie to allow him to paint her portrait, promising to immortalize her like the empress in the mosaics at Ravenna. Aurelie coyly resists, but she is intrigued.

At society parties, the artist dances too close to Aurelie under the gaze of her fiancé. He whispers that she must surrender to his “artistic” urgency. Only by painting remarkable women, he insists, can “
I become the person I am.”

“
Did I ever have to beg?” the artist implores.

He talks her into posing at her elegant home, then pushes her to come to his studio, where “
my house stands alone, and there are high walls around the garden,” much like Klimt's isolated studio.

She is reluctant. She has heard about models lounging there undressed. “
The police will come before long and raid that nest,” a matron warns. “There are women running around there the way God created them.”

Another woman whispers that he paints his mistresses “
just as Corregio painted Io, when the cloud descended on her. And he is always the cloud.”

The artist implores: If she comes to his studio, she will live forever, like the empress in Ravenna. “
Don't refuse me any longer,” he pleads. “I want to paint you in the sunshine. Heaven's light over your hair, over your forehead, your throat, your neck, your hips. We'll be like an island on the ocean. Come.”

Aurelie finally goes to his studio. The artist is not there. She finds her finished portrait and stands before it, stunned. Here, beneath the façade her society spent a lifetime creating, is her true face. The artist has lifted her mask to reveal who she really is.

Later that night, she sits alone at home, amazed, infuriated. Aroused.
Calling her carriage, she hurries across Vienna. “
To embrace him or kill him?” she asks herself. “I don't know.”

A crowded costume party fills the artist's garden. Couples move through a dark, fragrant night, “
alive with the lamentation and singing of violins and flutes.” Aurelie wanders under the stars, through torchlight and darkness, as “all around me gliding and sliding, shouts of joy, a sinking down.”

Suddenly she is face-to-face with the painter.

She sinks down, “
smothered in flowers, darkly glowing eyes above me,” overwhelmed by desire. “Did it last for minutes or hours? Was it a dream or was I awake?”

“
And then I experienced it—all of a sudden I was not myself anymore. I was the picture he painted. I felt myself, in the limbs I'd surrendered, my quivering breasts . . . all as I'd seen them in the painting—and knew then: this painting did not lie; this painting expressed a truth of which I'd had no idea . . .”

Felix Salten, the sultry Vienna journalist who wrote about Klimt, ca. 1910. He went on to write the children's classic
Bambi. (
Illustration Credit 13.3
)

The artist had descended on her like a cloud. Her passion was not a source of shame, but a transformative moment. The painting was the catalyst for her sexual awakening.

Whatever occurred between Klimt and Adele, Schnitzler's play captured the sexual fantasy the Vienna elite had of Klimt in his prime.

Did Klimt unmask his subjects, in the same way Freud sought to lift the veil on the human psyche? Did Klimt celebrate his female subjects, allowing them complex emotions and sexuality, or did he exploit women? Given all that we know, probably both.