The Lady in Gold (14 page)

Adele considered herself equal to her remarkable friends. “
If fate has given me friends who may be counted on intellectually and ethically as extraordinary, then I owe these friendships to one of my main qualities: the strongest self-criticism,” Adele would write. “I have always been, and still am, my strictest judge. Through the years I have become better and more mature, and have earned the right for myself to exercise criticism and place the highest demands on my friends.”

Adele still saw her immortality in art. She was working with the new director of the Belvedere museum,
Franz Martin Haberditzl, to make the family's Klimt collection their legacy. “
I think that in memory of my dear friend Klimt, I owe it to him to make a work by his hands accessible to the public,” she wrote Haberditzl.
My dear friend Klimt.

Haberditzl was a visionary. Confined to a wheelchair by what was diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis but some historians suspect was multiple
sclerosis, he was leading an ambitious plan to make the Belvedere a showcase of new Austrian art. Haberditzl embraced the avant-garde. He was among the first important believers in
Egon Schiele, buying his drawings and a portrait of Schiele's wife, Edith. The grateful Schiele called Haberditzl his “soul mate,” and painted a thoughtful portrait of his warm, kindhearted patron. Haberditzl was recruiting the patrons who had helped to create the
Secession to assist him in transforming the
Austrian Gallery into a showcase for the art they had nurtured. He would bring to the Belvedere more than five hundred new works by 250 new artists. Aided by patrons like Adele and Ferdinand, Haberditzl would pull these artists into the august Vienna institutions that had once shunned them. Ferdinand helped pay for the acquisition of one of Klimt's scandalous Faculty Paintings,
Medicine,
from Koloman Moser's widow, Ditha, along with an old Klimt admirer,
Sonja Knips. Klimt was gone. But the patrons he left behind still believed art had the power to open minds and change the world.

Adele, by her early forties, ca.
1920
, was a socialist, an atheist, and a proponent of women's rights. (
Illustration Credit 17.1
)

The transformation of the Belvedere was formidable.
Like many venerable Viennese institutions, the Belvedere had a complicated past, even by the standards of Habsburgs, who buried their entrails among the “bone rooms” in the catacombs of St. Stephen's and their hearts in the Augustinerkirche.

The Belvedere's creator, Prince Eugene of Savoy, was an aspiring soldier whose scandal-tainted mother had left him with dim career prospects in France. So in 1683 Prince Eugene headed to Vienna, where the Turks had laid siege outside the city walls, and helped rout them.

The prince spent the rest of his life erecting a fantastically ornate Baroque palace that was a monument to his life as a warrior. He had a lusty eye for the male physique. On one ceiling, Prince Eugene had himself painted as Apollo, master of the Muses, rolling around the heavens with Eros, the Greek god of desire. His palace's copper-green roof was made to resemble the tent camps of his Turkish adversaries, who left behind Vienna's most important fuel, after wine and sex: coffee. Decorative arrows and shields symbolized the booty of war. Fantastic lion-women, his sphinxes,
kept the palace secrets. He died in his sleep at the Belvedere in 1736, still a bachelor.

It was the transformation of this campy palace of war, suffused, like so much of Vienna, with the weight of history, that childless Adele wished to leave behind.

On January 19, 1923, Adele chose a piece of fine Elisabethstrasse stationery, dipped pen in ink, and wrote a short will. She asked Ferdinand to leave money to a home for poor children she sponsored, the Kinderfreunde. She left money to the
Vienna Workers' Association Friends of the Children and another charity. She left her jewelry to Gustav Bloch-Bauer's daughters, Luise and Maria, and her other nieces and nephews. Her immense library of books would go to the
People's and Workers' Library of Vienna. “
I ask my husband after his death, to leave my two portraits and the four landscapes by Gustav Klimt to the
Austrian Gallery in Vienna,” Adele wrote.

Art was no longer Adele's only existential concern. Women got the vote in late 1918, and a few months after elected a solidly Social Democratic city government that promised to help Vienna's poor. Adele was immersed in the ideals of this “Red Vienna,” and the battle for social justice. The socialists were determined to turn the capital into a liberal island. They were fighting for health care, decent housing, workers' rights, and secular education. The luxury taxes used to finance reform bred resentment, and church authorities preached against the atheists.

The architects of this movement gathered at Adele's house every week for a salon her family called her Red Saturday.

Adele now held court at Elisabethstrasse with
Karl Renner, the former chancellor of the first republic of Austria. Renner, a Social Democrat, had spent his youth at the birth of modern socialism with
Leon Trotsky, at Vienna's Café Central. Renner spoke of a revolutionary transformation of Vienna, an end to its teeming poverty. Their family friend Dr.
Gertrud Bien, now a successful pediatrician, discussed the delivery of health care to the poor. Adele had never been afraid to wade into Vienna's culture wars. This time it was not for an art-loving elite, but for the populist masses. “
Goethe writes in
Torquato Tasso:
A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the mainstream of the world,” Adele wrote.

In her private life, Adele was a bit of a mystery. She was always tired, not feeling well, and suffering from headaches and vague ailments. No record
of a diagnosis exists. Adele refused to go to the doctor. If poor women in Vienna didn't have access to doctors, she told her family, why should she?

Adele seemed disillusioned with her marriage. By the end of
World War I, arranged marriages were giving way to love matches with an expectation of sexual passion, what Freud called a union of
the “tender” and the “sensual.” The kind of intense union that Alma had insisted on, over and over. Her friend Alma had begun her affair with
Walter Gropius before
Gustav Mahler died; stormed through Kokoschka, married Gropius, then fallen in love with
Franz Werfel. Alma had always attained the fascinating men who aroused her passion. Except for Klimt.

Adele often seemed merely impatient with Ferdinand, with an air of resigned disappointment. When Ferdinand presented Adele with a luxurious diamond bracelet, Adele showed little pleasure. With socialism in the air, she rarely wore it.

To her family, Adele seemed moody and self-involved. She barely looked up when Therese's eight-year-old daughter, Maria, peered silently through the velvet curtains of Adele's crowded salon. Maria was intimidated by her formidable, remote aunt Adele, with her long gold cigarette holder and her sober, unsmiling stare. Adele did not warm to children. Maria watched as Adele blossomed in the company of her distinguished, learned friends.

Ferdinand never lost the awe he had felt when he first set eyes on Adele, arrogant and self-assured, sweeping into the room in a long white dress, as slim as a vase. Ferdinand still felt privileged to be married to this proud beauty who answered her distinguished guests and their strong opinions with raised eyebrows and her own strong convictions.

Women from good families rarely smoked openly, but Adele did so unrepentantly. Ferdinand watched silently as a plume rose in a delicate spiral from Adele's cigarette holder, while she and Alma Mahler listened to the dashing young Renner discuss the latest improvements in Vienna social services with
Berta Zuckerkandl.

Not all of Adele's family approved of her flirtation with socialism, and she knew it. But she was adamant about the importance of keeping an
open mind. “
Beware of criticizing things and conditions that you have no idea about or are unfamiliar to you. Beware of being disrespectful! You have to be thorough in everything!” Adele admonished.

“
With regards to others, you have to approach them with the greatest respect (also from within),” Adele wrote in a letter to her nephew Robert, Therese's deeply conservative youngest son.

Ferdinand was powerless to deny his wife what pleased her. He shrugged when she openly told people she did not believe in a Supreme Being. There was no point in trying to tone down her frankness. Ferdinand was a forward-minded industrialist, but he was as impeccably conventional as his porcelain collection. Without Adele, the
palais
on Elisabethstrasse would have been a silent museum.

Klimt's painting of Adele captured Ferdinand's own feelings with such clarity, it was as if Klimt knew Ferdinand's heart better than he knew it himself. As encrusted with golden mystery as a Byzantine mosaic, Klimt revealed Adele as a proud, regal empress, with her chin held high and her eyes shining with the aspirations Ferdinand saw when he first laid eyes on her. Anything was worth the treasure of that glance. Ferdinand did not possess a photograph that captured it. It had proved fleeting, like the empire, and so much else in life.

Adele's eyes gave away little now.

As Ferdinand watched his wife across the room in a silk brocade chair, tossing off bons mots his slower wit left him powerless to attempt, Adele wore her usual expression of opaque sophistication: self-possessed, subtle, inscrutable. She had grown into the very incarnation of the elegant, elusive Viennese woman he had seen in the street but never dreamed he would marry.

The childless Adele had failed as a conventional woman. She would be written out of the family tree, a dead-end branch that failed to bear fruit. Adele had not distinguished herself in world affairs, like
Berta Zuckerkandl. She was not brave enough to face hostile resistance to women entering a profession, like
Gertrud Bien. Unlike Alma, she wasn't courageous enough to roll the dice for love. Adele remained an unfinished woman. But like
Serena Lederer and Klimt's other patrons, Adele had succeeded in being a woman of her times. She was a freethinker, a muse, a self-invented founder of the Vienna Bloch-Bauers, the handmaidens of artists, progressive thinkers, and cultural creation. In her own way, Adele had pushed history forward, as one who helped give birth to modernism in Vienna. Yet her air of self-importance suggested she longed to be more.

Perhaps Adele was most fully realized in Klimt's majestic gold portrait.

——

Adele set a new course now, but she did not complete the journey. At her Saturday salon, she spoke excitedly with public health pioneer
Julius Tandler about the creation of a new society in the Soviet Union. Renner knew some of the Russian revolutionaries personally. Adele's family be-lieved she was in love with Renner. She spoke of traveling with him, to witness the Soviet experiment.

This was the dream that illuminated Adele when Alma dropped by with Werfel one wintry day in February 1925. Alma and Werfel were headed to Jerusalem. Adele was excited about their trip. She pulled books off her library shelves and gave them to the couple to read on the journey. A few days later, Adele felt feverish, went to lie down, and slipped into a coma. Early the next morning Adele was dead, at the age of forty-three. Doctors debated the cause: Was it a tumor? Or “brain flu”? They settled on meningitis.

“
I'm still dazed by Adele Bloch's death, which I learned of here yesterday,” Alma wrote the composer Anton von Webern from Cairo.

In the last days of my Viennese sojourn she couldn't show me enough love! As if she had known!

She gave us books, offered me hundreds of things, so that I was reminded of her during the whole trip. I have not yet used the sleeping bag for fear of spoiling it. Poor creature! She fainted and didn't wake up. Lucky, terrible death!

I would prefer to leave this world in a properly organized way.

Her death completely unsettled me yesterday.

Today the world is brighter again.

Ferdinand was devastated. As sleet fell outside, he turned his wife's room into a shrine. He hung their Klimt paintings on the wall, and set a photograph of Klimt, cuddling a black and white kitten, on her bed table. He asked servants to ensure there were always fresh flowers in the room. He called it his Gedenkzimmer, his Room of Remembrance. Here he retreated into mute mourning, gazing at the portrait of Adele, the teenage bride he had outlived, frozen in the golden instant when Vienna rivaled Paris.

The little poetess who won Ferdinand's heart before she knew her own.

The Good Spirit of his life was now a ghost.

By the summer of 1937, Ferdinand's brother, Gustav, presided over a big, happy family. When they strolled over to Elisabethstrasse to dine with Ferdinand, they visited his
bedroom shrine to Adele and exchanged glances. Ferdinand still kept fresh flowers at Adele's bedside in his Room of Remembrance.