Prologue: gold, and the edge of the abyss

In 1908, at the great Kunstschau in Vienna, the Austrian state bought a painting of two lovers. A man and a woman kneel at the edge of a flowered meadow that seems to end in nothing; he bends her head to his and kisses her cheek; and the two figures are fused into a single golden monolith — his robe patterned with black-and-white rectangles, hers with coloured circles and flowers, the whole shimmering with gold leaf against a bronze void. The Kiss is the most reproduced image in Austrian art and one of the most reproduced in the world, and it is the emblem of a civilisation: the Vienna of Franz Joseph's last years, of Freud and Mahler and Wittgenstein and Schnitzler, gilded, erotic, refined, anxious, and six years from the catastrophe that would end it. The painter was Gustav Klimt, the son of a struggling gold-engraver from the Viennese suburbs, and The Kiss is his art in one panel: the human — desire, tenderness, the body — dissolved into ornament, and the ornament laid over an abyss.

The claim this essay makes is that the gold is not decoration but argument. Klimt spent his life at the meeting-point of two things the nineteenth century had kept apart: the fine art of the easel, with its claim to meaning, and the decorative art of the surface — the mosaic, the frieze, the pattern, the craft. He was trained as a decorator, made his early living painting ceilings and theatres in a sumptuous historicist style, and never stopped being a designer of surfaces; and he brought to the easel picture the decorator's gold and pattern and flatness, and to the decorative scheme the easel painter's ambition to say something about love, death, sex and time. The result — the 'golden phase' of 1901 to 1909, the Bloch-Bauer portraits, Judith, Danaë, The Kiss, the Beethoven and Stoclet friezes — is a body of work in which the most refined ornamentation in the history of painting is put to the service of the most direct treatment of the erotic and the mortal, and in which a dying society painted its own beautiful, gilded face.

Klimt is also, and inseparably, the painter of the scandal of Viennese modernism. His allegories for the University of Vienna — Philosophy, Medicine, Jurisprudence — were rejected by the professors and the public as pornographic and pessimistic, and he withdrew them, never to accept a public commission again; his women, from Judith the seductive murderess to the naked Danaë to the frieze of floating, sensual figures, offended a society that wanted its art idealised; and his frank, tender, thousands of erotic drawings of women were a private practice of an openness that the public art only half-declared. He led the Secession, the revolt of 1897 against the academic establishment, and then seceded from the Secession; he was the older master who encouraged Schiele and Kokoschka; and he died in February 1918, of a stroke and the influenza that was killing Europe, nine months before the empire whose image he had painted dissolved forever.

The essay that follows moves through the life — the suburban engraver's son, the decorator, the Secessionist, the master of the golden phase, the landscape painter, the late colourist — and through the work: the technique of the gold and the pattern; the women who are its central subject; the allegories of life, death and desire; the landscapes of the Attersee summers; and the erotic drawings that are its secret foundation. And it returns, at the end, to the question The Kiss poses: what it means to make the most beautiful surface in modern art, and to lay it over the void.

I. The engraver's son: Vienna, poverty, and the craft

Gustav Klimt was born on 14 July 1862 in Baumgarten, then a poor suburb west of Vienna, the second of the seven children of Ernst Klimt, a gold-engraver from Bohemia, and Anna Finster, who had wished to be a musician. The family was poor — the depression of the 1870s hit the engraving trade hard, and Klimt remembered a childhood of moving from one cheap lodging to another, of Christmases without bread — and the poverty left its mark: Klimt was frugal, private, tied to his mother and unmarried sisters, with whom he lived all his life, and he had, from the craft his father practised, an intimacy with gold and metal and the decorative surface that would become the substance of his art.

At fourteen, in 1876, he won a place at the Kunstgewerbeschule, the School of Applied Arts attached to the Austrian Museum of Art and Industry — not the Academy of Fine Arts, the school of the easel painter, but the school of the craftsman and the decorator, and the distinction matters: Klimt was trained to make useful, beautiful surfaces, and he entered art through the door of the decorative. He studied there for seven years, learned the historicist repertory — the styles of the past, to be applied to the new buildings of the Ringstrasse — and formed, with his younger brother Ernst and their fellow-student Franz Matsch, a working partnership: the 'Company of Artists' (Künstler-Compagnie), which took commissions to decorate the new theatres, museums and villas of the Habsburg boom.

The model was Hans Makart, the reigning prince of Viennese painting — the master of the vast, sensuous, coloured historical decoration, the man whose studio was a stage-set and whose funeral in 1884 was a state event. The young Klimt worked in the Makart manner, and worked well: the Company decorated the staircases of the new Burgtheater (1886–88) and the Kunsthistorisches Museum (1890–91), in a sumptuous academic style of allegory and historical pageant, and the twenty-something Klimt was rewarded with the Emperor's Golden Order of Merit in 1888 and, in 1890, the Emperor's Prize for the Burgtheater pictures. He was, at twenty-eight, a successful academic decorator on the threshold of an official career. And then two things happened that ended it: his brother Ernst died suddenly in 1892, and Klimt, grieving, fell silent for several years; and when he emerged, around 1897–98, he had become a different painter.

II. The Secession and the scandal of the University pictures

In 1897 Klimt led a revolt. Nineteen artists, chafing at the conservatism of the Künstlerhaus, the official artists' society that controlled Vienna's exhibitions, seceded to form the Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs — the Vienna Secession — with Klimt as its first president. The Secession's aims were those of the international Jugendstil / Art Nouveau moment: to break the historicist grip, to show modern foreign art in Vienna, to erase the hierarchy between fine and applied art, to make of art a total environment. Its building, Joseph Maria Olbrich's white cube with its gilded dome of laurel — 'the golden cabbage', the Viennese called it — bore the motto Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit: 'To the age its art, to art its freedom.' Its journal, Ver Sacrum ('Sacred Spring'), carried Klimt's designs. And its exhibitions — twenty-three in the years Klimt was involved — brought the Impressionists, the Symbolists, Rodin, Khnopff, the Glasgow school and Toorop to Vienna, and made the city, for a decade, a capital of European modernism.

Klimt's own art transformed in these years. The Makart historicism fell away; in its place came a new manner — flat, ornamental, symbolist, erotic — under the influence of the international Jugendstil, of Whistler and the Pre-Raphaelites and Toorop and Khnopff, of Japanese prints, and of the Byzantine and Mycenaean and Egyptian art Klimt studied in the museums. Pallas Athena (1898) and Nuda Veritas (1899) — the naked truth holding a mirror to modern man — announced the new symbolism; Judith I (1901) fused the biblical murderess with the Viennese femme fatale in a shimmer of gold; and the great public commission of the years, the University ceiling paintings, produced the defining scandal of Viennese modernism.

The University of Vienna had commissioned, in 1894, three ceiling paintings for the Great Hall — allegories of the Faculties of Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence, to celebrate the triumph of light and reason. What Klimt delivered, between 1900 and 1907, was the opposite: not the triumph of reason but its defeat — Philosophy a drifting column of naked, suffering humanity in a starry void; Medicine a river of tangled bodies with Death among them and Hygieia, the goddess of health, turning her back on suffering mankind; Jurisprudence a nightmare of an old man delivered to punishing furies. The professors protested; eighty-seven of them petitioned against Philosophy; the pictures were denounced as pornographic, pessimistic, incomprehensible, a scandal to the university and the state. Klimt, after years of battle, bought the pictures back (with the help of his patron August Lederer) in 1905 and withdrew them; he never accepted a public commission again. The pictures themselves — the greatest of his allegories — were destroyed in 1945, burned by retreating SS troops at Schloss Immendorf with much else of his work, and survive only in photographs and a few studies. The scandal made Klimt: it drove him from the public sphere into the private world of the portrait, the landscape and the collector, and it confirmed the direction of his art — inward, erotic, pessimistic, ornamental — for the rest of his life.

The University pictures, in detail

The three Faculty paintings deserve their own account, because they are the hinge of the career and because they are lost. Philosophy (shown 1900) presented, against the professors' expectation of Reason triumphant over Darkness, a slowly turning nebula of naked human figures — waking, coupling, ageing, suffering, dying — drifting through a starry cosmic void, with a sphinx-like face of the world-riddle emerging from the dark and, at the bottom, the lit face of Knowledge gazing out; the message was not the triumph of philosophy but the mystery and suffering of existence, unmastered by thought. Medicine (1901) showed a column of tangled bodies — the stream of life, with a skeleton Death among them — and, below, the goddess Hygieia in gold and red, the serpent of Asclepius at her arm, turning her back on suffering humanity: not the healing power of medicine but its impotence before death, and a naked pregnant woman at its centre. Jurisprudence (1903), the darkest, showed a broken old man delivered up to a polyp-like monster and three furies, with the figures of Truth, Justice and Law relegated to a distant upper register: not the majesty of the law but its cruelty. Together they were a refusal of the Enlightenment's confidence — an image of humanity as driven, suffering, mortal and unredeemed by reason — and Vienna's academic and official world could not bear them. The petition, the parliamentary questions, the charge of 'pornography' (the nudity) and 'perverted excess' drove Klimt to withdraw. That the pictures were then burned by the SS in 1945 makes them a double casualty — of the academic reaction and of the catastrophe that consumed the whole world they belonged to — and they survive only in black-and-white photographs and a few coloured studies, ghosts of the greatest of Klimt's allegories.

The withdrawal was decisive for the whole shape of the career. Klimt had been, until 1900, on the path of the official artist — the imperial prizes, the Ringstrasse commissions, a probable professorship (he was, in fact, proposed for the Academy and rejected by the ministry, twice). The University battle ended that path and, with it, Klimt's engagement with the public and the state; he turned, for the remaining eighteen years, to the private patron, the portrait, the landscape and the collector, and to an art of the interior — the drawing-room, the body, the psyche — that no committee could commission or reject. Schorske's reading of this turn as the paradigm of the liberal bourgeoisie's retreat from public life into the private realm takes the University scandal as its pivot, and rightly: the gold of the following years is the gold of a refuge, the beautiful interior into which a painter, and a class, withdrew from a public world they could no longer move.