Authors: Anne-Marie O'Connor
If the reputation of a woman in Vienna was not entirely untouched by her sitting for a portrait with the controversial Gustav Klimt, the Jewish elite seemed less inclined to care. To
Felix Salten, the quintessential Klimt subject was a “
beautiful Jewish
Jourdame.
”
When Adele Bloch-Bauer finally swept downstairs from her elegantly appointed apartment to board the horse-drawn fiacre waiting to take her to Klimt's studio, her reputation was the last thing on her mind.
Adele had waited months. As she stepped out into the crisp weather in December 1903, she had the breathless anticipation of a bride. Her husband didn't care if some men didn't allow their unmarried daughters to model for Klimt, or that Klimt reputedly tried to seduce his models. He wanted his wife immortalized. Adele was a married woman now, and a commitment from Klimt was a rare prize.
As the driver flicked the reins and the horse drew forward, Adele looked eagerly onto the Schwarzenbergplatz, the home to the palace of a dynasty of Czech princes who were friends of Ferdinand. Nearby, the gilded dome of the Secession shone in the sun. When the horse drew up to Klimt's studio, Adele stepped out of the closed carriage. Her warm white breath hung in the cold air. She wore a high-necked dress and overcoat, and she pulled off her gloves as Klimt opened the door. We do not know if he greeted her formally, as a new patron, or if he was welcoming a woman he already knew, perhaps quite well. Whatever their previous acquaintance, Adele would now enter into one of the most intimate relationships Klimt was capable of. While he was working on the portrait, they would spend long periods of time completely alone together. This was not entirely
proper, even with a man with a different kind of reputation. But times were changing.
Soon Klimt was silently sketching Adele, his dark eyes caressing her form as his pencil traced the lines of her hair, her face, her lips, the curves of her body. When he looked up, his bold stare met her eyes. Adele was a sensitive young woman, being drawn by one of Vienna's most famous men. She would now be in regular contact with one of Vienna's most famous seducers, a celebrity even seasoned society women found difficult to resist.
The Adele sketched by Klimt in 1903 was a much-changed woman from the teenage bride of Ferdinand. Adele and her husband divided their time between a smart
palais
off the elegant Schwarzenbergplatz and a parklike summer castle Ferdinand bought that year in Brezany, outside Prague, where he hunted deer. They socialized with interesting men, like Prince Adolph Schwarzenberg, the composer Richard Strauss, and Czech intellectual Tomas Masaryk, who would someday be president of a republic of Czechoslovakia.
But the comfortable façade of Adele's marriage concealed a growing vulnerability. Adele's sister, Therese, had already given birth to a robust little bruiser, Karl. Adele was plagued by miscarriages. One child was stillborn. Finally, a baby boy, Fritzl, was born alive, to the relief of all. But little Fritzl lived just a few days, then weakly sighed his last breaths.
The possibility of childlessness was a crushing setback for Ferdinand and Adele. Children were the foundation of family life. For women, they were the path into the human tribe. They meant membership in a world where families gathered at country homes, surrounded by generations, and young mothers chatted while their children played. Childlessness meant a quiet, lonely apartment where the gilt clock ticked loudly while Ferdinand worked at the sugar factory. It meant being less womanly, less than a full participant in the human raceâeven an object of pity. Ferdinand would have to give up the dream of being a paterfamilias. He faced an empty house, the absence of heirs. It was a great loss. But he still had his work.
For a married woman, childlessness was a catastrophe, the loss of the prime anchor of personal and social identity.
So when Adele went to Klimt's studio that winter, she faced the possibility of failure as a woman. No one ever believed Adele was in love with Ferdinand. But she was expected to feel lucky, or at least content. Instead, she struggled with sobering disappointment.
At that moment, a door opened to one of the most exciting experiences any woman in Vienna could desire.
Klimt made endless sketches of Adele. They were simple pencil drawings on thin manila paper, of Adele seated, her hair piled on her head. Or Adele smiling, laughing, her movements like the frames of a film. Work on the painting went slowly under Klimt's dark, determined gaze. He would make more than a hundred studies of Adele. Only a handful of women would ever receive this much of his time and attention.
In this portrait, Adele and Klimt began the next chapter of their lives.
Klimt had a well-known aversion to scripture. But he loved religious symbolism, and considered art the source of an almost religious truth. So that December of 1903 he made an aesthetic pilgrimage to Ravenna, an ancient Roman capital and Adriatic port, to study the sixth-century mosaics, the greatest legacies of Byzantine art outside Constantinople.
Klimt's footsteps echoed on stone floors as he walked through the octagonal San Vitale Basilica, and gazed up at the gleaming murals. The golden tiles of Byzantium had dazzled Europe. Gold symbolized the primeval power of the sun, and in the Christian world it represented the divine. Gold tile was reserved for potentates and early Christian saints.
Klimt beheld the age-old stories of Cain and Abel, of Moses and the Burning Bush, of the sacrifice of Isaac and of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. The Lamb of God was flanked by a kaleidoscope of peacocks, flowers, and fruit. Jesus Christ, in a rich purple robe, offered his martyr's crown to Saint Vitale.
As Klimt drank in the explosion of color, his eyes wandered to Empress Theodora, glowing against golden tiles that shimmered like a halo above her head. Remarkable Theodora, portrayed by disapproving sixth-century historians as a stage actress, a courtesan, an infamous woman. Whatever her common origins, one civil servant praised her as “
surpassing in intelligence all men who ever lived.”
Theodora had already been another man's mistress when she met Justinian, the son of the emperor. Justinian defied royal opposition and married her anyway. Theodora was unable to bear him children. But she was a skillful military strategist with a canny ability to foil intrigues and plots. When Justinian became emperor in the year
527, he made Theodora an unusually powerful empress. “
Neither did anything without the consent of the other,” grumbled the historian
Procopius, who defamed Theodora as a power-hungry concubine. Theodora began to push for laws that eroded the chattel status of women. She fought the widespread kidnapping of women into prostitution. She pushed for laws against rape, for women's rights to hold property and to inherit. Theodora was credited with helping to elevate the legal status of women to unprecedented levels. She herself became one of the most powerful women in the Byzantine Age.
The
Eastern Orthodox Church made unlikely saints of this powerful couple, granting Theodora the immortality beheld by Klimt as he stood before her. These “
mosaics of unbelievable splendor” were nothing short of a “revelation,” Klimt wrote.
This was the image that scholars suspect was the inspiration for Klimt as he began to plot his golden portrait of Adele as a painted mosaic, and his subject as a fallen icon.
The ongoing portrait made Adele and Ferdinand full partners in the
Secession. It put Adele in the company of some of the most remarkable women of her time: art patronesses, journalists, and intellectuals. Adele had a haven from the confines of her sheltered family life, in a milieu in which she could freely exchange ideas about such things as Freud's theories that human consciousness could be broadened by examining unconscious dreams and fantasies.
Adele was immersed in a serious program of study, reading philosophy and political texts. Every morning after Ferdinand headed to the sugar factory at the castle town of Bruck an der Leitha, Adele sat down to devour classic works of French, German, and English literature. She studied art, medicine, and science. Removed from the enforced conformity of university classrooms in which women were still unwelcome, Adele began to develop a highly individual point of view. She came to believe that insight could not be taught, but had to be discovered through a personal quest similar to Klimt's artistic “
voyage intérieur.
”
“
You cannot receive knowledge or high literacy from a High School education, nor from University professors,” Adele would write years later. “You have to proceed with open eyes and an iron will to become thoroughly educated.
“Only the person who places the highest demands on himself can progress one step further,” she believed. “Self-satisfied individuals are incapable of development.”
Adele's association with Klimt propelled this intellectual journey by making Adele a member of an elite sorority.
One of Klimt's allies was
Berta Zuckerkandl, a young journalist whose salon of artists and intellectuals hosted the first conversations “by a
small group of moderns” that led to the creation of the
Secession. Berta considered Klimt a “great man” who lived by “the truth of his own soul.”
Berta was a woman with unusual clout. She was the daughter of
Moritz Szeps, the Viennese newspaper editor who had been a confidant of the ill-starred crown prince. As a teenager, Berta had traveled with her father, meeting Disraeli and future French prime minister
Georges Clemenceau, whose brother Paul would marry her sister Sophie. Berta, a keen observer of political and cultural currents, was becoming known as the “Viennese Cassandra.”
Berta was married to Emil Zuckerkandl, a pioneering anatomist at the University of Vienna
Medical School. Emil was then arguing for the admittance of women to the school of medicine. The school dean, however, had a different view. He said that Emil, “
as an anatomist, should know perfectly well that women's brains were less developed than those of men.”
Berta and Emil privately rolled their eyes and snickered. But the school administrators were deadly serious.
Emil cleverly pronounced that female doctors had become a matter of imperial urgency. They were needed to treat Muslim women in the former Ottoman-ruled regions of Bosnia and Serbia.
Emperor Franz Joseph agreed.
Emil quickly called in a protégée, bright young
Gertrud Bien. She passed the entrance exam, and under the reluctant gaze of the university administration, Emil escorted Fräulein Bien into anatomy class.
She was ordered to sit in the last row, ask no questions, and wear men's clothing so she would blend in. Shock settled over the room, then murmurs, as the young men realized that “Herr Bien” was a Fräulein.
Emil had to call security to escort hecklers from the hall.
Emil made Fräulein Bien his assistant. In a few years, young Dr. Bien was Vienna's first female pediatrician, and a member of Adele's growing circle.
Berta's salon was a magnet for Viennese who were fascinated by the latest trends in psychology, politics, and art. Visitors like
Auguste Rodin dropped in, and playwright
Arthur Schnitzler watched Klimt pursuing women like a “faun” there. Adele's friend Alma got to know her future husband,
Gustav Mahler, at Berta's salon. Johann Strauss, a regular, had fallen to his knees and gratefully proclaimed her “
the most marvelous and witty woman in Vienna.”
If art was a way to liberate minds, salons gave unusual women the social support to exercise aspirations that would not have been welcomed by Vienna institutions. They offered an alternative to stuffy circles closed to Jewish women by
anti-Semitism and sexism. But what gave salons gravitas was the fact that in the days before mass media, salons were indispensable to the spread of ideas.
The fashion sense of the women in Adele's circle was set by Klimt's sister-in-law and companion,
Emilie Flöge, a dress designer and early Vienna career woman. Flöge's fashion house freed women from the confines of corseted Victorian dresses. She replaced them with loose, caftan-style dresses that allowed women to move comfortably, and were something of a feminine counterpart to the tunic worn by Klimt. Klimt and Flöge sometimes collaborated on the design of women's dresses, giving the clothes added cachet. For women in Adele's circle, the unfettered style of Flöge's designs was a symbol of their liberated lifestyle.
Other constraints were more difficult to elude.
Adele's friend Alma had made an enviable marriage with the composer Gustav Mahler, and had not waited for the wedding to consummate the union. But Mahler had demanded before they wed that his fiancée abandon her ambitions to be a composer. During their courtship Mahler wrote:
A husband and wife who are both composers: How do you envisage that? Such a strange relationship between rivals: Do you have any idea how ridiculous that would appear, can you imagine the loss of self-respect it would later cause us both? If, at a time when you should be attending to household duties or fetching me something I urgently needed, or if, as you wrote, you wish to relieve me of life's triviaâif at such a moment you were befallen by “inspiration”: what then?
From now on you have only one vocation: to make me happy. You must give yourself up to me unconditionally, make the shaping of your future life, in all its facets, dependent on my inner needs, and wish nothing more in return than my love.
Ambitious women were policed by stigma. They were brazen, unnat-ural, mad, or, in Freudian terms, hysterical. Or simply irrelevant. Fellow intellectual
Karl Kraus derided Berta Zuckerkandl as a “
cultural chatterbox.”
In more conservative circles, women whose behavior violated feminine “nature” were labeled with a fashionable new term: “degenerate.” Women who pushed for higher education were “degenerate.” Women who agitated for the right to vote were having a “
degenerate women's emancipation fit.”