The Lady in Gold (12 page)

Years later, Dallas psychiatrist and art historian
Salomon Grimberg, determined to unravel this mystery, would unearth
an erotic Klimt drawing of a woman that was indistinguishable from his sketches of Adele. Except this woman was nude and aroused. Did Adele strike this pose? Or did Klimt fantasize about it?

Whatever occurred between Adele and Klimt as he painted her portrait, his own family would assume he tried to seduce her.

Lurking at the fringes of Adele's world was a penniless, shabbily dressed young man from the provinces who came to Vienna with dreams of becoming an artist. This man's troubled parents, like Klimt's, had been unable to meet his basic emotional needs, much less provide entrée into the cultural milieu he longed to join. He was shy, unconfident, awkward with women.

His name, Adolf, was from an old German name meaning “noble wolf.”
His surname was chosen by his father,
Alois Schicklgruber, who was born out of wedlock and as an adult adopted a variation of the name of the man his mother had later married, Hiedler, spelling it “Hitler.”

Hitler was Austrian, though the world forgets this. He grew up near the German border, in the stronghold of Austria's ferocious promoter of
anti-Semitism, the politician
Georg von Schönerer; a region where the German nationalist salutation “Heil!” was already popular.

In Linz, Hitler studied at the same school as
Ludwig Wittgenstein, the son of the
Secession patron. Though they were the same age, Wittgenstein was two grades ahead. Wittgenstein became one of the century's most influential philosophers, mapping the way in which “
the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”—the manner in which language shapes thoughts and perceptions.

Young Adolf had a different destiny. He got poor grades and was asked to leave school, at seventeen, in 1906. He headed to Vienna, to study art at the Court Museum. But he found himself irresistibly drawn to the Ringstrasse. “
For hours and hours I could stand in wonderment before the Opera and the Parliament. The whole Ringstrasse had a magic effect upon me, as if it were a scene from
The Thousand-and-One Nights,
” he recalled.

Hitler moved to Vienna in 1907, renting a tiny bedroom in a crowded district. His room was a few doors from the
Alldeutsches Tagblatt,
or Pan-German Daily, which endorsed the anti-Semitic Schönerer and advocated
Anschluss, the linking of Austria and Germany into a single German Reich. In September, Hitler walked to the Academy of Fine Arts to take the admissions test, expecting it to be “
child's play.” But he failed the drawing exam. “
I was so convinced of my success that when the news that I had failed to pass was brought to me it struck me like a bolt from the skies,” Hitler remembered.

Crushed, he walked out of the majestic academy on the Schillerplatz, “
for the first time in my young life at odds with myself,” Hitler recalled. “My dream of following an artistic calling seemed beyond the limits of possibility.” Some would blame Hitler's rejection by Jewish professors for his subsequent
anti-Semitism. But none of Hitler's jurors were Jewish.

In fact, Hitler was the beneficiary of kindness from Jewish Viennese.
As he became an increasingly down-and-out artist, he moved into a six-story men's shelter in a crowded workers' district on the outskirts of Vienna, a hostel financed with large donations from
Baron Nathaniel Rothschild and the Gutmanns.

The Jewish owner of a frame and window store,
Samuel Morgenstern, became the buyer of Hitler's drawings and watercolors. Morgenstern, a kind, entirely self-made man, felt sorry for Hitler and managed to interest his customers in Hitler's mediocre architectural scenes: the Auersperg Palace, the Parliament, the Burgtheater.

Rejection from the academy was hardly fatal. Another man excluded in 1907 would become its director years later. But Hitler was immersed in a Vienna that offered him a scapegoat for his woes. He initially disapproved of the anti-Semitic rhetoric of
Karl Lueger. But he soon became fascinated by “beautiful Karl,” a fiery, charismatic orator who was able to focus popular discontent on the liberal Jewish intelligentsia.
Lueger railed against the “press Jews,” the “ink Jews,” the “money and stock market Jews.” He promised to liberate the Viennese from the “shameful shackles of servitude to the Jews,” once suggesting that Viennese Jews be marched onto a boat and sunk on the high seas. Soon Hitler would confess “open admiration” for Lueger, “the greatest German mayor of all time.”

Living at the fringes of society, Hitler began to transform his frustrations into resentment against Jews who enjoyed privileges denied to him. “
Jewish youth is represented everywhere in the educational institutions . . . 
while there were hardly any Aryan youth,” he would write in
Mein Kampf
(My Struggle), the best seller he wrote from prison after his failed uprising in 1923.

Like Klimt, Hitler saw salvation and dignity in art. He was dazzled by the 1907 production of the
Richard Strauss opera
Salome.
But perhaps reacting to the chaos of his childhood, Hitler sought an orderly, tidy art. He avoided the bright colors that arouse emotions. He shied away from portraying people, creating instead tourist scenes that were linear and unimaginative, devoid of innovation or originality.

Hitler was an admirer of Makart. He blamed Jewish tastes for promoting
Vienna modernism, which he would dismiss as “
nothing but crippled daubing.” Anything “wholesome was called kitsch by the filthy Jews,” he complained.

But some modernists were embraced by critics and patrons. As Salieri once asked of Mozart, how could God love them more?

For this, Hitler blamed the Jewish press. At a time when
Felix Salten and
Berta Zuckerkandl were prominent arts writers, Hitler disdained the “
art reviews in which one Jew scribbled about another.”

“
This race simply has a tendency toward ridiculing everything that is beautiful, and it frequently does so by way of masterful satire,” Hitler wrote. “Behind that there is more: there is a tendency toward undermining and toward ridiculing authority.”

He began to loathe Eastern Jews in their black caftans, and the “
odour of those people” which “often used to make me feel ill.” He began to see Vienna Jews as “germ-carriers” of a “moral pestilence” that was “worse than the Black Plague.” Hitler asked, “Was there any shady undertaking, any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did participate? On putting the probing knife carefully to that kind of abscess one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew.”

At his hostel, Hitler regaled other penniless men with his belief in the creation of a single country with a united Germanic nationality. He derided Vienna's “linguistic Babel” and longed for “
the hour of freedom for my German-Austrian people. Only in this way could the
Anschluss with the old mother country be restored.”

Years later, Hitler would recall how his Vienna ordeal had “
turned into the greatest blessing for the German nation.” Being “
deprived of the right to belong to his cherished fatherland” would give Hitler the impetus to bring Austrians together with “their mother country.”

When Hitler left Vienna in 1913, his obsession with German hegemony was inseparable from his belief in a “Germanic” art reflecting the
völkisch
values of his fatherland.

If Adele had passed Hitler on the street in Vienna in those days, carrying his paints and pastels, she would have seen only an unfortunate young man, lacking in confidence. She probably would have felt sorry for him.

Klimt unveiled his first portrait of Adele in Vienna in June 1908.
It made Adele, at twenty-six, an instant celebrity. The
Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung
described the portrait as “an idol in a golden shrine.” Another critic complained it was “more Blech than Bloch”—
Blech
is the German word for “brass.”

Everyone had something to say about it.

Adele had arrived.

Adele's portrait hung at the Kunstschau, a downtown garden exhibition space designed by Vienna artists and architects led by painters, like Klimt, who were now moving beyond the
Secession. The Kunstschau galleries were installed in a strolling park, with courtyards and a café, and Adele and Ferdinand could wander in with friends and contemplate the portrait. Architect
Josef Hoffmann himself had made the simple golden frame, heightening the gravity of the painting.

The visceral impact was complex. Adele's lips were red and full. Her eyes stared out from a light-filled gold leaf that seemed to create a transcendent plane of its own. Adele's pale face floated against this mosaic like that of a silent film siren. “
The expression ‘vamp' had not yet enriched our vocabularies, but it was Klimt who first invented or discovered the ideal Garbo or Dietrich, long before Hollywood,” Adele's friend
Berta Zuckerkandl noted.

Like the
Mona Lisa
, this painting seemed to embody femininity. But it was a restless, sensual femininity, devoid of matronly resignation.

Perhaps it was Klimt's mischievous nature that made him imagine dressing Adele in a heavy bejeweled choker, as he did with his provocative Judith. Adele's hand was bent, hiding a crooked finger that seemed a touching mortal imperfection when set against so much grandeur.

The painting seemed alive with meaning. The Egyptian eyes of Horus floated on a tapestry with stylized vulvular symbols.
Ludwig Hevesi thought it had “
a rapturous feeling of the most majestic colorfulness. Colorful, sensual pleasure, a dream of bejeweled lust” that gave viewers the feeling “of being able to rummage through gems.” It was “a bodiless, pure feast for the eyes, conjuring up, once again, the soul which lived in the physical art of former times of magnificence.”

Klimt embedded Adele in a luminous field of real gold leaf, giving her the appearance of a religious icon, which art historians would compare to the mosaic portrait of Empress Theodora in Ravenna.

Hevesi coined an expression for this new style: Klimt's “
painted mosaic.”

The Kunstschau show was the first major exhibition of new Klimt works since he walked away from the state art world in disgust. The show also exhibited his portraits of
Margarethe Stonborough-Wittgenstein, the in-tellectual daughter of the
Secession patron and sister of Ludwig, the future famous philosopher, and
Frieda Riedler, another progressive Viennese woman.

Klimt had ennobled these women from Vienna's “
second society,” elevating this emerging meritocracy to an aesthetic aristocracy. “
They have a great longing to rise above the ordinary, everyday world, like princesses and madonnas, in a beauty that can never be ravaged and devastated by the
clutching hands of life,” wrote Joseph A. Lux, a critic. With Klimt, these women found “the nobility which they are longing for.”

Klimt's
Adele Bloch-Bauer I. (
Illustration Credit 15.1
)

The fact that these woman were of Jewish ancestry was not lost on critics. “
Whether her name is Hygieia or Judith, Madame X or Madame Y, all of his figures have the pallor of the professionally misunderstood woman,” sniped
Karl Kraus, adding that the models also shared the same dark rings under their eyes, or
Schottenringe
—a play on words alluding to the Klimt models who were from wealthy Jewish families that lived near Vienna's Schottenring.

But some Viennese coined an expression to describe the exotic, dark-haired allure of Klimt's models: “
la belle Juive,
” or “Jewish beauty.” They too were promoting a stereotype, but this time it was appreciative.

With the gold portrait, Adele was frozen as a symbol of the enlightened turn-of-the-century Viennese woman, imbued with the opulence Klimt disdained and thrived on. The Habsburgs would borrow Adele's gold portrait for exhibitions, to present the regal face of an empire that was modern, sophisticated, and decidedly urbane. “
The new Viennese woman—a very
specific type of new Viennese woman, whose ancestors are Judith and Salome—was discovered or invented by Klimt,” a reviewer would write. “She is delightfully dissolute, attractively sinful, deliciously perverse.”