The Lady in Gold (13 page)

Danae, painted
1907
–
8
, at the same time as Adele's portrait.

As Klimt rubbed gold leaf on Adele's portrait in 1907, he was finishing his painting of long-limbed Danae, the mythic symbol of divine love. Locked in a tower of bronze by her father, the King of Argos, Danae is receiving a celestial visitation from Zeus. There is a look of rapture on Danae's face as his immortal gold falls between her thighs, conceiving the son, Perseus, who will slay the Medusa.

As was done in religious art, Klimt used gold to convey the reach for the divine. The next gold painting Klimt would show at the Kunstschau was
The Kiss;
a delicate woman wrapped in the bear hug of a naked man, in a field of gold that shimmered with transcendence. Years later, scholars would remark upon Adele's resemblance to the woman in
The Kiss,
and how Adele's crooked finger matched the hand of the woman who kneeled before Klimt's mortal embrace.

By 1909, Klimt was at a crossroads.

Pablo Picasso and
Cubism were creating a new way to see.
Vassily Kandinsky was mapping abstract modernism.
Claude Monet was pushing the limits of artistic expression with his water lilies, without even leaving his garden.

Klimt had failed to win recognition for his experimental work in Vienna. He was back to decorative work, finishing a commission of a golden tree of life, for a Brussels villa designed by
Josef Hoffmann for Belgian engineer
Adolph Stoclet.

He had not triumphed, like Picasso, over his detractors. He sometimes worried he was becoming passé. “
The young no longer understand me. I don't even know whether they appreciate my work anymore,” Klimt told
Berta Zuckerkandl.

“It happens to every artist,” he mused. “The young will always want to take everything that's already there by storm, and pull it down.”

Klimt was encouraging a younger friend,
Oskar Kokoschka, who would soon unleash his own wild
Expressionism on
Bride of the Wind,
a painting of himself in passionate embrace with a widowed Alma Mahler. When a seventeen-year-old
Egon Schiele unfurled his drawings and asked if he had talent, Klimt looked at his angular nudes and replied: “
Much too much.” Soon Schiele sat at the Café Tivoli with Klimt, a vital young prince to the aging king.

The exuberance that fueled his gold paintings was weakening. Klimt had always had a terrible fear of syphilis, and now the aging Pan was suffering signs of its dreaded advance. Klimt's letters complained of the skin eruptions that mark the advanced stages of the illness. “
Results good. Boil seems to be closing,” he wrote
Emilie Flöge.

Klimt took healing trips to Lake Attersee with his beloved sister-in-law, Emilie Flöge. There he spent hours gazing, his paintbrush in hand, at the small villages that spilled down the mountains on the shores of the Attersee. He painted Schloss Kammer, a castle near the Villa Paulick. He painted the Persian carpet of wildflowers on the mountains. Flöge had become his home in this world. He had painted her portrait, but it failed to capture her confidence and enigmatic smile, and she was frank: she didn't like it. This was a partnership of equals; Klimt finally settled into something approaching emotional intimacy.

In this physical and moral retreat, Klimt was painting the portraits of women that people would be forced to remember—the women who had kept his career alive. The fact that he was deeply enmeshed in his patrons' emotional lives lent psychological depth to his portraits.

Serena Lederer's niece
Ria Munk had shot herself in the chest in 1911 over a failed love affair with a promising young writer. Her mother, Aranka, pleaded with Klimt to paint Ria posthumously.

Klimt was also working on a second commissioned portrait of Adele, and visiting the Czech castle she shared with Ferdinand at Brezany. “Beautiful,” Klimt wrote Flöge after arriving at Brezany on September 27, 1911. “
A very beautiful existence. I am for the time being the only guest of this couple,” though more were to arrive for quail hunting. “
A mixture of rain and sun,” Klimt wrote the next day. “The hunt may be spoiled by the rain. I'm doing fine.” Adele may have known of Klimt's illness. In February 1912, after a visit to a spa at Semmering, Klimt wrote from Brezany that “Mrs. Bloch tells me that I look very good, that this trip did me good. She thought I went to Attersee.” In mid-November, Klimt “
arrived well” at Brezany. “The whole way it was already like winter. I ate the swill in the train dining car. But the exhaustion is quite strong.”

In 1912 Klimt unveiled his second portrait of Adele. It was a very different work. Her expression was mature, direct, and anything but seductive. This was an older Adele, with world-weary eyes and cigarette-stained teeth, a painting some would call evidence of the end of the affair. This Adele was no Salome. She was beyond flirtation and the mundane. Here was a serious Adele, one who had left behind her golden youth and grown into a formidable woman who demanded respect. In this painting, Klimt's admiration had deepened into empathy. This Adele mirrored his preoccupation with mortality.

As the years passed, Klimt was more inscrutable than ever, outside of his supportive coterie of loyal patrons. He began to acquire “
an almost pathological sensitivity of avoiding the public,” a newspaper article contended. “
I am less interested in myself as a subject for a picture than in other people, above all women,” Klimt stated cryptically. “I am convinced that I am not particularly interesting as a person. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning until night. Whoever wants to know something about me—as an artist, the only important thing—ought to look carefully at my pictures and try to see in them what I am and what I want.”

Klimt in a photograph that stood on the night table of Adele's bedroom, 1912. (
Illustration Credit 16.1
)

The Empire was shrouded in uncertainty, as if the dark prophecies of Klimt's murals were coming to life. In August 1914,
Archduke Franz Ferdinand left his Vienna residence at the Belvedere Palace for a trip to imperial Sarajevo, where an anarchist stepped out of the crowd and shot him, precipitating the outbreak of
World War I. The ethnic tensions that Adele's father feared would sabotage his railroad line through the Balkans were breaking apart the empire's cosmopolitan mosaic.

Klimt often seemed depressed. “
Little pleasure for work,” he wrote Emilie Flöge that year. “I get up without much joy.” Later, he confided, “I didn't want to write on the first day—I was too down. Worn down, washed out, crushed.”

Klimt spent the first two years of the Great War painting Serena Lederer's daughter Elisabeth. The Lederers had remained loyal. August bought
Klimt's
Beethoven Frieze
from a collector in 1915. There was no better Klimt collection in Vienna.

Little Elisabeth had grown into a high-minded young beauty. Klimt captured her doe-eyed vulnerability, flanking her with protective Chinese warriors. He found it impossible to finish. “
I'll paint my girl as I like!” he would bark, cursing floridly. Finally, Serena drove to his studio and impatiently loaded the portrait into her car. When Klimt saw the painting on their wall, he shook his head. “It's still not her,” he said.

Klimt spent the last two years of the war painting his third portrait of
Ria Munk. This time he resurrected the ill-starred teenage lover in a resplendent dress, surrounded by flowers. Klimt was having difficulty—“
slaving away with the dead girl”—and sometimes he felt that “I just can't do it.” But Aranka found solace in his artistic re-creation of her daughter. Klimt was feeling the strain. “
Work proceeding slowly, like the War, but it has to go on,” Klimt wrote Emilie in 1916. “It all sounds so sad.”

By August 1917, Klimt was feeling “
artistically super rotten.” His latest independent painting,
The Bride,
was “
really getting on my nerves.” A newspaper detected “
weariness and suffering on the high, furrowed brow of the aging master.” His health was in free fall. Klimt was vacationing with the Primavesi family when a boil suddenly opened on his skin, so he headed to Bad Gastein for a spa treatment. By 1917, he was struggling to complete his portrait of
Berta Zuckerkandl's sister-in-law, Amalie, in a ballroom gown that left her delicate white shoulders bare.

At some point, Alma Mahler noted in her diary that when she had longed for Klimt, “
I did not know that he was syphilitic.”

Perhaps Alma resented never being immortalized by Klimt. Or perhaps she was indulging her habitual
anti-Semitism when in December 1917 she asked a salon of wealthy women, “
Why is Klimt, the poor, radiant, great artist, only permitted to paint parvenues, and nobody well-bred and beautiful?

“Take advantage of the time this genius is among us,” she urged them.

Around that time, Klimt picked up his sketchbook and jotted down the name of one of his “parvenues”: “
A. Bauer.” Adele Bauer. It was a final clue to Klimt's mysterious tie to the woman he had painted into history.

A few weeks later, in the wintry dregs of World War I, Klimt had a stroke. He was rushed to the Sanatorium Loew. When he stabilized, he was transferred to the Vienna hospital. There Spanish influenza swept through his ward. Klimt was quickly overcome. Gustav Klimt died on February 6, 1918. He was fifty-five. His last words were “Send for Emilie.” His life partner, Emilie Flöge.

Egon Schiele sat at his bedside and silently made three sketches of the lifeless Klimt. The
Austrian Artists' Society announced, “
Art has lost something enormous; mankind, much more.”

“
He died of syphilis,” Alma Mahler wrote in her diary.

Adele recorded Klimt's death with a cross in the black leather-bound agenda she used to track the final days of the empire, tracing the march of Austrian troops across Europe, each battle won and lost, each ship sunk—the unraveling of her world—like the jottings of a war correspondent in the battlefield. Among Adele's handful of personal notations was Klimt's birthday, and the day and time of his funeral, on a page with a printed quote by
William Shakespeare: “
To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst be false to any man.”

All of progressive Vienna crowded into the Hietzing Cemetery, near Schönbrunn Castle, to pay their respects to Klimt.
Josef Hoffmann designed Klimt's simple tomb.
Arnold Schoenberg, whose music had caused fistfights, walked in the crowd with
Berta Zuckerkandl. Serena and
August Lederer came with Elisabeth. “
I was paralyzed, and only the singing of the choir of a Beethoven piece during his funeral unleashed the tears and all the pain, the first tremendous one I had lived,” Elisabeth Lederer wrote.

Klimt had come into the world at the dawn of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time of his death, the turn-of-the-century rebel had visually defined an empire that was now in its twilight.

“
He has entered into the centre of the earth in the Orient, this man with the high forehead of Rodin's Man with Broken Nose and the mysterious features of Pan under the beard and hair of the ageing Saint Peter,” wrote artist
Albert Paris Gütersloh.

In the final days of World War I, Vienna's shimmering era of brilliance was drawing to a close. By fall, the empire of 60 million people was defeated, and reduced to an Austrian backwater of 6 million. The Habsburgs and their titles were royal no more. Spanish flu claimed Schiele, his pregnant wife, and millions of others.

Klimt and his golden moment were gone.

Klimt's muse lived on. Still beautiful, Adele wore the formless dresses of the
Wiener Werkstatte, an alliance of innovative designers and artists, and chain-smoked cigarettes from a long gold holder. Adele had grown into a serious woman.
She told people she was a socialist.

Adele had moved with Ferdinand in 1920 to a decidedly nonproletarian
palais
at Elisabethstrasse 18. The four-story town house was a rarefied address.
Katharina Schratt had once lived there.
Karl Kraus had lived in a building next door, where Ferdinand rented offices.

Adele's friend Alma Mahler lived a few doors down.
Gustav Mahler had died in 1911. Alma had divorced her latest husband,
Walter Gropius, the founder of the
Bauhaus, and was living with a Czech-born writer,
Franz Werfel, near the offices of an obscure group of men who called themselves National Socialists.

Adele proclaimed herself an atheist. She contemplated alternative spirituality, signing a letter “Hugs from your Buddha.”

Richard Strauss frequently came to dine, though Alma dismissed him as “
a speculator, an exploiter of opera, a materialist par excellence.”

Adele's family now used the kind of hyphenated surname, Bloch-Bauer, that was most common among the Viennese aristocracy, though it was ostensibly designed to carry on the family name after the death of Adele's brothers.