The Lady in Gold (5 page)

Gustav and Ernst helped their father work with gold. Thanks to the construction boom of the Ringstrasse, gold was a more promising trade. The Midas touch was everywhere on the imperial ministries and monuments going up on the Ringstrasse. All that glittered was gold, or at least gilt. Here, Atlas hoisted his golden globe, the gilt features of Pallas Athena shone in the sun, and gold leaf glowed from ceilings and Corinthian columns.

Gold symbolized everything that was out of reach for Gustav and Ernst Klimt, who seemed born to live at the sidelines of Vienna's pageantry, as skilled tradesmen like their father.

But Gustav had a sense of destiny. At fourteen, he enrolled at the new School of Applied Arts in Vienna. Ernst soon joined him. The talented, good-looking Klimt brothers attracted
an important mentor, Professor
Ferdinand Laufberger. Impressed by their precocious gifts and relentless
work ethic, Laufberger guided them into mosaic and fresco. He recommended them for their first commissions, and soon the brothers were painting the interiors of the Hermes Palace, an imperial retreat for Empress Elisabeth from the Vienna court she despised. The Klimt brothers teamed up with another promising student,
Franz Matsch. In 1880, the trio painted the ceilings of the Palais Sturany in Vienna. They began to call themselves the Künstler-Compagnie, or Artists Company.

Gustav Klimt, then eighteen, was the hope of his desolate family.

“
He was not naturally a man of society but more a loner, and it therefore had to be the duty of his brothers and sisters to eliminate all the small things in his daily life that were inconvenient,” his sister Hermine recalled.

“
Gustl, why don't you know how to play music?” asked his little brother, Georg, as Gustav sketched. “Because I must paint, you monkey you,” Gustav answered affectionately.

The Künstler-Compagnie soon had more work than its three young artists had time. They were invited to the Middle European architectural gem of Karlsbad to paint a theater. That led to wall decorations for the silver anniversary of Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth's lifeless marriage. They painted a lion lying languidly at the feet of a lushly nude heroine, in what seemed a risqué allusion to the bohemian empress.

Socially, the Klimt brothers cut striking figures. They were well spoken, with the discerning eye of gifted artists, and the rugged physicality of men destined for the fields. Unknown to their admirers, they were under tremendous financial pressure. Only one of their three surviving sisters, Johanna, would ever marry.

But the Ringstrasse offered opportunity. The Klimts studied ancient vases at the Imperial Museum in search of the Etruscan figures and Egyptian motifs so fashionable for Vienna friezes. They used photographs to achieve a sharply realistic style that was far ahead of its time.

Even in rigidly hierarchical Vienna, the Klimt brothers' talent eclipsed their dubious pedigree. At one reception, a society girl cast sultry glances at Gustav, telling him she was pleasantly surprised to discover he was so young. “
What seducers you are!” a sculptor friend remarked, laughing.

Ernst began to court
Helene Flöge, the daughter of
Hermann August Flöge, a manufacturer and exporter of meerschaum pipes.

The Flöges were as happy as the Klimts were miserable. One uncle,
Friedrich Paulick, a decorative artisan for the emperor, built an enormous handmade castle on Lake Attersee in the Austrian Alps, with a labyrinth of
suites for his large extended family. The Villa Paulick was a dreamlike palace that delighted the eye. Sharp-tongued dragons lounged over the massive entryway, and a carved wooden lion reared from a banister. Woven into the ironwork were bare-breasted Valkyries, the mythic winged women who chose which slain warriors rise to Valhalla. Children were captivated by the murals of fairy tales painted above the luminous wood paneling of a small downstairs room. At this idyllic lakeside retreat, built solely for the pleasure of the extended family, the Flöges lived the contented family life denied to the hardscrabble Klimt brothers.

As Ernst courted Helene, the Künstler-Compagnie painted their most important commission, the decoration of the new Burgtheater. On the stairway, Gustav planned to re-create a conventional classical frieze of an idyllic theater of ancient Italy.

At the same time, in a related painting, Klimt was asked to portray real-life spectators of Vienna theater, sitting in their curtained boxes. He painted in cameos of progressive Viennese women he knew and admired, like
Serena Pulitzer, one of the witty Pulitzer sisters from Budapest, who would someday be recalled as a relative of the American newspaperman Joseph Pulitzer. He painted cultural heroes, like the composer
Johannes Brahms and the opera singer
Alexander Girardi. Klimt knew that including
Katharina Schratt, the emperor's mistress, was obligatory. But he omitted Vienna's notoriously anti-Semitic politician, Karl Lueger, from the painting.
When the omission was noticed, Klimt reluctantly painted Lueger in.
But as someone would remark to Klimt, Lueger was far outnumbered in the painting by Viennese Jews. In a city in which theater was staged drama within the great drama of life, inclusion in Klimt's painting of the Burgtheater audience was more than prestige; it was public proof of membership in Vienna society. In Klimt's painting, this society was not a collection of aristocrats, but something approaching a meritocracy.

The young members of the Künstler-Compagnie agonized over the reception of their murals. But when the new Burgtheater was unveiled in October 1888, Vienna gasped with admiration.

In a daze of astonishment and relief, Klimt accepted the emperor's prize, the Golden Service Cross with Crown. Klimt was twenty-six.

“
Is it we who are stupid or them?” Klimt growled to his brother and Matsch, who had spent months worrying the mural wasn't good enough.

The Klimt brothers had painted their way out of a precarious childhood and into a warmly approving spotlight. Art was power in Vienna, and the Klimt brothers were now young gods.

——

Armed with this prestige, Ernst asked Helene Flöge's father for her hand. Ernst had tremendous liabilities: a nervous mother and erratic sisters. But he had the makings of a brilliant career—and dark good looks that quickened the pulse.

Helene was very much in love with her handsome artist. In 1890, her father gave his blessing.

It seemed the brothers had finally rescued their fragile family. But in 1892 their father fell ill. He wept on his deathbed, begging his oldest son to swear to take care of his mother and three sisters, and to “
put their fate, whatever happens, into my hands and my heart,” Gustav recalled. Later that year, in snowy December, Ernst died suddenly, of pericarditis, leaving a widow and a tiny daughter, Helene.

Gustav Klimt promised to look after them all. His responsibilities were not trifling. It was cruel to be poor, especially for women. For impoverished men, the army beckoned, a dangerous life as cannon fodder. The fate of desperate women was visible to all. The streets of Vienna were filled with girls who were forced to become prostitutes. They were exposed to cold, tuberculosis, and the rampant syphilis whose slow death was the fear of all Vienna. Klimt remained with his family. His brother and sisters “had to see to it that everyday annoyances were kept away from him,” his sister Hermine recalled. “He came to us every evening, ate without saying much and then went to bed early.”

He turned to art for solace. With the death of Ernst, Gustav lost interest in painting architectural decorations to please rich people. Art was his salvation. It was the beautiful mask of a strong but scarred soul. Soon Gustav Klimt's demons would spill from his tumultuous psyche and into his paintings.

Adele was always different.

At the height of the season, Therese was thrilled to lead the waltz at the
opera balls, whirling around a ballroom in a purplish blue watered-silk gown, a matching corsage of lilacs pinned above her ample décolletage. Adele would be contentedly curled up on a divan, reading Goethe, or discussing the new artists' movement with its patrons at the
palais.

Witty, poised, and intellectually precocious, Adele longed to study. It was an unlikely ambition. A handful of women had finally been allowed to matriculate at the 532-year-old
University of Vienna in 1897, but only in philosophy. Young society girls like Adele were expected to pass the time with needlepoint, reading, or private instruction in language or music, as they awaited their destiny in life—marriage.

But Adele was bored out of her mind with the rounds of teas and luncheons that filled the days of society girls, who were expected to blush, abstain from strong opinions, and whisper and giggle “
as if they were slightly tipsy,” observed
Stefan Zweig, a family friend.

Therese had brimmed with excitement at her coming out, as young ladies arrived in evening gowns, and young men in tails and collapsible top hats called
chapeaux claques.
Adele showed little interest in making a debut. She only endured the kind of fashions that had young women “
laced into a wasp's shape in a corset of stiff whalebone, blown out like a huge bell from the waist down, the neck closed in up to the chin, legs shrouded to the toes” until women “could no longer move about freely,” Zweig wrote.

Adele found Vienna society dull and superficial compared to the artistic world unfolding on the effervescent Ringstrasse, which was literally at her doorstep.
The Bauers lived in an apartment in a subdivided
palais
owned by
Hermine Wittgenstein, who had persuaded her father, Karl Wittgenstein, to finance a new building for the
Secession movement of Gustav Klimt. The Wittgensteins were important patrons, hosting concerts in their mansion by
Johannes Brahms,
Gustav Mahler, and
Pablo Casals. They rented apartments at the Ringstrasse
palais
to other patrons of the arts scene. It was a heady address.

Immigrant parents like Adele's were from less cosmopolitan Bavarian cities. Adele grew up a member of a generation that viewed immersion in art as its birthright, and as an essential prism for understanding the world. “
You don't have to become an art expert, but you have to know what is genuine, what style is. You have to learn to see,” Adele believed.

“
You have to develop a feeling for quality,” she would muse. “Once you have learned to enjoy the great works of art, the plastic arts and literature, then you will be able to evaluate people, whether they are valuable
or worthless.” In the rarefied world of privileged Viennese, a life in the world of art was a noble, near-religious calling, and Adele was already a convert. Her parents, however, had more conventional aspirations for their youngest.

Ferdinand Bloch, a Czech sugar magnate,
shown here ca.
1920
, was captivated by the seventeen-year-old Adele Bauer when he was thirty-four. (
Illustration Credit 5.1
)

Adele's father was an ambitious man, a modern entrepreneur who was following in the footsteps of the Rothschilds. By the time Adele came of age, Moritz Bauer's bank was the seventh largest in the empire. Bauer was president of the Orientbahn, or Oriental Railway, the Vienna component of a large-scale scheme, financed by German banks, to create a line from Berlin to Baghdad. Negotiated directly with the Turkish grand vizier and built on old caravan trails, the project was closely watched by Austria's Crown Prince Rudolf. Moritz fretted constantly that the ethnic tinderbox of the Balkans would sabotage the expensive project. But by 1888, the railroad had reached Belgrade, Sofia, and Constantinople, and was carrying the glamorous luxury cars of the Orient Express. Moritz relished his reputation as a sophisticated man who embraced technological innovation.
“
Today, I tried to reach you by telephone. You were not there, and in view of your general aversion to it, I decided not to try again,” Moritz would humorously chide a stodgy colleague at
Deutsche Bank, a sponsor of the railway.
Jewish modernizers were now rewarded: Moritz Bauer received a knighthood—the Order of the Iron Crown, an ornate golden medal with a double-headed eagle, as well as the Imperial Ottoman Order of Medschidie, and the Royal Serbian order of Takowo.

Moritz had successfully steered his eldest daughter, Therese, into marriage with
Gustav Bloch, an attorney for the Orientbahn. He would have less luck with his five sons. Raphael left to become a New York banker, and Karl would die of pneumonia. Leopold would succumb to insanity—a common delicate term for syphilis—and David would die in Italy at the age of thirty-two. Eugene, a successful businessman, would succumb to tuberculosis.

It was difficult for Moritz to imagine a more brilliant match for Adele than Gustav's brother, Ferdinand, captain of an emerging sugar-beet industry that had reduced dependence on sugar imports from the Caribbean. In Vienna, where sugar was not just a condiment but a staple, this was a revolutionary shift.