As the old Hapsburg order disintegrated and anti-Semitism grew, Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka gave form to their foreboding

At the turn of this century, when a great empire was dying, Vienna, the grand capital of that empire, witnessed an outburst of creativity so rare that one must think back to Renaissance Florence or ancient Athens to find moments in history that surpassed it in variety and influence and beauty. In literature and music, in art and architecture, in science and politics, in cinema and design, Vienna set a pattern and a pace for modernity in our century. Yet the rest of the world, content with images of fancy-uniformed Hapsburgs and lighthearted operettas and lilting Strauss waltzes and warm coffeehouses, does not always think of imperial Vienna as a center of extraordinary creative activity.

Of course, it is no secret that Sigmund Freud transformed the awareness and way of thinking of Western society, that Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg loom as two giants of 19th- and 20th-century music, that Arthur Schnitzler was one of the most popular writers in the German language for many decades, that Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka were powerful painters of sensitivity and anguish, that Adolf Loos influenced the path of modern architecture, that Ludwig Wittgenstein revolutionized the study of philosophy, that Erich von Stroheim and Fritz Lang helped pioneer the transformation of cinema into art, that journalist Theodor Herzl turned Zionism into a mass movement. But even admirers of these men do not often realize that all of them came from the same time and the same place - fin de siècle Vienna.

Various governments and institutions have joined recently to try to set imperial Vienna in its true and wondrous place. The Historical Museum of the City of Vienna opened a six-month exhibition in March 1985 describing the ferment and achievements in art, architecture, music, design, literature, theater, cinema, politics, science and philosophy in Vienna from 1870 to 1930. The exhibition moved to Paris in February of this year with even larger scope. The Georges Pompidou National Center of Art and Culture (SMITHSONIAN, August 1977) asked Princeton University historian Carl E. Schorske to serve as consultant and expanded the period of study to 1938. That was the year Adolf Hitler annexed Austria, paraded into Vienna and put a brutal end to its already dying creativity. A shortened version of the exhibition opened last month at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Entitled “Vienna 1900: Art, Architecture & Design,” it will be on view there until October 21.

To the disappointment of historians like Schorske, MOMA, befitting its title and mandate, has chosen to concentrate on the artists, architects and designers of Vienna. For the museum, in fact, the arrival of 20 oil paintings by Klimt and 20 drawings by Schiele is a major artistic event. The Austrian government has always been reluctant to allow the departure of the works of Klimt. His masterpiece, The Kiss (p. 80), will be leaving Austria for the first time to hang at MOMA. Many Americans have never seen his famous portraits of powerful, sensual women adorned in gold and geometric symbols. But Klimt and his colleagues cannot be understood without putting them in their epoch. History, though kept in the background, will still infuse the show.

In the last half of the 19th century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire of Emperor Franz Josef was regarded as one of the great powers of Europe. The authoritarian Hapsburg Dynasty had ruled longer than any other in Europe, and extended over all of present-day Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and large tracts of Yugoslavia, Poland, Rumania, Russia and Italy. But the empire, unable to hold under the tensions of defeat and nationalism, would finally crumble in World War I. In 1910, Franz Josef was the ruler of 51 million people, but only 12 million—less than a quarter—were, like himself, of German nationality. The rest were Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Ruthenians, Rumanians, Croats, Serbs, Slovaks, Slovenes and Italians all demanding self-rule. “The Habsburg Monarchy,” British historian A. J. P. Taylor has written, "was a geographic nonsense, explicable only by dynastic graspings and the accidents of centuries of history.”

Vienna, the imperial capital, ignored the rot of the empire. “On the surface,” Edward Crankshaw wrote in his book The Fall of the House of Habsburg, “this beautiful city had never seemed more vital than when it was dying.” Vienna, transformed by an urban-renewal program even more massive and monumental than that of Napoleon III in Paris, was the creative center of central and eastern Europe. The Vienna writer Hermann Broch called this era of grandness at a time of impending doom “the joyous apocalypse.”

An atmosphere that continued to draw artists

The city of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, Vienna had long been renowned as a mecca for musicians, and it is not surprising that the atmosphere in Austria should continue to attract a Mahler to conduct and compose there during this period of political decline or encourage a Schoenberg to break new musical ground. But it is far more difficult to try to explain the forces behind so much creativity in other arts at the same time.

The outburst came out of the power and later the disquiet of the new upper middle class of Vienna. The patronage of culture was one way for the bourgeoisie in the Hapsburg Empire to acquire the status of the old aristocracy. The well-to-do Viennese attended opera and theater often, encouraged their children to play the piano or paint, and supported the government’s commitment to culture. This bourgeois obsession with culture became more intense in the first shatterings of political illusions of a liberal culture. When the anti-Semitic Karl Lueger was elected mayor and took office just before 1900, for example, many sensitive Viennese of the upper middle class responded by turning their backs on politics. “By the 1890s,” Schorske has written, “the heroes of the upper middle class were no longer political leaders, but actors, artists, and critics.”

The artists, many of them coming out of that upper middle class, though often rebelling against it, felt the same mood as everyone else and began to peer inward. They became, as Schorske puts it, “preoccupied with the problem of the nature of the individual in a disintegrating society.” Schnitzler was the chronicler of this inner tension at a time of outward rot; Freud became the prophet. This obsession with the self nurtured the creativity of Vienna.

The artists and intellectuals of Vienna did not work in isolation but knew each other. The relationships could be professional, personal, casual or profound, but they were meaningful enough to reinforce ideas. Everyone in Vienna seemed to know what everyone else was up to. A spell of impotence prompted Mahler to consult Freud. Freud wrote an admiring letter to the playwright and novelist Schnitzler as a birthday favor from Schnitzler’s fans. Gustav Klimt chased in vain after the 18-year-old Alma Schindler before her marriage to Mahler. After the death of Mahler, Alma became the wife of writer Franz Werfel and the mistress of painter Oskar Kokoschka. Kokoschka did portraits of Alma, the architect Adolf Loos, and the poet and critic Karl Kraus. Arnold Schoenberg, who tried his hand at more than music, painted the burial scene of his mentor Mahler. Mahler’s tomb was designed by the architect Josef Hoffmann. Klimt, who was a friend of both Mahlers, founded the Secession art movement with Hoffmann and others.

Coffeehouses, newspapers, constant conversation

"It was sweet to live here in this atmosphere of spiritual conciliation,” the novelist and biographer Stefan Zweig wrote in his memoirs about his youth near the turn of the century, “and subconsciously every citizen became supernational, cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world.” Zweig found a key to the understanding of old Vienna in its coffeehouses, where one could remain all day for the price of a cup of coffee and read all Europe’s newspapers and magazines and talk with friends. “Perhaps nothing has contributed so much to the intellectual mobility and the international orientation of the Austrian,” Zweig wrote, “as that he could keep abreast of all world events in the coffeehouse and at the same time discuss them in the circle of his friends.”

Some were torn about staying. Anguished by lack of promotion in his early years and hemmed in by anti- Semitism, Sigmund Freud maintained throughout his life that he hated Vienna. (“This is no atmosphere in which to maintain the hope of achieving anything difficult,” he wrote in 1898.) Yet he remained until 1939, the year after Hitler’s troops marched in.

As the imperial capital, Vienna attracted people from all over the empire. It was the place for a young Hungarian, for example, especially if he were German-speaking, to seek fame and fortune. Jews found the attraction even more compelling. Unlike the neighboring Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire refrained from pogroms, leaving its Jews in relative peace. Jews, who were living in every dominion, could not identify with the various national movements that were trying to break away from the empire. Instead, most of them believed their future was tied to the empire, and they looked on the Emperor as a protector and the city of Vienna as the natural goal of their assimilation. By the turn of the century, Jews made up perhaps ten percent of the population of Vienna and a larger percentage of its upper middle class.

Many of the artists and intellectuals of Vienna reflected this Jewish background. Freud, playwright Arthur Schnitzler, critic Karl Kraus, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, writer Stefan Zweig, and composers Arnold Schoenberg and Gustav Mahler came from Jewish or partly Jewish families. (Mahler converted to Catholicism just before taking over as director of the Vienna Court Opera. The Emperor would not have allowed a Jew to take the position.) The presence and influence of the Jews in Vienna served as a familiar scapegoat for the anti-Semitic, mass political movements trying to break the power of the upper middle class. After witnessing the electoral victory in Vienna of the anti-Semitic Mayor Karl Lueger, journalist Theodor Herzl, an assimilated Budapest-born Jew who had covered the trial for trumped-up charges against Alfred Dreyfus in France, founded his Zionist movement to create a Jewish national homeland in Israel. Adolf Hitler, a young down-and-out would-be artist and architect, who painted watercolors of the city (six were on exhibit in the Paris show) while living in Vienna from 1908 to 1913, learned to admire Lueger and his anti-Semitism.

To help understand the artistic dynamics of old Vienna better, Carl Schorske, an American, and the Vienna-born American psychologist Bruno Bettelheim have come up with two very different yet very apt metaphors. In his book, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, Schorske uses the image of the construction of the enormous Ringstrasse - the name given both to the boulevard and the buildings on it - to explain what happened in Vienna. In the late 1860s and the 1870s, the liberals of the upper middle class - at this time the new establishment of Vienna - began erecting a series of monumental structures, like the Opera, the Parliament, the University and the City Hall, and of substantial Baroque-style apartment houses along this new boulevard, which ringed the old center of the city. “The liberal rulers," wrote Schorske, “tried to design their way into a history, a pedigree, with grandiose buildings inspired by a Gothic, Renaissance, or Baroque past that was not their own.” This architecture still defines the look of Vienna today.

The Ringstrasse became the symbol of this period of upper-middle-class, culturally liberal dominance of the city. The word Ringstrasse, Schorske tells us, conjures up an era for Austrians much as the word Victorian does for the English and the term Second Empire for the French. The first stirrings of modern art in Vienna came from the generation of artists that included Klimt and architect Otto Wagner, who took part in the construction and design of the Ringstrasse and then broke away from all that it symbolized.

Bruno Bettelheim, who fled Vienna in 1939, invoked the image of Mayerling as his metaphor. On the night of January 29, 1889, Crown Prince Rudolf, the 30-year-old unstable philanderer who was heir to the throne, shot and killed his 17-year-old mistress, Marie von Vetsera, and then killed himself, in the bedroom of his hunting lodge at Mayerling in the Wienerwald, the Vienna Woods. It was a double-suicide pact. The girl meant little to Rudolf. He simply felt the need, according to Bettelheim, of the presence of a sexual partner in order to kill himself. His mother, Elisabeth, the beautiful and willful Empress who never spent much time with either her husband Franz Josef or her son, revealed the truth about the Crown Prince's suicide to the Emperor. News of the deaths leaked out, and the Mayerling affair became one of the most sensational and romantic tales of 19th- and 20th-century Europe.

For Bettelheim, the affair symbolizes what was the obsession of Vienna at the turn of the century: “The strange and deep link of sex and destruction was to mark Viennese culture during this period of the slow decadence of the empire," Bettelheim wrote in the Pompidou Center’s exhibition catalog. “This interconnection, publicly demonstrated at Mayerling, formed for a long time the essential underlying theme of the art, the literature and the psychoanalysis of Vienna.” Bettelheim cites a good deal of evidence: the predominant place of these themes in the psychoanalysis of Freud; plays and novels by the medically trained Schnitzler about sexual involvements that inevitably lead to suicide and murder; the Eighth Symphony of Mahler, set in part to a scene of Faust finding salvation in death through the love of a woman; the numerous paintings of Klimt that juxtapose eroticism and signs of death. Bettelheim helps clarify all that happened to Viennese culture. At a time when their empire was dying, the artists and intellectuals of Vienna looked inward; what they found, he says, were the forces of sex and destruction.

The work of Gustav Klimt reflects both the rebellion against the Ringstrasse and the obsessive themes of the Mayerling affair. As a young, promising artist, Klimt received commissions between 1885 and 1891 to paint historical and allegorical murals for the Museum of Art History and the Burgtheater, two of the monumental buildings that were going up on the Ringstrasse. His reputation grew enormously. But a streak of rebelliousness, which Vienna did not notice at first, grew as well. In 1897, when he was 35 and probably Vienna’s best-known painter, he founded the Secession movement. This coterie of painters, architects and designers mocked the Ringstrasse of their fathers and its imitation of ancient and medieval architecture, searching instead for modern ideas like the Art Nouveau style fashionable elsewhere in Europe, and proclaiming art a refuge from modern pressures.

An emperor who supported the rebels

The upper middle class could accept so mild a rebellion. The government of Emperor Franz Josef, proud of its modernity in the arts, even supported the Secession financially. Klimt still received commissions from the establishment. But after the turn of the century, he provoked a fury in Vienna when he painted three allegorical panels of medicine, philosophy and law for the University of Vienna. The professors could neither tolerate Klimt’s sensual and anguished bodies nor his questioning of the value of the university’s disciplines. Right-wing politicians took up their cause. The government refused to allow the Academy of Fine Arts to appoint Klimt as professor. The experience seared Klimt, who told an art critic, “I want to get out of all these unrefreshing absurdities that hinder my work and get back to freedom. I refuse all state help. I renounce everything.” Enraged, he bought back his university paintings and turned even more inward, exploring the themes of desire and deprivation. He used the form of the sexually destructive female - her eroticism cloaked, layered and ultimately kept untouchable by a glittering surface of elaborate gold patterning.

A mixture of eroticism and death imagery

Klimt, a burly, handsome, bearded man often photographed in his studio wearing a caftan, can still shock us almost a century later. His Judith I (1901), coiffed like a Viennese society matron, her neck choked in gold, flaunts both sexual satisfaction and anguish, her eyes lidded dreamily, her mouth parted, as she makes her way from the sleeping chamber, clutching the head of Holofernes (p. 81). This mix of eroticism and death imagery runs through many of his canvases. The pregnant woman with downcast eyes in Hope II (p. 78) is confronted with a skull that rests on her distended abdomen, while in her garment below, apparitions of sorrowful women echo the weight of her anxiety. Klimt could be playful. He displayed the bottom of a woman prominently in his Goldfish (1901-02) and had to be dissuaded by friends from titling the painting To My Critics.

In his later years, Klimt became a much sought-after portrait painter. Many of these portraits combined naturalistic studies of the power and sensuality of the model's face with the most implausible dress and ornamentation. John Russell, art critic of the New York Times, has described one work of this genre, Klimt's portrait of the dress-shop owner Emilie Flöge, with her haughty, powerful beauty, as a “masterpiece of delicate insight.” Flöge was Klimt's mistress for the last two decades of his life. When he was carried home with a stroke in 1918, he called out “Get Emilie here,” and died in her presence.

It has always been difficult for Americans to see and understand the work of Klimt. Some of his paintings, including the controversial allegories that infuriated the University of Vienna, were destroyed in a fire started by the Nazis during World War II. Fearing damage during travel, Austrian museum curators at first refused to loan The Kiss (1907-08) to the New York show. In fact, the Paris and New York exhibitions were almost canceled when Austria insisted at first on holding back a few other Klimts. It took a personal plea from President Francois Mitterrand of France to President Rudolf Kirchschlaeger of Austria.

Klimt discovered Egon Schiele as a young, unhappy teenage student at the Academy of Fine Arts and exhibited his work at a showing of new art that he and his friends organized. Schiele looked on Klimt as a kind of mentor, yet he represented a new generation that was breaking away. Although the young artist took some of Klimt's sexual themes and extended them, he explored the complexities of reality not with heavy symbolic overlays but rather with unremitting reduction to raw essential.

Schiele led a troubled life, living off friends while painting, striving for an aimless iconoclasm, and serving almost a month in jail when he was 21 for the charge of seducing a young girl. His Self-Portrait with Spread Fingers (p. 73), completed in 1911, the year before he was imprisoned, reveals his response to the world: intense, defiant, divided. Most of his works are marked by torment and sexual tension. By 1914, he was working in near seclusion, frequently sketching and painting his model and companion, Walli. But he fell in love with Edith Harms, an innocent woman who lived near his studio, and proposed marriage. Edith's parents were shaken by his unconventionality but agreed nevertheless. As a symbolic farewell to Walli, Schiele painted Death and the Maiden in 1915, a self-portrait allegory which he hung over his bed. That same year he married Edith, and critics detected a gradual calming in his work, culminating in a striking canvas of himself, his wife and their expected child as The Family. But the scene was not to be. In a tragic turn of events that calls to mind Klimt's Hope II (above), painted a decade before, Edith died of Spanish influenza in 1918 while still pregnant, and Schiele died of the same illness three days later at the age of 28. Klimt, Schiele and the Austro-Hungarian Empire all died in the same year.

Oskar Kokoschka, four years older than Schiele, represents a true break with the Secessionists and Klimt. The paintings and plays of the young artist made him the enfant terrible of his generation; they brimmed with a wild frenzy that frightened others. After seeing some of them in an exhibition in 1911, an incensed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination later triggered World War I, said, "This man deserves to have every bone in his body broken."

Like Schiele, Kokoschka refused to mimic Klimt, whom he revered. In seeking a new reality, Kokoschka seemed to take a psychological step even beyond Schiele, putting his subjects through a kind of Freudian psychoanalysis on canvas. Grating the nerves of viewers, he laid raw secrets bare, especially in portraits (p. 75). His imagery was brutal, as in the poster connected with his own drama, Murderer, Hope of Women (p. 74), which premiered at the Kuntschau in 1909.

During his Vienna years, Kokoschka, obsessed with love for Alma Mahler, painted the two of them lying together in the eye of a storm in The Tempest (1914). Before painting the work, he wrote a letter to Alma describing the images in his mind: “We two, expressing a great calm force, our hands clasped, along a semicircle with a sea shining with colors, a water tower, mountains, lightning, and the moon." Yet in the finished work, she sleeps contentedly while his body is rigid and he stares into space. Their love did not last long after that, and Alma left him for the German architect Walter Gropius. Kokoschka, like many others, left the city before the end of World War I. He made an international reputation as an Expressionist artist elsewhere in Europe, eventually settling in Switzerland, where he died only six years ago.

These developments in painting had their parallels in other arts in Vienna, most obviously in architecture and design. Otto Wagner, like Klimt, worked on the Ringstrasse and then turned his back on its attempt to evoke a classical past with monumental architecture. For the Wiener Stadtbahn, the extensive railway network he designed for the city, which included 40 stations, Wagner combined classical elements with the cleaner lines of the Jugendstil style and innovative use of iron and glass. A younger architect, Josef Hoffmann, a pillar of the Secession, joined designer Kolo Moser in founding the Wiener Werkstätte, an arts-and-crafts cooperative that created stylish furniture, silverware, glassware, cloth and even postage stamps. Architect Adolf Loos preached the strictest use of materials in a no-frills architecture. “The work of art is the private affair of the artist," he said. "The house is not."

A demand that walls be left bare

Loos insisted that architecture and, in fact, furniture should provide comfort and not project the personality of the architect and the designer. He did not want a new style, he wanted no style. Loos became harsh in his attacks on ornamentation, demanding that walls be left bare. "All art is erotic," he wrote. “The man of our own times who from an inner compulsion smears walls with erotic symbols is a criminal or a degenerate." Loos, now regarded as a pioneer of modern European architecture, entered a contest in 1922 for the design of the Chicago Tribune Tower. He submitted plans for an enormous column topped by a Doric capital, but lost.

After World War I, Vienna suddenly found itself the capital of a small republic instead of an empire. The philistinism and anti-Semitism of some of the mass political movements intensified. Some artists began to look elsewhere for a more sympathetic intellectual climate and for opportunities. The exodus swelled in the 1930s with the growth of fascism and turned into an outpouring when Hitler paraded into Vienna and gloated over his grasp of a great city that had once spurned him. The list of exiles is impressive. Even before the war, film director Erich von Stroheim and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had left. In the early waves, Vienna lost film director Fritz Lang, architect Richard Neutra, engineer Ferdinand Porsche, composer Arnold Schoenberg, economist Joseph Schumpeter and others. With the Anschluss of 1938, the rest fled, including Sigmund Freud, psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, novelists Robert Musil, Franz Werfel and Stefan Zweig, and philosopher Karl Popper.

The Paris exhibit, in its final room, described the exodus in a simple, affecting audiovisual display. With a recording of Vienna waltzes playing in the background, one screen showed a famous picture of Hitler entering Vienna in an open car. While this slide gradually increased in size, a second screen flashed photographs of the many exiles, one after another. After the last exile disappeared, both screens overwhelmed the room with huge pictures of Hitler in Vienna, and the music stopped.

The author, Paris correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, has also contributed to the pages of Atlantic, The Nation and Foreign Affairs.

‍CAPTIONS IN ORIGINAL SMITHSONIAN ARTICLE

Egon Schiele’s Autumn Sun (Sunrise), painted in 1912, was escape for artist from raw, powerful portraits. Almost half of his completed oils are city views  and landscapes, which echo the intensity of Van Gogh.

Turn-of-the-century coffeehouses like the Griensteidl were nerve centers for city’s artists and intellectuals.

One of Schiele’s calmest works, The Family, 1918, depicts himself, his wife and their anticipated baby.

In Self-Portrait with Spread Fingers, Schiele offers a frank and uncompromising stance to the world.

Death and the Maiden was Schiele’s symbolic farewell to model Walli when he wed Edith Harms in 1915.

Oskar Kokoschka’s poster advertised Murderer, Hope of Women, a stark, bloody play he staged in 1909.

In Portrait of an Old Man, Kokoschka exaggerated external features to suggest the sitter's internal state.

Silver tea service by Wiener Werkstätte founder Josef Hoffmann was both simple and sophisticated in design.

Kolo Moser, colleague of Hoffmann, sought clarity and unpretentiousness in writing desk, other furniture.

Karlsplatz Station was part of 40-station rail network for Vienna, designed by architect Otto Wagner.

Gustav Klimt's Hope II hits at life's deepest joys and fears, as pregnant woman is haunted with worries.

The Kiss, painted by Klimt in 1907-08, is powerful rendering of the concept of hope and love fulfilled. The Austrian government has let this painting leave its homeland for the first time to hang in MOMA show.

In his sensual Judith 1, Klimt portrays seductive temptress sheathed in gold carrying Holofernes' head.

With jeweled neck collar and encrusted dress, Emilie Flöge, Klimt's longtime mistress, confronts the viewer.

RECOMMENDED READING

Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture
Carl E. Schorske
Vintage Books, 1981

Vienna 1900: Art, Architecture & Design (exhibition catalog)
Kirk Varnedoe
Museum of Modern Art, 1986

The Fall of the House of Habsburg
Edward Crankshaw
Viking Press, 1963

Vienna: Legend and Reality
Ilsa Barea
Secker and Warburg (London), 1966

Vienna
Frederic V. Grunfeld
Newsweek Book Division, 1981