Saturday, May 10, 2008

One-Hundred-Ninety

Eden

Betony Vernon’s Eden launches in Paris.  It’s an extension of the members-only salon. 

We featured Betony Vernon back in October here.

And we have membership.  See you there.

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

One-Hundred-Eighty-Nine

Gustav Klimt: a life devoted to women
Gustav Klimt’s golden visions of the female form are about to go on show in Britain. Martin Gayford reports

In June 1902, the great French sculptor Auguste Rodin was passing through Vienna, en route from Prague.

While in town, he accepted an invitation to visit the current exhibition of the Vienna Secession movement, and to meet the artist whose monumental work, the Beethoven Frieze, was at the heart of the display: Gustav Klimt.

The two artists - Rodin 62, and at the peak of his fame, Klimt just about to turn 40 - went to a café in the Prater garden. According to the art critic, Berta Zuckerkandl, they sat down “beside two remarkably beautiful young women at whom Rodin gazed enchantedly.

“That afternoon, slim and lovely vamps came buzzing around Klimt and Rodin, those two fiery lovers,” Zuckerkandl recalled.

“Rodin leaned over and to Klimt and said, ‘I have never before experienced such an atmosphere - your tragic and magnificent Beethoven fresco, your unforgettable, temple-like exhibition, and now this garden, these women, this music. What is the reason for it all?’ And Klimt slowly nodded his beautiful head, and answered only one word: ‘Austria.’”

Rodin and Klimt, despite differences in nationality, age and medium, had a great deal in common, not least that both of them had created daring works with a single theme: a kiss between naked male and female figures. Indeed, the word “kiss” is a little euphemistic. The subject was sex.

Klimt’s kiss was the climactic moment of his monumental Beethoven Frieze, a recreation of which will be one of the highlights of the forthcoming exhibition at Tate Liverpool, Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design & Modern Life in Vienna 1900.

This will be the first substantial exhibition of work by Klimt ever staged in Britain. It will present around 26 paintings and 30 drawings in the context of an equal number of pieces of furniture and objects by contemporaries such as the architect and designer Josef Hoffmann.

Among the Klimts will be several important works including Nuda Veritas (1899), the sensuous naked nymphs of Water Serpents I (1904-7) and a 34-metre replica of the Beethoven Frieze.

This huge work was based on Richard Wagner’s description of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which concludes, of course, with the singing of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”. Wagner had described this epic piece of music as “a struggle, conceived in the most grandiose manner, by the Spirit for joy against the weight of those hostile powers that stand between us and earthly happiness”.

Klimt represented Schiller’s words, “Joy, beautiful sparks of the gods, this kiss for all the world”, in the most earthy manner, with his naked, embracing lovers.

To Klimt, it seems, the hostile powers - naked temptresses and a huge snarling ape - above all symbolised the disease syphilis of which he was terrified - and understandably, since he had contracted it at an early age.

Thus, his frieze brought together the themes of music, death, love - or sex - so fundamentally fascinating to the Vienna of Sigmund Freud and Arthur Schnitzler. That was perhaps what Klimt meant by his laconic answer to Rodin’s question.

As this incident suggests, Klimt was a man of few words, but he made a forceful physical impression. Alfred Lichtwar, the director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, described him as “a stocky man, more or less chubby” with “the cheerful, brusque manners of a nature boy, a sailor’s brown skin, strong cheekbones and little darting eyes. When he speaks, it is with a resounding voice and strong dialect.”

A young woman named Frederike Beer-Monti rang on Klimt’s doorbell in 1915, hoping he would paint her portrait (she had already posed for his younger rival, Schiele). She found him both taciturn and formidable.

“Klimt took her hand, looked at it, turned it over and for a long time, said not a single word.”

Beer-Monti was finally allowed to enter. But, “It took a lot of talking to make him a little friendlier.”

Klimt eventually agreed to paint her - an arduous business which took three sittings of three hours each per week for six months. Though the result was a magnificent picture, Beer-Monti was ambivalent about the artist.

“Klimt was exceptionally animal-like. His body exuded a peculiar odour. As a woman, one was really afraid of him.”

Born in 1862, Klimt was from a relatively humble background - the second of seven children, his father a gold engraver. There was something feral about him. In photographs he is often wearing a full-length smock, in which he resembles a classical faun dressed up as a biblical prophet.

His studio was filled, as was Rodin’s, with models who posed for endless drawings - often, again like Rodin’s, of a startling eroticism.

These models inhabited his studio, rather like his pet cats. When he was painting Frederike Beer-Monti, “He took a break every hour and went into an adjacent room to relax and chat for a while with the models who were always there.

Alma Schindler reported that he ‘would take them to the theatre or races, always slipped them a banknote’.” Alma Schindler herself - later Alma Mahler, and subsequently the lover of Oskar Kokoschka and the wife of the architect Walter Gropius - was one of Klimt’s failed conquests.

He pursued her to Italy in 1899, where she was on holiday with her family. He kissed her in a Genoese hotel room, embraced her on a bridge in Venice while they looked into the dark waters of the canal, but she, though wildly in love, was firm ("not without a ring on my finger").

About the same time, Klimt fathered three sons - one of whom went on to become a well-known film director - by two other women, and began a long-lasting, though apparently open, relationship with a talented proprietor of a Viennese fashion salon, Emilie Flöge.

The names of the models and other women in his life do not always survive, partly because Flöge burnt much of Klimt’s correspondence after his death from a stroke in 1918. One who has been identified by chance recently was Hilde Roth, a beautiful Bohemian redhead from Budapest whose face can be seen Lady with Hat and feather Boa (c1910), and voluptuous body - probably - in Goldfish (1901-02).

Although he was a delightful painter of landscapes, women were Klimt’s theme above all others.

Richard Muter, in a newspaper review of 1909, claimed that “the new Viennese woman, a specific sort of new Viennese woman - their grandmothers were Judith and Salome - has been invented or discovered by Klimt. She is delightfully vicious, charmingly sinful, fascinatingly perverse.”

Klimt was certainly able, like certain couturiers and fashion photographers, to make his sitters and models look extraordinarily glamorous. In his later portraits, the work for which above all he is famous, his strategy was to retain the academic realism of his earlier work for the face and figure of the subject.

But he dissolved the rest of the image in luxuriant decoration, derived from Byzantine mosaics, Celtic design, and the Oriental textiles and ceramics that filled his studio. The effect is sumptuous, sensual, near-abstract but not too dauntingly avant-garde.

That ornament, however, tended to be filled with meaning. When Klimt died, an unfinished painting entitled The Bride was left in his studio. The right half was dominated by a semi-naked female figure.

As the art historian Alessandra Comini described it, “The knees were bent and the legs splayed out to expose a carefully detailed pubic area on which the artist had leisurely begun to paint an overlay ‘dress’ of suggestive and symbolic ornamental shapes.”

Thus Klimt’s own death revealed the sexual obsession that lay beneath his shimmering surfaces.

Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design & Modern Life in Vienna 1900 is at Tate Liverpool (0151 702 7400) from May 30 until Aug 31

* * * * *
Gustav Klimt: the ladies’ man

Famous for his sumptuous portraits of society women - not to mention his irregular liaisons with them - Gustav Klimt revolutionised the art scene in Vienna with his use of gold leaf and other precious materials. As a major exhibition opens, Kathryn Hughes explores the images that are ‘bringing the bling’ to Liverpool (from the London Times, May 2008)

Two years ago Gustav Klimt officially became the world’s most expensive painter of all time. His 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, a shimmering waterfall of gold-leaf exuberance, was bought by Ronald Lauder (of lipstick fame) for $135 million (£70 million). At a tap of the auctioneer’s hammer the painting beat the previous record set by Picasso’s Boy with a Pipe, which went two years earlier for a mere $104 million (£53 million).

Klimt, like Picasso, is an instantly recognisable artist with a global reach. His signature pieces, many of which appear this month in the Tate Liverpool exhibition ‘Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life in Vienna 1900’, have been reproduced on a thousand postcards and posters. The designer John Galliano even credits the Austrian painter as a major inspiration for his spring/summer 2008 collection.

Frequently featuring society women, Klimt’s works are less portraits than fantastic meditations on the sexual and economic energy of fin-de-siècle Vienna’s haute bourgeoisie. Although it’s not clear how many of these women he slept with himself (when closeted with his models in the studio he wore nothing under his painter’s smock), it is quite clear that he was fascinated by their heady combination of sharp wit and material wealth.

The result is some of the most striking portraits of women to have appeared in the 20th century. Take the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of a wealthy industrialist. Her head is strangely generic (all Klimt’s ladies tended to look the same - high cheekbones, dark hair, mouth slightly ajar), but her gown is a magnificent tumble of sumptuous gold leaf that merges with the equally gorgeous background. Not for nothing does the Tate trumpet that it is ‘bringing the bling to Liverpool’.

Klimt’s use of precious materials in his portraits, turning them into what we’d now call ‘multimedia’ rather than straight paintings, caused an enormous fuss in his own time. An older generation of critics sneered that this wasn’t art at all, but merely craft, exactly the sort of thing you might expect from the son of an immigrant gold engraver from Bohemia. Younger commentators, however, responded enthusiastically to Klimt’s audacious breaking down of the barriers between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms. For Klimt, as for the Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshops) group of artist-craftsmen with whom he was associated, the skill involved in the meticulous application of gold leaf and ceramics was just as valuable as the ability to wield a paintbrush in more conventional ways.

As all this suggests, Klimt was the product of a very particular historical and cultural moment. Vienna at the turn of the century was hungry for new ways of thinking about both the arts and the sciences (Schoenberg and Freud were just two of the bright young men then making waves). Since 1850 the city had been expanding at a rattling rate, and a new elite had risen to the top like rich cream.

The old aristocratic ethos of the crumbling Austro-Hungarian empire (think duels, waltzes and dowagers in tiaras) had given way to a fresh energy, pioneered by the new mercantile and professional classes. Rich but unstuffy, sophisticated yet radical, these new taste-makers thrust Klimt’s dazzling and often shocking work to the very forefront of the European-wide movement known as art nouveau.

It was a stunning outcome for the young man whose highest ambition had once been to qualify as an art teacher. After years of producing work designed to appeal to the old guard - he even won the Golden Order of Merit from the emperor at the age of just 26 - the young Klimt broke free in the late 1890s and started producing work to satisfy himself rather than his paymasters. Together with a group of like-minded renegades he engineered the Secession, a movement dedicated to producing and showing the best avant-garde art. The Secessionists were responsible for propelling Vienna, previously something of an artistic backwater, into the very heart of European artistic culture.

During this time Klimt gravitated to depicting the female form, often taking biblical or mythological subjects as his starting point. His Judith, for instance, is only fleetingly concerned with the Old Testament story of Judith and the Assyrian general Holofernes. What really got his creativity going was the chance to paint one of his striking femmes fatales (according to legend, Judith cut off Holofernes’ head, which is about as fatale as you can get), all high-boned hauteur and fabulous oriental richness.

This same attachment to the exotic showed through even when Klimt turned to real, living subjects. His 1913-1914 portrait of Eugenia Primavesi, yet another rich man’s wife, imagines her almost as a Russian icon, pressed into a flat plane, the top half of her body shadowed by what appears to be a halo. Meanwhile her gown, possibly a kimono, is a mosaic waterfall that owes more to a Byzantine aesthetic than any western influence. (While no great traveller, Klimt made an exception when it came to journeying to Venice to view the artistic residues of the old Ottoman empire.)

Not all Klimt’s women are shown in quite such non-naturalistic ways. Rose von Rosthorn-Friedmann, whom he painted in 1900-1901, is granted an individuality that later sitters such as Adele and Eugenia cannot claim. Instead of collapsing Rose’s body into a geometric shape that then becomes one with the background, Klimt gives her the kind of figure of which any fin-de-siècle society lady would be proud. Substantial yet sinuous, Rose is shown off to her best advantage in a conventional evening dress of deepest black-blue. And yet, Klimt being Klimt, there is still plenty of sparkle. A scattering of what appears to be small stars is sprinkled over the full length of the gown, turning it at a stroke into a piece of the midnight sky.

Alongside this semi-public art, designed to be hung on the walls of Vienna’s smartest salons, Klimt also produced scores of sketches of the female form intended mostly for his own gratification. Many are frankly pornographic, showing women with their skirts hitched up, legs splayed, absorbed in their own private pleasure.

It should thus come as no surprise to learn that Klimt enjoyed - if that is quite the right word - a complicated relationship with flesh-and-blood women. Although he never married, he is credited with fathering 14 illegitimate children. And while a woman called Emilie Flöge is described as having been his ‘constant companion’ for decades, there is no evidence that he ever slept with her.

Klimt did, however, paint Emilie. A stunning portrait of 1902 shows her in a lavish dress of singing blue, with a signature halo effect (in this case produced by what seems to be a large framing collar). Klimt was fascinated by women’s clothing, often creating spectacular outfits for Emilie, herself a fashion designer. While for a certain kind of artist it might have seemed infra dig to turn one’s studio into a temporary couture house, for Klimt it made complete sense.

He believed passionately that there should be no division between what were conventionally described as ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms. Like William Morris before him, Klimt was as interested in the design of a teapot or an armchair as he was in the production of more obviously formal artworks. To him, the term ‘artisan’, far from being a patronising put-down, was the greatest compliment.

It is with this in mind that Tate Liverpool’s exhibition looks at Klimt’s considerable achievement in applied as well as fine art. Working with the architect Josef Hoffmann, Klimt created paintings that doubled as interior decoration. For instance, his 1901-02 portrait of Marie Henneberg was designed to fill a particular space on the wall of the Villa Henneberg, which had been built by Hoffmann. And, in return, Hoffmann organised his own architectural vision around Klimt’s artwork.

A 1903-04 portrait of Hermine Gallia, all grey and white, became the dominant motif when Hoffman came to design a boudoir for her a decade later. The stucco pillars and ceilings of the room echo Hermine’s pale gown, while the furniture, made to Hoffmann’s design, is in matching white enamelled wood. Years later he was to provide a coolly geometric tea and coffee service for Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, another wealthy Viennese whom Klimt had painted. The finished effect of these carefully integrated interiors was cool and uncluttered, about as far away from the Ruritanian ruffles of the old Viennese ruling classes as it was possible to get.

All the same, it is as the maker of richly exotic stand-alone artwork that Klimt will always be most celebrated. In 1908 he painted his masterpiece, The Kiss. It has been reproduced so many times and in so many contexts, that it often slips past us without registering fully. It consists, of course, of a man and woman in a moment of rapturous embrace.

She appears to be kneeling, raising her face towards his. Impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins, both figures are enclosed in golden capes. Critics have pointed to the semi-ceremonial feeling of the painting: the robes are priestly while the wreaths in the hair suggest that the viewer has stumbled upon some ancient fertility rite.

The overall effect of The Kiss is ancient, or perhaps timeless. And it is this ability to be both intensely of the moment and yet out of the reach of normal life that marks Klimt’s best work. His society ladies - Hermine, Margaret, Rose, Adele and his own Emilie - are presented to us both as products of a very particular moment in Viennese history, yet as uncannily contemporary women, too.

Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life in Vienna 1900’ is at Tate Liverpool (0151 702 7400), from 30 May until 31 August

* * * * *

Gustav Klimt’s $135 million legacy

Martin Gayford explores the history of Gustav Klimt’s most famous work Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I

Adele Bloch-Bauer (1881-1925) - delicate, Jewish and intellectual - was unhappily married to a sugar magnate, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, and may have had an affair with Klimt (scholarly opinions differ). At all events, she sat for two portraits, the first of which, completed in 1907, became Klimt’s most famous single painting.

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I

Adele Bloch-Bauer died aged 43, leaving a request that her two Klimt portraits and three landscapes be left to the Austrian state collection. But her husband fled to Switzerland when the Nazis took over Austria, and his possessions, including the Klimts, were confiscated. For many years they were regarded as Austrian national treasures.

Undaunted, Ferdinand’s niece and heir, Maria Altmann, and her lawyer E Randol Schoenberg - grandson of the composer - fought an epic legal battle for restitution of the pictures, which they finally won in 2006.

Subsequently, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (pictured) was sold in June 2006 for a reported $135 million, making it the most expensive work of art ever to change hands (until it was trumped, five months later, when film and music mogul David Geffen reportedly sold Jackson Pollock’s No 5 for $140 million).

Subsequently, Schoenberg and the Bloch-Bauer heirs continued the battle for a sixth Klimt with a different legal history: Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl (1918).

Last month, however, it was announced that the Austrian supreme court had rejected this claim.

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

One-Hundred-Eighty-Eight

Victorian erotica: the original cheeky girls

Ever wondered what our great grandparents got up to behind closed doors? A new collection of erotica leaves little doubt, says Guy Kennaway (London Telegraph, May 2008)

‘I bought my first erotic photograph in the mid-1980s,’ Danny Moynihan tells me. ‘I had come across some photos of Austrian origin of rather portly looking ladies in petticoats playing with sex toys. I thought they were rather amusing.’

A Parisian nude from the 1930s

Moynihan is an artist and a curator. He has collaborated frequently with his friend Damien Hirst and has written a novel - soon to be released as a film - satirising the art world. He is also the owner of one of the world’s largest collections of vintage erotica.

‘At the time I was buying and selling 20th-century photographs with the art dealer Paul Kasmin,’ he explains. ‘In those days photos didn’t really exceed $5,000, though we did own a Violin d’Ingres by Man Ray which we sold to the Getty for $10,000, but that was an exceptional piece.’

Woman on a cross-bar

So presumably, were the dozen or so pictures that started Moynihan’s collection of nearly 500 often explicit photographs, many of which decorate the walls of his Chelsea home, where I have come to meet him.

‘I think the Austrian photos were a few hundred dollars altogether,’ he says. ‘I got them from a German in New York, who just happened to have them on him at the time. I showed them to a few friends and enjoyed their reaction of shock, surprise and delight.’

It is no longer only Moynihan’s friends who will be surprised, possibly delighted, by the photographs. Nearly a third of his collection has been reproduced in a substantial coffee-table book being brought out by the art publisher Other Criteria. He puts it onto the table between us and gives the lady on the front a pat. ‘Not long after my first purchase I found these photos by Felix Moulin of Manet’s model for Olympia. Moulin had a way of photographing women that made them erotic but not pornographic. They were rather more expensive but it set me thinking about making a collection of erotic photos.’

A French model from 1880

The model lying naked on the couch is unquestionably the sublime woman in the iconic painting, whose body is instantly recognisable to all connoisseurs of fine art. ‘Manet worked a lot from photographs, rather than live models,’ Moynihan explains.’It’s well documented. If you look at his pictures you can see they are unmistakably photographic.’

Moynihan would certainly object to his collection being described as filth. Instead, he divides it into five categories including ‘the sensual nude, ethnographic tribal nudes, medical photos, posed studio tableaux and straight pornography’. Quite a lot seems to have changed in the world of pornography since these photographs were taken. The invention of the ladies’ razor, for one. Most of the women have their (often wrinkled) stockings on, the men their socks. This might have been considered saucy, intended to represent the haste of the liaisons, or it may simply have been cold in the photographers’ studios.

Inside the hareem - a portrait from the 1850s by H. Arnoux

Moynihan taps the book again. ‘I adore this one, early 1850s woman, but you can hardly notice the pussy.’ I raise my eyebrows. Then I notice there’s a kitten in the folds of her pulled-up can-can dress.

‘The most I have paid for one is $5,000 - when the dollar was a dollar and not a rupee’ - he adds urbanely. ‘I think it was three or four years ago. As time went on I became more discerning, and could see when something really good came up.’

Young Parisian model, c1900, photographed by Angelou

We go past a couple of photographs of a cupboard full of what was then shameful police evidence of sexual perversion but would now not look out of place in an Ann Summers shop window. Another shows a man eating a meal off a tray and prodding the generous buttock of a woman with his fork.

‘A lot of these pictures were photographed by a Frenchman called Monsieur X,’ says Moynihan. ‘His whole collection came up for sale in the Forties, when he died. Nobody was allowed to know his real name. The auctioneers in Paris were bound by the terms of his will to silence. Some people even today have their suspicions, but nothing is known for certain about him. He was obviously an amateur.’

I stare at the shot of a woman on her elbow wearing a revealing pair of knickers with slack elastic. ‘Very personalised,’ he adds softly, ‘note the grainy quality. She’s unorchestrated, unposed; you sense it was all done for himself, whoever Monsieur X was.’

Is there lots of competition between collectors? ‘There are a few collectors. I know they exist - but I don’t want to know them,’ he says. ‘To be part of a tribe of porn collectors would be rather seedy. It’s a curiosity, not an endeavour. If I come across them I get them.’

It’s Moynihan’s personality that gives Private Collection its charm. He doesn’t take the book or the subject of erotica very seriously. Perhaps this is because he has so many other things going on: at 48, he is a happily married father of two, has written the screenplay for the forthcoming film of his novel, Boogie Woogie, throws parties full of famous names and faces, has houses here and there, and an ever changing collection of art.

French model, 1930s

‘I love this one,’ he says, drawing my attention to yet another photo. ‘Great background.’ His finger alights, rather incongruously, given the content of the rest of the picture, on a bedspread. ‘Look at that textile,’ he coos, ‘isn’t it beautiful? And the wallpaper in this one,’ he says, ignoring the cavorting ladies and gentlemen on the bed and tapping the wall behind an upturned Victorian buttock. ‘William Morris,’ he says, ‘an amazing, early Edwardian interior.’

Has he ever bought contemporary pornography? ‘No, no, no, no,’ he answers, distaste at the very thought flitting across his face. How old does a photograph have to be to get into his collection? ‘Recently, 1930s,’ he says, ‘though I am getting more and more into the 1950s and 1960s stuff. It’s so posed, so of the period.’

I ask whether he has ever thought of taking erotic photographs himself. A faint smile appears on his inscrutable face. ‘I’ve never had a stab,’ he says. ‘Maybe I should. I am coming to the age when that kind of thing crosses the mind.’

‘Private Collection: A History of Erotic Photography 1850 to 1940’ is published by Other Criteria at £55. The book contains explicit material. For more information, see othercriteria.com

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©