Klimt, Successionists, and Vienna

In July, 2006, I took a trip to Europe with Ben, my 16-year old son. We visited palaces, churches, and museums in Vienna, Trieste, and Venice. It was a heavy dose of European history, religion (Christianity) and arts. By looking at numerous outstanding examples, we got a pretty good understanding of the Byzantine (12^th to 13^th centuries), Gothic (13^th to mid 15^th centuries), Renaissance (15^th and 16^th centuries), and Baroque (17^th century) architectures. It was fascinating to learn the philosophy and politics of Benedictine monastery, and intriguing stories of the lives of Franz Josef and Elizabeth (Sisi), the legendary figures in the 19^th century Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Being in Vienna, it is hard to resist the power of music. One can smell Mozart in the air. We also had a good exposure of some of the Renaissance artists such as the sculptor Giambologna (Jean Boulogne) and the painter Tintoretto. The most impressive experience to me, however, was the Viennese Succession art, led by the painter, Gustav Klimt.

Klimt has been one of my favorite artists for many years. My first encounter with Klimt’s work was in the early 80^th. After I graduated from college, I was assigned as a biology teacher in “Pu-ming Teaching School” in “Pu-dong” area (Yes, this is the most glamorous financial district in Shanghai today. But back then, it was a vast farmland that nobody wanted to go). I wanted to come to America, but the government’s policy prohibited young students to go abroad. I was stuck, felt no hope for the future, and did not know what to do. I became interested in Western arts. I met a friend, Fan, who was a young art teacher in the same school. We became close friends. She was the one who taught me art history, and influenced me to develop a life-long interest in art. We spent a lot of time talking about impressionists, post-impressionists, Vincent van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso, etc. For the purpose of teaching, the school bought a set of 2000 slides, all masterpieces of Western arts. Fan particularly liked the way Klimt painted woman’s skin. “Look,”, she pointed at the slides “Danae” projected on a big wall, “in the background of gold or other dark colors, he painted the flesh so vividly as if they were still alive, with circulating blood underneath” (Fig. 1). Fan also liked decorative art, and often played with lines, shapes of different colors. She thought about how those could be used in daily utensils, furniture, and cloths. She felt that Klimt’s work was quite decorative, and suited her tastes. Under her influence, I began to pay attention to Klimt, and thought that his paintings of flowers may look good on window drapes and woman’s long skirts.

Years later, when I was studying at Cornell Medical College in New York, I went to a special Klimt exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum. There I got a first look of some of Klimt’s originals. I appreciated what Fan meant by Klimt’s skill to paint nude bodies. If one pays a close attention to details, there are actually numerous colors on an apparently white skin. Klimt’s composition and his use of colors were also extraordinary. However, I liked the works after his “golden phase”, perhaps due to my personal experience of hardship. There were not so much glamorous ornamentation, splendid décor, or yearning of eroticism, but more revelation of darkness, death, and helplessness. I bought a good sized poster of “The Virgin”, and framed it in a black metal frame myself (Fig. 2).

Our first stop was Vienna, where I attended 5^th Forum of European Neuroscience (FEN). On the first day of the conference, I went to a public lecture by Eric Kandel (Fig. 3), a professor of neurobiology at Columbia Univ., who received Nobel Prize in 2000 for his work on learning and memory. The title of his talk was “The Vienna School of Medicine and the origins of Austrian expressionism”. Sounds like he was going to talk about Vienna and arts instead of science! I knew Kandel well, both about his work and him as a person. When Yi Rao and I were young graduate students in Shanghai Medical College, the first scientific talk I ever gave was to introduce Kandel’s work. I have been working in a similar field for many years and met him a couple of times. And I have read his recent biography “In search of memory”, and knew his roots in Vienna. I was still surprised that he could so comfortably talk about arts in front of 5000 European people! I was really amazed that a man of almost 80 years old could still have that much energy and passion. His fascination to his new book and his love of Vienna arts were truly contagious. This is it. This is why people like Kandel could win Nobel Prize. Their childish zeal, their ego to impress people, their constant appetite for new challenges not only make impossible happens, but also make themselves young at heart.

Kandel is a master in making connections between seemingly unrelated things. He first tried to link Sigmund Freud, the world-renowned Viennese psychoanalyst, to neuroscience. I felt that this was a bit far-fetched. Freud was a philosopher, or at the best a psychologist, not a neurobiologist. He developed theories to interpret human behavior, rather than performing experiments to test hypotheses. He is most famous for attributing many human behaviors to sexual drive. But I could see that talking about Freud was a brilliant way for Kandel to build the bridge between neuroscience and art, the main topic of his talk. This allowed him to talk about how Klimt was influenced by Freud, a man of Klimt’s contemporary. Freud was known for his theories on human sexuality and death, two subjects that constituted the main themes of Klimt’s work. “Death and Life”; “A Girl in Dream”; “The Kiss”; “Adams and Eve”, you name it. One can easily see “pre-shadows of death” and “erotic mosaic” in Klimt’s paintings.

From Klimt, Kandel went on to talk about other artists in Vienna at the turn of the 20^th century. He was particularly fond of Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. These two and Klimt together are known as Expressionists. Instead of talking about Kokoschka’s work, Kandel talked a lot about the passionate love affair between Kokoschka and Alma Mahler, the widow of the great composer Gustav Mahler, and an elegant society beauty considerably older than himself. One of Kokoschka’s greatest works, “the Tempest” shows Kokoschka’s distorted relationship with Alma Mahler, and his dark emotion (Fig. 4). Egon Schiele was another successor of Klimt. Even more than Gustav Klimt, Schiele made eroticism one of his major themes and was briefly imprisoned for his strange behavior. He died when he was only 28, but his paintings have a self-pitying adolescent spirit that has a powerful impact on viewers. Kandel showed some of his personal collection of Schiele’s drawings. This must have made him feel so good.

It was undeniable that Freud’s psychology had a great influence on Viennese Succession artists. As farfetched as it was, Kandel had built a successful argument for exchanges of ideas among scientists, and even between scientists and artists. “In the old days, Freud and Klimt may chat over coffee at Café Central. Today we discuss our new findings at the FEN meeting”. I went with Morgan Sheng and other to Café Central. The atmosphere there was truly tempting for intelligentia. Kandel also pointed out the strong desire of the succession artists to show their unique contributions, to distinguish themselves from their contemporaries as well as the historical giants, and to have a legacy in the art world. “Every generation should have its own mark in history”, Kandel said. “And this was particularly difficult in Vienna, where masterpieces are just around the corner”. I think he was talking about himself. “This was one of the important driving forces for scientific discoveries”, I remember he wrote this in his biography.

Ben and I went to Belvedere the next day. This was the summer palace of Price Eugene, a French-born nobleman who served three consecutive Habsburg emperors as a general and statesman in 18^th century. The building and the garden are baroque at their extreme. One can only marvel how such an extravagant palace was built. In addition to its large collection of European masterpieces from Medieval to the present time, it has key works by expressionists such as Egon Schiele’s “The Embrace” and “Death and the Maiden”, Oskar Kokoschka’s “Still Life with Dead Lamb”. And finally, “The Kiss” and “Judith I”, the most popular works of Klimt (Fig. 5 and Fig. 6). These are the best illustrations of Klimt’s style. There is so much detail in the background. The overwhelming gold in the garments and lavish colors on the ground give breathtaking seduction difficult to resist. The rectangular and circular ornamentations on the gown are symbolic of man and woman. Of course, one cannot escape the perpetual subject “woman”, which dominated in Klimt’s art.

It was when we visited the Succession building that we finally appreciated the true spirit of Viennese Succession. This was a building where successionists exhibited their work. Its façade is just like Klimt’s painting, with entwined gold leaves on the upper wall and a gold dome (Fig. 7). A famous Succession quote “To every age its art, to art its liberty” engraved in gold on the front wall. In the basement is Klimt’s famous “Beethoven Frieze”, a 34-meter long wall painting on the subject of Beethovan’s 9^th symphony as interpreted by Richard Wagner. Succession was a kind of rebel against overwhelming establishment of classic art in Vienna. “We want to declare war on sterile routine, on rigid Byzantinism, on all forms of bad taste…” The successionists wanted to be different and unique, and to some extent they succeeded.

It was no wonder that Succession was born in Vienna, which at the turn of the century witnessed a cultural flowering unparalleled anywhere else. There were the architects Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, the writers Karl Kraus and Arthur Sschnitzler, the composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schonberg… On top of those, there was Sigmund Freud. Artists and intellectuals developed enormous creativity, torn as they were between reality and illusion, between the traditional and the modern, between glorious past and uncertain future. The romantic bourgeois, splendid banquets, inordinate love of pleasure, had a catalytic effect on the cultural environment. It was out of this “laboratory” that Klimt and Succession art grew.

Klimt has clearly left a mark in the history of arts. Do we have the “cultural environment” for a unique contribution in the history of science? Is “anti-dogmatic” or “anti-establishment” a way to do it?