EGON
SCHIELE’S
WOMEN
≥
Jane Kallir
≥
Prestel
Munich ≥ London ≥ New York
Published by Prestel, a member of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH
© 2012 Prestel Verlag, Munich • London • New York
text © 2012 Jane Kallir
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kallir, Jane.
Egon Schiele’s women / Jane Kallir.
pages cm
ISBN 978-3-7913-4648-9 ( hardback)
1. Schiele, Egon, 1890-1918 — Criticism and interpretation. 2. Women in art. I. Title.
N6811.5.S34K354 2012
759.36 — dc23
2012025152
Editorial Direction: Ryan Newbanks
Picture Research: Monica Davis
Editing and Indexing: Jane Friedman
Design: Gina Rossi
Production: Astrid Wedemeyer, Wolfram Friedrich
Origination: ReproLine Mediateam, Munich
Proofreading: Nicole Lanctot
Printing and Binding: Passavia Druckservice GmbH & Co. KG, Passau
Verlagsgruppe Random House FSC-DEU-0100
The FSC-certified paper Profibulk was produced by Sappi, Ehingen
Printed in Germany
ISBN 978-3-7913-4648-9 ( English edition)
ISBN 978-3-7913-4647-2 (German edition)
All artworks under copyright reproduced by permission
© Fondation Oskar Kokoschka / VG Bild-Kunst: figs. 6, 200. © The Munch Museum /
The Munch Ellingsen Group / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012: figs. 7–9, 89. © Eberhard Spangenberg /
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012: 4. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012: fig. 190
Frontispiece: Detail of Kneeling Girls Embracing, 1911 ( fig. 117 )
To Schiele’s women, and especially to the women
whose support of Schiele scholarship has been my inspiration:
Hildegard Bachert, Alessandra Comini, and
my grandmother Fanny Kallir
•
References to artworks by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele include
citations from the following catalogues raisonnés:
Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele: The Complete Works ( New York, 1990; 1998 )
[ Paintings are designated by the prefix P. and drawings by the prefix D. ]
Alice Strobl, Gustav Klimt: Zeichnungen, vols. I – IV ( Salzburg, 1980 – 89 )
Alfred Weidinger, ed., Gustav Klimt ( Munich / New York, 2007 )
CONTENTS
Introduction
•
9•
I
The Woman Question
Gender and Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century Austria
19 •
•
II
Family: Marie, Melanie, and Gerti (Gertrude) Schiele
( 1890 –1910 )
•
37 •
III
The Women of the Streets
( 1910–1911 )
•
83 •
IV
Wally ( Valerie / Walburga ) Neuzil
( 1911–1915 )
•
117 •
V
Edith Harms Schiele
( 1914–1918 )
•
181 •
Afterword
•
269 •
Notes
•
272 •
Biographical chronology
•
285 •
Bibliography
•
295 •
he first catalogue raisonné of Egon Schiele’s work in all media, which I
wrote in 1990 and expanded in 1998, was divided into two parts: a biography and the catalogue proper.1 There were several reasons for this
approach. Most of the substantive research on Schiele’s life had at that
point been completed. The early memoirs by people who had known
the artist, such as Heinrich Benesch and Arthur Roessler, had been analyzed and supplemented by more objective investigations.2 Alessandra Comini’s 1974 book
Egon Schiele’s Portraits was not only the first significant biography in English, but the first
to incorporate information gleaned from lengthy interviews with Schiele’s surviving friends
and relatives.3 Christian Nebehay’s 1979 Schiele Dokumentation was another major landmark,
comprising the vast majority of extant letters to and from the artist, along with other contemporary written material.4 It therefore seemed prudent to assemble all this information in a
comprehensive biography.
The biography also served as a useful complement to the catalogue raisonné, facilitating the
dating of the art via coordination with concurrent events in the artist’s life. In cataloguing the
art, it had become evident that Schiele not only drew very quickly, he developed at an enormous
pace, especially in the years 1910 to 1915. The work unfolds in a diaristic fashion, changing
almost from one day to the next. Drawings and watercolors done in early 1910 differ markedly
from those done at mid-year, which likewise differ from those done in December. Schiele’s oil
paintings, which took longer to complete, on the whole evidence less dramatic stylistic transitions
≥
Detail of Self-Portrait, 1910 ( fig. 56 )
•
9
and serve different purposes. Whereas the watercolors and drawings remain quite intimate, the
oils were intended for a broader public and are often laden with heavy allegorical subtexts. It is
therefore unwise to generalize about Schiele’s artistic achievements. One must always ask: What
year are we talking about? Are we talking about the oils or the works on paper?
In the present publication, I have tried to interweave three salient strands of pertinent
material: historical context, biography, and art. The book begins with a general overview
of gender and culture in early-twentieth-century Austria. Subsequent chapters focus on the
women who dominated Schiele’s life and art, in roughly chronological order: his mother and
sisters; his early girlfriends; his first serious partner, Wally Neuzil; and, finally, his wife, Edith
Harms. At times, the women overlap: family subjects recur throughout the oeuvre, and Egon
began his courtship of Edith before ending the affair with Wally. Nevertheless, each woman
or group of women represents a particular phase, a particular approach to the subject at
hand. As Schiele’s relationships with the women changed, so, too, did his artistic representations of them, so much so that it can be hard to identify the various subjects (such as Wally
or the unnamed early models known as the “black-haired girls”) across time. Schiele’s shifting views of these women, as reflected in his work, also mirror the artist’s changing views of
female sexuality.
During the last several decades, the rising popularity of “Vienna 1900,” and in particular
of Egon Schiele, has fostered much new research on the period. Among the more focused
Schiele studies that have appeared since the publication of the 1990 catalogue raisonné are
Franz Wischin’s Egon Schiele und Krumau and Egon Schiele: “Ich Gefangener!” (“I, Prisoner!”)5;
Klaus Albrecht Schröder’s Egon Schiele: Eros and Passion6; Kimberly Smith’s Between Ruin and
Renewal: Egon Schiele’s Landscapes7; the exhibition catalogues Egon Schiele & Arthur Roessler:
Der Künstler und sein Förderer (The Artist and His Champion)8; Die Tafelrunde: Egon Schiele
und sein Kreis (The Roundtable: Egon Schiele and His Circle)9; Egon Schiele: “Das unrettbare
Ich” (The Unsalvageable Ego)10; and my own Egon Schiele: Selbstporträts und Porträts (SelfPortraits and Portraits).11 Overall, recent Schiele studies evidence a shift in approach from the
general to the specific, and from the biographical to the contextual.
The biographical orientation that characterized much fundamental early Schiele scholarship was necessary in part because the artist remained largely unknown outside Austria until
the 1960s.12 It thus made sense to sort through the basic facts of his life before attempting more
in-depth analyses of the work. Contextual interpretations were discouraged by the fact that
Schiele absorbed influences from many sources, some of which can be identified only by inference. Unlike modernists in France and Germany, Austrian artists did not cohere in stylistically
oriented groups, so intellectual connections among them are more difficult to document. A
final reason for the pronounced interest in Schiele’s biography is what may be termed the
romance of the Expressionist artist. Like Vincent van Gogh (an artist with whom he is often
compared), Schiele seemed to pour his soul into his work. The public is therefore naturally
curious to know what the artist was like as a person.
Schiele’s classification as an Expressionist rests on a broad, and today largely discredited,
definition of Expressionism as an art derived from subjective emotions.13 Even in Germany, its
≥
1. Kneeling Girl in Orange-Red Dress ( Gertrude Schiele )
1910. Black crayon, watercolor, and gouache on paper. 17 3 ⁄ 8 × 12 1 ⁄ 8 in. ( 44.2 × 30.7 cm ). Kallir D. 476
Leopold Museum, Vienna
•
10
•
11
•
12
putative birthplace, the Expressionist movement is hard to pin down conceptually.14 The art
historian Rose-Carol Washton Long describes the German Expressionists as a group united by
“a common (but not identical) outlook based on utopian hopes for a transformation of social
values and a genuine faith in the power of experimental color, form, space, and imagery to
assist in this transformation.”15 Schiele meets some, but not all, of these criteria. While he
believed in the redemptive potential of art, he had little faith in broad-based social renewal.
Stylistically, he shared some influences—most notably, an interest in Gothic sources—with
his German colleagues, but he was less interested than they in formalist experimentation for
its own sake. Based on his desire to deliver sweeping allegorical statements about the human
condition, Schiele could easily be labeled a late Symbolist rather than an Expressionist. In
many respects, he remains an outlier whose work, like that of van Gogh, Ferdinand Hodler,
Gustav Klimt, and Edvard Munch (all of whom he admired), is sui generis.
Delving deeper into Schiele’s idiosyncratic cultural context raises new, more complex interpretative possibilities. While Schiele’s biographers often focused on the post-adolescent artist’s
search for himself, recent scholars have connected these efforts to a wider search for the self,
a quest shared by many of his contemporaries. Pointing out that a central issue in fin-de-siècle
Austrian thought was “loss of faith in the notion of a central, stable, rational ego,” Kimberly
Smith suggests that “Schiele’s continuing probing into his own, and others’ identities emerged
from a disquieting sense that perhaps there was no self to be pictured.”16 Helena Pereña picks
up on this idea, writing that in Schiele’s work, “The self is no longer an unchanging constant from whose standpoint knowledge of reality is possible, but rather an ‘eternal coming’
or sometimes becoming.”17 Klaus Albrecht Schröder compares Schiele’s faces to masks and
feels that it is a mistake to talk of the artist’s “expressive body language,” since the figures do
not appear (to Schröder) to be communicating anything.18 The distinction between “Schein”
(seeming) and “Sein” (being), which Alessandra Comini identified in the work of Klimt and
Schiele, respectively, turns out, in the opinion of these later writers, to be illusory.19 If there is
no self, then everything is pretense.
Inasmuch as the search for self is intimately connected to sexual identity, fin-de-siècle
Austrian intellectuals were especially concerned with issues pertaining to sex and gender.
Schiele’s interest in erotic subject matter evolved naturally from this environment, yet his work
is often seen as being unusually transgressive. Obscenity charges first emerged in 1910, when
fourteen of the artist’s drawings were removed by the police from an exhibition in Prague,20
and continued with Schiele’s imprisonment on a morals complaint in 1912. Later, Oskar
Kokoschka repeatedly dismissed his competitor as a “pornographer.”21 The contention that
Schiele’s erotica served commercial rather than artistic ends was taken up by others and eventually handed down to present-day critics.22 A review of a 2011 Schiele exhibition at Vienna’s
Leopold Museum revisits the 1912 case and finds “Porno-Egon” guilty of child abuse.23 Even
today, many assume that the artist must have been emotionally disturbed, that the “mangled”
bodies in his paintings and drawings were expressions of a “mangled soul.”24
In fact, Schiele was probably the most “normal” of his colleagues. Unlike Alfred Kubin,
he never attempted suicide or suffered a nervous breakdown. He did not, like Kokoschka,
≥
2. For art and for my loved ones I will gladly endure to the end!
1912. Brush and watercolor on paper. 18 7⁄ 8 × 12 5 ⁄ 8 in. ( 47.9 × 31.9 cm ). Kallir D. 1189. Albertina, Vienna
•
13
commission an anatomically correct replica of an ex-girlfriend and then take the doll out on
dates.25 Nor was Schiele anywhere near as promiscuous as Klimt. Schiele was essentially a
serial monogamist, with a slight tendency to cheat. The artist’s preoccupation with sexuality, like his metaphysical questioning, is typical of late adolescence.26 Schiele explored these
issues when he was in his early twenties, and then, as he grew into adulthood, moved on.
Those who consider Schiele’s interests aberrant fail to take into account his relative youth
and exceptional creative precocity, which made it possible for him to express feelings older
men generally repress.
By most standard criteria, Schiele does not qualify as a pornographer. Not even his harshest
critics would contend that his work lacks artistic merit.27 Nor is there any evidence of prurient intent. To the contrary, many of Schiele’s nudes evoke fear or revulsion rather than erotic
arousal. “If the litmus test of pornography is that it excite the (typically male) viewer, then
Schiele is no pornographer,” writes the novelist John Updike. “His nudes, gaunt and splotchy
on the whole, make us tense and sad, even though many deserve to be called beautiful.”28
Indeed, it is the unpleasantness of Schiele’s work that some people find so unnerving.
Discussing the distinction between art and pornography, the art historian Kenneth Clark
noted, “To my mind art exists in the realm of contemplation, and is bound by some sort of
imaginative transposition. The moment art becomes an incentive to action, it loses its true
character.”29 Lynda Nead, who has written extensively about the nude in Western art, expands
on Clark’s interpretation, commenting that, unlike pornography, “Erotic art legitimizes the
presentation of the sexual through the assertion of form, which holds off the collapse into the
pornographic. Erotic art takes the viewer to the frontier of legitimate culture; it allows the
viewer to be aroused, but within the purified, contemplative mode of high culture.”30 Aesthetics
perform a distancing function, removing the naked woman from base reality and transforming
her into an object of artistic contemplation.
As Nead explains, “One of the principal goals of the female nude has been the containment and regulation of the female body.” Continuing in this vein, she writes that, because “the
body’s boundaries cannot be separated from the operation of other social and cultural boundaries . . . bodily transgression is also an image of social deviation.”31 Schiele’s willful, repeated
violation of the aesthetic devices that had traditionally been used to defuse representations of
the female nude unleashed the power of the feminine “other” and thereby called into question
the efficacy of rational masculine control. The transgressive nature of Schiele’s work resides
less in its content than in its form.
Many of Schiele’s nudes were covert, probably unwitting, attacks on the dominant patriarchy. For this reason, although his work was widely collected by male connoisseurs of erotica
(both during his lifetime and later), it has also evoked the strongest negative feelings (ranging
from mild discomfort to outrage) in heterosexual male viewers. And it is probably also for this
reason that some of the most original and objective Schiele scholarship has been produced
by women, such as Alessandra Comini, Danielle Knafo,32 Helena Pereña, Renée Price,33 and
Kimberly Smith. Although most of Schiele’s lifetime patrons were men, American collectors
such as Gertrud Mellon and Alice Kaplan played a central role after World War II. Last but
≥
3. Kneeling Female
1913. Pencil, watercolor, and gouache on paper. 18 1 ⁄ 2 × 12 1 ⁄ 2 in. ( 46.9 × 31.7 cm ). Kallir D. 1285. Leopold Museum, Vienna
•
14
•
15
not least, Schiele has been a significant influence on contemporary women artists, among
them Marina Abramovic´,34 Vanessa Beecroft, Marlene Dumas, Tracey Emin, Nan Goldin, and
Sherrie Levine.35 As Dumas observes, “Schiele’s . . . bony young girls are more of our time than
of his time. . . . They know what they are doing. And they do it with their bodies.”36
Egon Schiele was like the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” proclaiming a nakedness
no one else dared acknowledge, though it was there for all to see. Schiele’s women were his
partners in this process. That does not mean they were his equals; by the standards of the time,
such a leap would have been impossible. Nevertheless, Schiele could not have achieved what
he did without these women. This book is their story.
≥
Female subjects so dominate Schiele’s oeuvre that it is surprising the artist’s women have not
heretofore been systematically studied. Nonetheless, while the present publication may represent an obvious addition to the Schiele literature, preparation of this book was not easy, and it
required the assistance of a great many friends and colleagues. First and foremost, I owe a huge
debt of gratitude to my Schiele “family,” who have been at my side since I first began researching
the artist over thirty years ago. Hildegard Bachert, my partner at the Galerie St. Etienne, has a
historic involvement with Schiele that dates back to the 1940s and includes work on Otto Kallir’s
1966 and 1971 catalogues raisonnés. Hildegard, who collaborated with me on my own 1990/98
Schiele catalogues, once again proved an insightful reader, advisor, and translator. Alessandra
Comini, whose early Schiele studies were aided by Hildegard and Otto Kallir, returned the favor
by applying her wide-ranging art historical knowledge and keen editorial instincts to early drafts
of this manuscript; the final product is undoubtedly far richer for her input. My father, John
Kallir, who grew up in Vienna in the 1920s and ’30s, provided a welcome additional perspective
based on his personal experiences as well as his profound understanding of Austrian literature
and history. The late Fanny Kallir (John’s mother and Otto’s wife) translated Edith Schiele’s
diary and a number of other German-language sources for me in the 1980s. She remains with
me in spirit, just as her translations continue to ease my burden. Last and certainly not least, I
am happy and fortunate that my husband, Gary Cosimini, traveled with me on this latest Schiele
journey, as he did back in 1979, when we first went to Vienna together.
Beyond the circle of my immediate Schiele “family,” I would like to express my heartfelt
appreciation to the staff at the Galerie St. Etienne, who assisted with this publication in so
many essential ways. Courtney Donner, Fay Duftler, and Elizabeth Marcus read and reread
the manuscript multiple times, helping me clarify ambiguities and thereby refining the narrative’s flow. The gallery’s staff was also enormously helpful with the mundane tasks that go into
the preparation of any manuscript—such as typing captions and collating illustrations. In this
regard, Hannah Bary deserves special mention and thanks for her expert and diligent scanning
of the images.
I am extremely fortunate to also have a wide circle of helpful colleagues in Austria. There
is nothing like a quick reply to an email when one is searching for an essential, elusive bit of
•
16
information! I am extremely grateful to the following for so willingly, promptly, and intelligently
responding to my queries: Marian Bisanz-Prakken at the Albertina; Robert Holzbauer and
Sandra Tretter at the Leopold Museum; Hansjörg Krug at the Antiquariat Christian Nebehay;
Ursula Storch at the Wien Museum; and Alfred Weidinger at the Belvedere. I would also like to
thank the many museums, dealers, and collectors throughout the world who provided images
and graciously allowed works from their collections to be reproduced in this book.
My outermost circle of collaborators is in some ways the most crucial, for without the support of my publisher, Prestel, this book would not exist. Monica Davis was responsible for
tracking down a plethora of obscure images, and Jane Friedman for the diligent copyediting of
my text. The German Prestel team proved equally diligent: Clemens von Lucius not only coordinated the German- and English-language editions to ensure consistency, but also proved
an extraordinarily erudite fact-checker; Ute Hasenkamp's translation of my text is virtually
flawless, achieving a fluent ease that belies the true complexity of her task. I am extremely
grateful, too, to the designer, Gina Rossi, for making my words come alive by so creatively
integrating them with Schiele’s art, and to my editor, Ryan Newbanks, for pulling everything
together. Thanks to you all!
≥
•
17
The
Gender and Culture in Early-20th-Century Austria
I have lived in an age of transition, in the midst of the emancipation of
women. It was then the woman who seduced and lured and betrayed
the man. . . . In the age of transition, man became the weaker sex.1
— Edvard Munch
Diary entry, 1929
uring the years when Egon Schiele came of age, artists, writers, scientists, and philosophers throughout Europe were preoccupied with what
was commonly referred to as the “Woman Question,” or, more bluntly, the
“Woman Problem.” Over the course of the nineteenth century, industrialization had gradually shifted the focus of economic activity away from the
domestic farmstead. As men ventured forth to earn their living through
entrepreneurship and the capital markets ( if they were lucky ) or in factories ( if they were not ),
the premise that “a woman’s place is in the home” became increasingly untenable, and, at the
same time, a matter of great concern for those determined to maintain women’s historically
subordinate role.
A woman’s position in fin-de-siècle Europe depended on her social class and marital status.2 Women who lacked a male provider often did not have the luxury of remaining in the
home, but their professional options were severely limited. Although mechanization had made
it possible for women to perform some manufacturing tasks that were previously restricted to
men, women were paid significantly less, and “special protection” rules enforced de facto gender discrimination. Drawn to cities in search of a living wage, many poor women ended up as
prostitutes. Women of a slightly higher social station might find employment as petty bureaucrats ( mainly in the postal and educational services ) or in shops selling “feminine” items such
as lingerie or sweets. Women’s occupational choices were further reduced by inferior education. Poor girls might attend elementary school ( Volksschule ), where they were drilled by rote
in grossly overcrowded classrooms. Bourgeois girls were usually tutored at home or sent to
“finishing schools” to learn the skills thought necessary to make a good marriage: languages,
music, handicrafts, household management, and etiquette. Secondary school ( Gymnasium )
and university were more or less off-limits.
≥
Detail of Gustav Klimt’s The Beethoven Frieze: The Hostile Forces, 1901 – 02 ( fig. 15 )
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19
Not surprisingly, the women’s emancipation movement was riven by class divisions and
ideological differences. The German socialist-feminist Clara Zetkin believed that proletarian women were united with proletarian men in their joint opposition to capitalism, whereas
bourgeois women were fighting the men of their own class.3 While socialists like Zetkin sought
nothing less than the overthrow of the entire economic and political order, bourgeois feminists
for the most part advocated reform within the existing system. Many bourgeois feminists were
relatively content with their lot and advocated employment rights only for unmarried women.4
Austrian women’s associations and their leaders represented a broad array of positions. There
were Catholic groups and groups that were vehemently anticlerical, feminists who hated men,
and feminists who never questioned the patriarchy. In 1893, the various associations came
together under the rubric of the Allgemeine Österreichische Frauenverein ( General Austrian
Women’s Union ), but it remained difficult to craft a unified agenda.
Due to both their own disunity and fervent opposition from the male establishment, Austrian feminists progressed only slowly toward their goals. Suffrage was a less significant issue
than matters pertaining to employment ( such as equal pay for equal work ) and motherhood
( such as maternity benefits ). Understandably, great emphasis was placed on female education.
The first girls’ Gymnasium in Vienna was established in 1892. Five years later, the Austrian
Ministry of Education endorsed the expansion of educational and professional opportunities
for girls and women, but only insofar as the curriculum was “founded in the nature of woman.”
Full equality with boys and men was characterized as posing “a serious danger to women’s
mental stability and natural calling,” and, furthermore, as “harsh discrimination against men,
whose earning capability would be . . . diminished by competition, thereby jeopardizing the
establishment and preservation of the family.”5
In 1897, women were admitted to the philosophy department at the University of Vienna,
and in 1900 they were permitted to study medicine. Around 1901, Dr. Eugenie Schwarzwald,
a feminist who had earned her Ph.D. at the University of Zurich ( the first on the continent
to admit women ), opened a private school for girls in Vienna. Avant-garde luminaries such
as Oskar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, and Arnold Schoenberg would later lecture there, and in
1913 – 14 Loos designed the school’s building. ( Loos also found the Schwarzwald School to be a
convenient source of adolescent girlfriends.6 ) Relatively high tuition meant that the Schwarzwald School and other private Gymnasia were options only for the well-to-do. Public secondary
education for girls was not instituted until 1919, the same year that Austrian women gained
the right to vote. Women were admitted to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1920, and the
University’s department of Protestant theology in 1923. The department of Catholic theology
did not accept female students until 1946.
T H E F E M A L E “ T H R E AT ”
The changing roles of men and women in industrial society, which had spawned the women’s
emancipation movement, also fostered a plethora of scientific and pseudo-scientific studies on
gender difference. Coincidentally ( or not ), almost all these studies purported to offer “objective” proof of women’s inferiority. Charles Darwin’s writings provided ample grist for this mill.7
•
20
≥
Evolution, it was said, had given women smaller bones and brains than men, making them
inherently weaker and stupider.8 Just as hermaphroditic life forms had gradually evolved into
creatures with two distinct genders, theorists suggested that the human sexes had become
more sharply differentiated over time. “Masculine” characteristics still persisted in females,
as did “feminine” traits in males, but these were atavistic throwbacks that evolution would
eventually eliminate.9 Gender parity came to be associated with the threat of devolution or
degeneration, and human progress with male dominance. A number of these popular misogynistic concepts were neatly woven together in Otto Weininger’s hugely successful 1903 tract
Geschlecht und Charakter ( Sex and Character ).
Of particular concern to fin-de-siècle men was female sexuality.10 “The woman is devoted
totally to sexual matters,” Weininger explained, “that is to say, to the spheres of begetting and
reproduction.” She was, essentially, all vagina and no brain. Whereas “man possesses sexual
organs,” Weininger wrote, “her sexual organs possess woman.”11 It was feared that a woman,
propelled by the voracious hunger of her womb, had the power to lure a man to his death — if
not literally ( by infecting him with a sexually transmitted disease ), then figuratively. “Sexual
union, considered ethically, biologically and psychologically, is allied to murder,” Weininger
declared. “It is the negation of the woman and the man; in its extreme case it robs them of their
consciousness to give life to the child.”12
Fear of women’s sexuality was reflected in the Freudian concepts of castration anxiety and
its female counterpart, penis envy. A baby, Sigmund Freud opined, was a natural penis substitute for a woman. Intellectual or professional ambition in a woman, on the other hand,
was symptomatic of unhealthy penis envy.13 The fin-de-siècle imagination ran wild with fantasies of what females could do to males. Images of deadly temptresses turn up repeatedly in
the early work of the Austrian artist Alfred Kubin ( fig. 4 ). Another incarnation of the femme
•
21
4. Alfred Kubin, Earth: Mother
of Us All
1900. Pen and ink and wash on paper.
6 3 ⁄ 4 × 15 1 ⁄ 2 in. ( 17 × 39.4 cm ). Private
collection
fatale was the popular subject of Judith, flaunting her breasts and, simultaneously, the head
of Holofernes, whom she has seduced and then
decapitated in his sleep ( fig. 5 ). Frank Wedekind’s anti-heroine Lulu ( later the subject of
an opera by Alban Berg ) murders one lover
after another until she is finally done in by Jack
the Ripper.14 Here, as in Oskar Kokoschka’s ca.
1909 drama Murderer, Hope of Women ( fig. 6 ),
the battle lines are clearly drawn: it is kill or
be killed.
The idea that a man’s sexual desires make
him vulnerable to women’s malevolent predations is a recurrent theme in the work of the
Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. Even at its
apogee, as in the various works titled The Kiss
( fig. 7 ), love seems to entail for Munch a dangerous loss of self, a melting into the “other”
that is woman. The inevitable outcome of such
debilitating passion is depicted in Vampire
( fig. 8 ). Describing this work, Munch’s friend
Stanisław Przybyszewski wrote: “The man
there rolls and rolls in abysmal depths, without
will, powerless. . . . He cannot rid himself of the
vampire, cannot rid himself of the pain either,
and the woman will always sit there, biting
forever . . . with a thousand poison fangs.”15
Munch’s view of the opposite sex is summed
up in a series of paintings and prints entitled
The Woman ( fig. 9 ). The artist here offers three
alternative visions of his subject: as virgin,
whore, and nun.
•
22
≥
5. Gustav Klimt, Judith I
1901. Oil on canvas. 33 1 ⁄ 8 × 16 1 ⁄ 2 in.
( 84 × 42 cm ). Weidinger 147. Belvedere,
Vienna
6. Oskar Kokoschka, Murderer,
Hope of Women
Ca. 1909. Pen, brush, and ink with
white heightening on transparent
paper. 8 5 ⁄ 8 × 7 1 ⁄4 in. ( 24.7 × 18.5 cm ).
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
•
23
•
24
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7. Edvard Munch, The Kiss IV
1902. Color woodcut on paper.
18 3 ⁄ 8 × 18 3 ⁄ 8 in. ( 46.7 × 47.7 cm ).
Albertina, Vienna
8. Edvard Munch, Vampire II
1895 – 1902. Color lithograph and
woodcut on paper. 15 1 ⁄4 × 21 3 ⁄ 4 in.
( 38.7 × 55.2 cm ). Munch-museet, Oslo
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THE MADONNA AND THE WHORE
Staples of Christian iconography, the “Madonna” and the “whore” acquired new relevance
amidst fin-de-siècle worries about female emancipation. In Catholic Austria, the notion of a
distinction between asexual “good” women and evil nymphomaniacs had special traction,
even among Jewish thinkers like Freud. Freud believed that “Libido is invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature,” and that “normal” women sublimate their sexual desires in
the service of bearing and raising children. “Exaggerated sexual cravings” in a woman were
regarded as a symptom of hysteria.16 The psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing concurred.
“If normal in her intellectual development and well brought-up,” he wrote, “[ a woman ] has
very little sensual desire.”17
Gustav Klimt’s work was decisively shaped by the Madonna / whore dichotomy. His famous
portraits of Viennese society ladies resemble Byzantine or Russian religious icons. Little faces
peek out from vast expanses of ornamentation, which not only conceal the women’s bodies
but render them flat and virtually sexless ( fig. 12 ). The subjects’ erotic power is subsumed
within a sensuous decorative surround. In Klimt’s allegorical paintings and many of his studio
drawings, on the other hand, sexuality is addressed in an extremely forthright manner ( figs.
14, 15, 112 –14 ). Often, the women appear lost in an erotic swoon, seemingly oblivious to their
charms, yet nonetheless ruled by them. Writing enthusiastically about Klimt’s nudes, the Viennese critic Hermann Bahr echoed Weininger: “Everything about the woman belongs to lust,”
he observed. “Every part of woman is ‘sex.’ ”18
In his personal life, too, Klimt conscientiously toed the line separating the bourgeois
“Madonna” from the common whore. Although it has been rumored that he slept with some of
his wealthy clients, it is likely that class differences between the artist and his patrons largely
precluded sexual intimacy.19 For the most part, Klimt’s lovers came from the lower echelons of
society. Modeling ( that is, removing one’s clothes for money ) was tantamount to prostitution
in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Klimt’s studio housed a virtual harem, filled with naked women who
posed for him, serviced him sexually, and gave birth to his illegitimate children ( at least six
of whom — several named Gustav — are known to have existed20 ). At the same time, the artist
maintained what seems to have been a platonic, lifelong friendship with Emilie Flöge, the sister of his brother’s wife.21 It has been suggested that Klimt refused to marry Flöge because, like
many promiscuous men of his generation, he had contracted syphilis.22
Fin-de-siècle men wanted to believe in the existence of the “pure” woman, but they also
wanted — needed — their whores. Indeed, the latter were required to secure the existence of
the former. As Wedekind noted, “The whore protects the young man . . . from smashing like
an inhuman monster into bourgeois society on account of his accumulated and thereby degenerate lechery.”23 Social and economic inferiority kept the prostitute safely sequestered in a
separate realm. There, she could be romanticized as a “fallen woman” or “whore with a heart
of gold,” stereotypes dating back to the Biblical figure of Mary Magdalene. Max Klinger’s 1884
etching cycle, A Life, tells the story of such a woman, who, after being abandoned by her lover,
descends Into the Gutter! ( fig. 13 ) before ultimately being redeemed by Christ. Male sympathy
was offered as compensation for female humility and loss.
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9. Edvard Munch, The Woman II
1895. Hand-colored aquatint and etching on paper. 11 3 ⁄ 8 × 14 in. ( 28.7 × 33.5 cm ). Munch-museet, Oslo
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10. Gustav Klimt, Study for the
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I
1904 – 06. Black crayon on paper.
17 1 ⁄ 2 × 12 1 ⁄4 in. ( 44.4 × 31 cm ). Strobl
1118. National Gallery of Canada,
Ottawa
11. Gustav Klimt, Study for the
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I
1904 – 06. Black crayon on paper.
17 1 ⁄ 2 × 12 1 ⁄4 in. ( 44.6 × 31 cm ). Strobl
1137. National Gallery of Canada,
Ottawa
12. Gustav Klimt, Adele BlochBauer I
1907. Oil on canvas. 55 1 ⁄ 8 × 55 1 ⁄ 8 in.
( 140 × 140 cm ). Weidinger 184. Neue
Galerie New York. This acquisition
made available in part through the
generosity of the heirs of the Estates of
Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer
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The süßes Mädel ( sweet young thing ), a stock figure in the plays of Arthur Schnitzler, was
another character in this mold. She was the sort of lower-class girl who might find work in a
Viennese milliner’s shop while trolling for a husband among the bourgeoisie. The chances of
such a girl ever marrying into the upper class were slim, however, and the süßes Mädel was
fated to be betrayed. A relationship with one of these women was appealing precisely because
it entailed no serious obligations. Schnitzler, himself an incorrigible adulterer, knew well the
phenomenon of which he wrote, and his compassion for the literary süßes Mädel did not necessarily extend to her real-life counterparts.
The secret fear that all women are whores haunted men like Schnitzler, who despite his
own philandering grilled his lovers relentlessly about hypothetical past indiscretions.24 His
most famous play, Reigen ( known in the U.S. by its French title, La Ronde ), depicts an endless
circle of infidelity in which both sexes are equally culpable. There was of course good reason
to suspect that Freud’s paragon — the asexual bourgeois “Madonna” — did not in fact exist. and
this belief was readily transformed into a rationale for the most extreme forms of misogyny.
Weininger and his followers went so far as to aver that any expression of intelligence, compassion, or moral decency by a woman was merely a subterfuge, designed to lure men into
her web. “In . . . the absolute female,” Weininger proclaimed, “there are no logical and ethical phenomena, and therefore the ground for the assumption of a soul is absent.”25 Weininger
hereby provided the ultimate argument for restricting or eliminating female participation in
masculine civil society.
PRIMITIVE DESIRES
Beyond the Madonna / whore divide, lay a deeper philosophical chasm. For centuries, the male
had been associated with civilization, culture, spirituality, and intelligence, and the female
with primitivism, nature, lust, and instinct. While the former qualities were for the most part
considered positive and the latter qualities negative, there was a contrarian line of thought,
derived from the eighteenth-century writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which idealized the
“noble savage.” In the late nineteenth century, as European intellectuals grew increasingly
dissatisfied with “rational” civilization, an alternative cult of the “primitive” emerged. Rebelling against bourgeois norms, Expressionists such as Kokoschka and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
educated themselves at local ethnographic museums, appropriating the stylized forms and
bright colors of tribal art. Hermann Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde followed the French artist
Paul Gauguin to the South Seas. Posing their naked models outdoors in the countryside, the
German Brücke artists achieved a perfect synthesis of primitivism, nature, and feminine sexuality. Woman thus became the emblem of man’s revolt against convention without in any sense
being divested of her inferior cultural associations.
The celebration of female sensuality did not make a man a feminist. The Austrian architect
Adolf Loos and his friends, the writers Peter Altenberg and Karl Kraus, claimed to adore women,
yet all three could be scathingly misogynistic. Altenberg believed that “ The ‘beautiful’ woman is
placed on earth by the creator to awaken the world power of man.”26 Kraus agreed that female
sexuality was “the primal spring at which the intellectuality of man finds renewal.”27 At the same
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13. Max Klinger, Into the Gutter!
1880 – 84. Etching and aquatint on cream wove paper. 7 3 ⁄ 8 × 6 5 ⁄ 8 in. ( 18.7 × 16.8 cm )
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UNVERKÄUFLICHE LESEPROBE
Jane Kallir
Schiele's Women
Gebundenes Buch mit Schutzumschlag, 304 Seiten, 24,0 x 34,0 cm
ISBN: 978-3-7913-4648-9
Prestel
Erscheinungstermin: August 2012