Klimt and the Precedent of Ancient Greece by Lisa Florman

Gustav Klimt and the Precedent of Ancient GreeceAuthor(s): Lisa FlormanReviewed work(s):Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 72, No. 2 (Jun., 1990), pp. 310-326Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3045736 .

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Gustav Klimt and the Precedent of Ancient Greece

Lisa Florman

The Viennese painter Gustav Klimt was a cultural hero during his lifetime; today critical appraisals are more reserved, if anything underestimating the sophistication of the artist's interests and aims. The present essay, intended as a partial corrective, examines one area of particular interest to Klimt: the art of Greek antiquity. Throughout his early career, Klimt freely appropriated ancient Greek imagery, primarily Archaic motifs as opposed to the more restrained and highly mimetic works of the Classical tradition. Several of Klimt's paintings indicate that his interest in the Archaic period was aroused by Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, a book that had many admirers among Vienna's intellectual community. The artist seems to have been especially impressed by Nietzsche's assertion that Germanic culture could only be revived by an art that was the equivalent of the tragedies born of Archaic Greece. The following article suggests that in the richly ornamented paintings of his "Gold Period," Klimt intended to create the painterly equal of such drama.

"It is only an overemphasis," George Steiner has written, "to say that the history of thought and of feeling throughout the nineteenth century draws essential force from a reflection on Hellenism, from an attempt at once analytic and mimetic to grasp the sources of the Attic achievement."' The same might be said of nineteenth-century painting and sculpture, of certain fin-de-sidcle works no less than the avowedly Neoclassical art of the century's first few decades. It will be argued here that the paintings of the Vien- nese artist Gustav Klimt represent just such an active en- gagement with Greek antiquity, and that they too "draw essential force from a reflection on Hellenism."

Apart from discussions of a few select figures and motifs, relatively little has been written on this aspect of Klimt's art.2 His paintings' references to ancient Greece are more often treated as instances of Viennese eclecticism, or the residue of a traditional education, than as part of any co- herent program. Although Klimt appropriated images and ornamental designs from the art of many cultures, ancient Greece received his most sustained and, I hope to show, thoughtful consideration. In his deliberate formulation of a personal style, Klimt, like earlier and more conservative artists, turned to ancient Greece for example. Yet his understanding of the "Attic achievement" was radically different from theirs.

Some measure of the difference can be obtained by com-

paring Klimt's Pallas Athene of 1898 with another, almost exactly contemporary image of the goddess, the central figure of Theophil Hansen and Karl Kundmann's Reichsrat Fountain (Figs. 1 and 2). Hansen, a Danish architect and a devout Philhellene, had been awarded the commission for the Reichsrat, or Parliament, based on his plans for a building in the Greek style. He believed that the "noble, Classical forms would produce with irresistible force an edifying and idealizing effect on the representatives of the people,"3 and Kundmann's Athena Fountain was an inte- gral part of that plan. Fronting the Ringstrasse and backed by an impressive array of statues representing Thucydides, Polybius, and other Greek historians, the fountain's giant figure of Athena stood in her dual roles as protectrix of the polis and goddess of wisdom.4

No doubt both Hansen and Kundmann hoped that the statue's pose and attributes would evoke associations with what was perhaps the greatest civic monument of all time, the Athena Parthenos of Pheidias. Although the Parthenos itself was no longer available for direct imitation, some- thing of its character had been preserved in subsequent sculptures and in several ancient literary accounts. These served as the immediate sources for Kundmann's statue. He carefully modeled his goddess after the Athena Hope/ Farnese type, which Adolf Furtwangler had recently judged, on the basis of its "marvellous and peculiar beauty," to

I would like to thank all of those who read this paper in one of its several incarnations for their invaluable comments and criticisms: Professors Theodore Reff and Richard Brilliant, the anonymous reader for the Art Bulletin, Lisa Kapp and, as always, David Weinberg. I also owe a general debt of gratitude to Professor Evelyn Harrison, who helped to fuel my own interest in the art of ancient Greece.

1 G. Steiner, Antigones, Oxford, 1986, 1. 2 The most thorough treatments of the subject are M. Bisanz-Prakken,

"Zum Gemalde 'Pallas Athene' von Gustav Klimt," Alte und moderne Kunst, xxi, 1976, 8-11; and Kilinski, 1979 and 1982.

3 From a conversation with Hansen related by E. Seuss, Erinnerungen, Leipzig, 1916, 171-172, and quoted by Schorske, 41.

4 See Schorske, 43, for a discussion of the fountain in the context of Hansen's plan.



GUSTAV KLIMT AND THE PRECEDENT OF ANCIENT GREECE 311

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1 Karl Kundmann, Athena Fountain, 1896-1902. Reichsrat, Vienna (photo: Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek)

2 Gustav Klimt, Pallas Athene, 1898 (photo: Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien)



312 THE ART BULLETIN JUNE 1990 VOLUME LXXII NUMBER 2

reflect a Pheidian work only slightly later than the Par- thenos itself.5 For the gilding of Athena's helmet and aegis, however, Kundmann had to rely on the testimony of ancient authors, who described at length the enormous quan- tities of gold Pheidias used in making the cult image. Ro- man copies of Greek originals were typically devoid of such colorful ornamentation, with the result that artists ever since the Renaissance had been producing sculptures made of unadorned white marble in conscious imitation of the ancient examples known to them.6 Centuries of tradition had given false support to a belief in a Greek art stripped to its essentials: a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur ("eine edle Einfalt und eine stille Gr6sse") were characteristics Winckelmann attributed to it, in language that denoted both aesthetic and moral qualities. For Winckelmann, Greek art was the antithesis of Baroque exuberance and of what he perceived as the decadent hedonism of the Rococo. To the extent that color and ornament were associated with sensualism, they were decried by academics well into the nineteenth century as reducing the moral value of the work of art. To paint a statue, or to adorn it (as Kundmann had) with gold, risked introducing an irrational element that was decidedly unclassical.

Although it may still be rather difficult to imagine brightly ornamented Greek sculpture,7 there is today at least general agreement on the facts of the matter. Such was not the case throughout most of the nineteenth century, when the debate over the coloring of statues held a particular urgency for scholars and artists alike.8 A brief digression into the history of the debate therefore seems in order, to establish the proper context for Klimt's and Kundmann's Athenas, and to gain a fuller understanding of exactly what was at stake in their choosing to ornament the goddess as they did.

The proscriptions against polychromy had actually met their first major challenge before mid-century, with the publication of polemical works on the subject by Gottfried Semper and J.I. Hittorff.9 Because the Greek War for In- dependence had rendered most of the important Classical sites inaccessible, Hittorff traveled instead to Sicily and

Southern Italy to study the early Doric architecture there. Extrapolating from the remaining traces of paint he found on those temples, Hittorff produced full-color reconstruc- tions of them, and argued that architecture throughout the Greek world had been painted similarly. Hittorff's restorations of brightly colored metopes and yellow stucco to the temples at Selinus were controversial enough, but Sem- per's views were even more inflammatory; he described a Parthenon covered entirely in red, with contrasting touches of green, purple, and gold.1' Both men also believed that freestanding sculpture - the figures' flesh and draperies alike - had borne comparable amounts of color, and their views helped to kindle a debate that raged for the better part of the century, until the great excavations of the final decades provided sufficient empirical evidence for a partial resolution. In 1885, archaeologists on the Acropolis dis- covered a deposit of statues that had been destroyed during the Persian invasion and subsequently buried by the Ath- enians. These unweathered fragments furnished undeniable proof that at least Archaic period sculpture had originally been painted, if perhaps not quite so luridly as imagined by Hittorff and Semper."

Three years after the first polychromed statues were excavated from the "Persian rubble," Klimt painted his version of Pallas Athene (Fig. 2). Its colors are borrowed straight from Semper's palette: a predominantly green background with subtle tints of purple, patches of red that make up in intensity what they lack in surface area, and, above all, gold. Kundmann, in gilding his statue, may have risked the disapproval of conservative academicians for the sake of historical authenticity and decorative contrast, but Klimt let gold completely dominate his image, carrying it far from either noble simplicity or quiet grandeur. The rad- ical truncation of Athena's figure, effected by her placement in the immediate foreground, allows her metallic, Gorgon-emblazoned aegis to occupy fully one third of the canvas. In place of the Classically-featured gorgoneion worn by the Parthenos and recreated by Kundmann, Klimt chose a typically Archaic prototype for his image: the be- headed Medusa from one of the metopes of Temple C at

s A. Furtwangler, Meisterwerke der griechischen Plastik, Berlin, 1893, 110-111.

6 An interesting aside to this discussion is the fact that Thomas Hope, the original owner of one of the Athena statues that had served as Kund- mann's model, added colored glass eyes to the sculpture's empty sockets, again in a deliberate attempt to recreate the impression of Pheidias's cult image. On this, and on the whole debate surrounding the relation of the Hope/Farnese type to the Parthenos, see A. Preyss, "Athena Hope und Winckelmanns Pallas," Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archiiologischen Insti- tuts, xxviii, 1913, 244f.

7 See J. Boardman, Greek Sculpture: The Archaic Period, New York, 1978, 80-81.

8 On the polychromy debate, see especially H. Bliimner, Technologie und Terminologie der Gewerbe und Kiinste bei Griechen und R6mern, Leipzig, Il, 1884, 200f.; G. Treu, Sollen wir unsere Statuen bemalen? Berlin, 1884; T. Alt, Die Grenzen der Kunst und die Buntfarbigkeit der Antike, Berlin,

1886; and M. Collignon, La Polychromie dans la sculpture grecque, Paris, 1898.

9 G. Semper, Vorliiufige Bemerkungen iiber die bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten, Altona, 1834; and J.I. Hittorff and L. Zanth, Ar- chitecture antique de la Sicile: Recueil des monuments de Segeste et de Silinonte, Paris, 1825; 2nd ed., 1870.

10 For an illustration of Semper's polychromatic restorations of the Par- thenon, see M. Fr6hlich, Gottfried Semper: Zeichnerischer Nachlass an der ETH Ziirich, Basel, 1974, 215.

11 Also relevant to our discussion is a polychromed marble head of Ath- ena, believed to be a copy of the Parthenos, that was excavated in 1885 from the Gardens of Sallust in Rome. The following year - the same year that Kundmann began work on his statue and just two years before Klimt painted his Pallas Athene - the head was exhibited in the Berlin Museum and a colored illustration of it appeared in the museum's Antike Denkmiiler, 1886, T, pl. II.




Ivip

3 Metope from Temple C at Selinus, The Beheading of Medusa, ca. 550 B.c. Palermo, Museo Nazionale (from O. Benndorf, Die Metopen von Selinunt, pl. i)

Selinus (Fig. 3).12 The graphic savagery of this Archaic Gor- gon, with its crossed eyes and wide grimace, more closely approximates the image of Athena's armor created by Homer:

And across her shoulders she threw the betassled, terrible aegis, all about which terror hangs like a garland. And Hatred is there, and Battle Strength, and heart-freezing Onslaught, And thereon is set the head of the grim gi- gantic Gorgon, a thing of fear and horror, portent of Zeus of the aegis.

(Iliad v. 738 ff, trans. Richmond Lattimore)

The scaly aegis with its hideous gorgoneion is made even more monstrous in Klimt's painting through visual associations. In the background behind Athena is a depiction of Herakles' fight against Triton, greatly enlarged but otherwise accurately copied from an Archaic black-figure hydria (see Fig. 4).13 The image of the struggling hero was

4 Painter of Vatican G43, Attic black-figure hydria with Hera- kles and Triton. Last quarter of the 6th century B.c. Toledo, Museum of Art (from Kilinski, 1982, fig. 2)

almost certainly intended as an allusion to the Vienna Secession's own fight for freedom.14 Yet the selection of this particular hydria, to convey a theme that was, after all, a staple of Athenian art,15 perhaps owes more to the visual analogy it establishes; the gold-outlined scales of the bestial fish-tailed Triton rhyme remarkably well with the scales of Athena's aegis. Klimt seems to have been bent on substantiating, and even exaggerating, the old moralistic warning that the sensuous application of ornament would under- mine the rational purity of the image.

In fact, sensual irrationality pervades the Pallas Athene. Not only is it evident in the application of gold, it is explicitly personified in the small naked figure of Nike, here less an emblem of military victory than of sexual liberation. Even Athena, the goddess of wisdom, is presented in a similar light. The bright red coloring of her lips, hair, and peplos create an aggressively unclassical tone, made all the more disturbing by her gilt martial regalia. Klimt substi- tuted a Corinthian battle helmet for the more purely cer-

12 Although Hittorff included a colored engraving of this metope in the 1870 edition of his Architecture antique de la Sicile (pl. 28), the detail is

greater in Klimt's painted version. The modeling of the eyes and mouth in particular could only have been copied from a photograph, most probably the first plate in O. Benndorf's Die Metopen von Selinunt, Berlin, 1873, reproduced in Fig. 3.

13 Klimt probably copied the vase from an engraving published in E.F.W. Gerhard, Auserlesene griechische Vasenbilder, hauptsfichlich etruskischen

Fundorts, Berlin, 1843, 11, pl. 111. This is also the opinion expressed by A. Greifenhagen, Griechische Vasen auf Bildern des 19. Jahrhunderts, Hei- delberg, 1978, 29, n. 69, and Kilinski, 1982, 106.

14 Kilinski, 1982. 15 On a poster for the Secession done earlier that same year, Klimt had used Theseus's battle with the Minotaur to make a similar statement.




emonial variety worn by the Parthenos. He probably copied the replacement from an example displayed in Vienna's Kunsthistorische Museum.16 Yet whatever its specific source, the metal helmet with its narrow openings makes Athena's face appear masklike and unsettling, akin to the apotropaic gorgoneion below. In fact, the two are left to play off one another continuously, the Gorgon joined to Athena by the column of her neck and framed by the tresses of her hair.

The cumulative effect of these associations is to destroy completely the notion of Classical order and harmony, the world of "sweetness and light," in Matthew Arnold's sac- charine phrasing. Klimt's confrontational Athene seems to demand from the viewer a re-vision of antiquity, surrounded as she is by painstakingly accurate renderings of actual Greek works that assert the historical legitimacy of this image. By placing Athena, the consummate Classical goddess, against a specifically Archaic background, Klimt effectively undermined the authority of the entire Classical tradition. His painting envisions and celebrates a darker, irrational past for Athena, a past that had been completely repressed in her Pheidian incarnations from the Parthenos to Kundmann's Reichsrat statue.

Still, this new conception of Pallas had not sprung full- grown from Klimt's imagination. The painting, in fact, marks a fairly late stage in the development of his thinking on ancient Greece, and of his interest in Archaic art in particular. That interest had been encouraged by the tremen- dous archaeological advances made in the relatively brief span of Klimt's lifetime.17 Numerous important excavations throughout the Greek world brought to light Archaic originals in unprecedented number and quality. Klimt was af- forded the opportunity, denied artists of the previous generation, to study such works in museums and especially in publications - large, lavish folio volumes that undoubt- edly appealed to the Secessionist interest in book design.18

In many ways, the enthusiastic reception of Archaic works in the German-speaking world had been prepared a generation before, through the early writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.19 Nietzsche, perhaps more than any other writer, awakened interest in Archaic Greece by revealing the de-

cisive role it had played in the formation of Hellenic art and society. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argued that the critical neglect of the preclassical had left a distorted impression of Hellenic culture. He reproved that "conception of Greek antiquity which endured through the centuries [and which] clung with almost unconquerable per- sistency to the pink hue of cheerfulness - as if there had never been a sixth century with its birth of tragedy, its mys- teries, its Pythagoras and Heraclitus, as if the works of art of the great period did not exist. .. ."20 It was perhaps one of the fortunate coincidences of history that the intellectual picture of Archaic Greece sketched by Nietzsche was filled out so shortly thereafter by the major archaeological discoveries of the late nineteenth century. It was, at any rate, a coincidence that Gustav Klimt turned to great advantage in his art.

Many who have written on this period, foremost among them Carl Schorske, claim that the Secessionists, and Klimt above all, "attempted to project the ideas of Nietzsche in a credible art."21 Usually such observations - like those on Klimt's interest in ancient Greece - are made in con- nection with only one or two paintings and remain at the level of fairly general iconographic interpretation. In the remarks to follow, I will attempt to extend this line of inquiry into the "Nietzschean" character of Klimt's work, and to show how closely it is intertwined with his admiration and understanding of (particularly Archaic) Greek art. I hope to demonstrate that these two interests, in Archaic art and in Nietzsche's philosophy, provide strands of con- tinuity throughout the evolution of Klimt's personal ornamental style. The task is complicated somewhat by a lack of documentary evidence substantiating Klimt's appreciation (or, for that matter, awareness) of the German phi- losopher. Certainly Vienna's cultural and intellectual circles, in which Klimt traveled, were permeated by Nietzsche's ideas.22 But Klimt was unhelpfully reticent on this as on most subjects; he rarely spoke of his own work and almost never committed any statement to paper. One of the few comments that has been preserved is his ad- monition that "whoever wants to know about me, as a painter - the only topic of any interest - should study

16 Kilinski, 1979, 98, fig. 15. 17 See A. Rumpf, Archiiologie, Berlin, 1953, i, 92f., for a general summary and discussion of the excavations conducted during this period. 18 Our knowledge of the books on ancient art that Klimt owned or had access to is woefully incomplete and largely circumstantial, as his library was not kept intact. Among the papers preserved in the Stadtbibliothek Wien is a receipt indicating that Klimt had a standing order for the mul- tiple volumes of B. Graif's Die antiken Vasen der Akropolis zu Athen, Berlin, 1909-1925 (see Nebehay, 53). Kilinski (1979, 99, n. 4) reports that a copy of H. Schrader, Auswahl archaischer Marmorskulpturen im Ak- ropolismuseum, Vienna, 1913, which was owned by Klimt, appeared for sale in 1977. In some cases, although documentary proof is lacking, we can be fairly confident that Klimt relied on a particular book for certain illustrations. E. Gerhard's Auserlesene griechische Vasenbilder for ex-

ample, seems the only likely source for the previously discussed Herakles and Triton vase, then in the collection of the Comte de Pourtalks-Gougier. Gerhard's volumes were perhaps especially appealing to Klimt for the

manner in which the vase paintings were flattened out, already assimilated to the two-dimensional surface of the page. 19 See E. Langlotz, Griechische Kunst in heutiger Sicht, Frankfurt-am- Main, 1973, 15-16. 20 Nietzsche, 78-79. 21 C. Schorske, "MOMA's Vienna," New York Review of Books, 25 Sep- tember 1986, 19. See also the essay on Klimt in Schorske's Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, 221 and 228-231; W. Hofmann, Gustav Klimt, London, 1972, 18-27; and among others, Greifenhagen (as in n. 13), 30. 22 Nietzsche's belief that Germanic culture could be reborn on the Attic model enjoyed a particularly wide currency in Vienna's artistic commu-

nity. On the broad popularity of his philosophy among the Austrian avant-

garde, see W.J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria, New Haven, 1974. Schorske, 230, discusses some members of these circles whom Klimt knew well, particularly Max Burckhard, a "Nietzschean law-

yer" and editor of the Secessionist journal Ver Sacrum.




my pictures with care, and try to draw from them what I am trying to do."23 He has left us little choice in the matter. The following, therefore, is a chronologically ordered analysis of individual works, through which I hope to trace the development of Klimt's art and thought. It should be ac- knowledged at the outset that Klimt's "development" is not strictly linear. As with any work carried out on a complex problem over the course of many years, progress came in fits and starts and even backtrackings, with patrons' de- mands and other interests intervening all the while. To the extent that it is possible, I have avoided discussion of these latter concerns, important as they are, in order to focus more clearly on the problem at hand.

Greek Art and The Birth of Tragedy Klimt received his early training at the Kunstgewerbe-

schule, a school for primarily commercial and applied arts that had been opened recently in Vienna. It was there that he, along with his brother Ernst and another fellow student, Franz Matsch, formed an artistic company that received several prestigious commissions for the decoration of newly erected Ringstrasse buildings. The first of these, and the most significant for the present discussion, was for the ceiling decoration of Vienna's Burgtheater. The commission called for a series of eleven paintings chronicling the history of the theater, from its origins in antiquity through sev- enteenth-century performances of Shakespeare and Mo- liere (Fig. 5). Six of the eleven paintings, well over half the surface area of the ceiling, were given over to subjects drawn from ancient Greece. Of these, four were executed by Klimt, including a pair of paintings, one at each end of the room, representing the Altar of Apollo and the Altar of Dionysus. The contraposition of these two images to frame a pictorial history of the theater seems a clear reference to Nietzsche's assertion that tragedy was born from the combined powers of the Greek gods Apollo and Dion- ysus. In turn, the emphasis on tragedy manifested in the ceiling decorations is explained by the sort of works that were performed at the Burgtheater. In contrast to the Volk- soper, where light comedies by Offenbach and others were performed, the Burgtheater produced great tragedies: Oed- ipus, Hamlet, Faust.

The Burgtheater's repertoire and the decorative program of its ceiling were both designed by Adolf von Wilbrandt, artistic director of the theater at the time the painting was undertaken.24 Although Klimt was not responsible for de- veloping the general iconography, he almost certainly chose the images that he himself would paint. In any case, it is clear that his involvement with the project would have in- troduced him to Nietzsche's ideas, had he been previously unfamiliar with them.

Nietzsche's central thesis in The Birth of Tragedy (originally published as The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music) was that the drama of ancient Greece had been

LEFT WING RIGHT WING

PAINTINGS ABOVE THE DOORWAYS

G. KLIMT G. KLIMT Altar ofApo/llo Atar of Dionysus

CEILING PAINTINGS

F. MATSCH G. KLIMT Ancient Improvisation Thespian Chariot

G. KLIMT F. MATSCH Theater of Taormina Scene from the

Ancient Theater

F. MATSCH G. KLIMT Medieval Mystery Play The Globe Theater

OVER ENTRANCE TO AUDITORIUM

E. KLIMT E. KLIMT Carnival Harlequin Le Malade Imaginaire

5 Diagram of the ceiling decoration over the staircases of the Vienna Burgtheater

driven by two aesthetic impulses: the Apollonian, which was characterized by order and restraint, just those qualities that Winckelmann had celebrated in antiquity; but also the wilder, irrational drive toward ecstasy and self-aban- don that dominated the earliest Dionysian festivals. Nietzsche agreed with Winckelmann that the Apollonian impulse found its perfect expression in Classical Greek sculpture, but he claimed that it offered at best an incomplete understanding of ancient civilization. He reproached those who shared Winckelmann's vision for turning a deaf ear toward music and the other Dionysian elements of early Greek culture, elements that had played a leading role in the creation of Attic tragedy. "We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics," Nietzsche wrote at the open- ing of his book,

S.. once we perceive not merely by logical inference, but with the immediate certainty of vision, that the con- tinuous development of art is bound up with the Apol-

23 Nebehay, 40. 24 Ibid., 88.




Ionian and Dionysian duality. Through Apollo and Dionysus, the two art deities of the Greeks, we come to recognize that in the Greek world there existed a tre- mendous opposition, in origin and aims, between the Apollonian art of sculpture, and the nonimagistic, Dion- ysian art of music. These two different tendencies run parallel to each other, for the most part openly at var- iance; and they continue to incite each other to new and more powerful births, which perpetuate an antagonism, only superficially reconciled in the common term "art"; till eventually, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic "will" they appear coupled with each other, and through this coupling ultimately generate an equally Dionysian and Apollonian form of art - Attic tragedy.25

In giving visible form to this Apollonian and Dionysian duality, Klimt utilized the smooth "photographic" style of the Burgtheater cycle's other, historicizing tableaux - a descriptive realism designed to provide its audience with what Nietzsche claimed was the "immediate certainty of vision." Concerned that the images be as accurate as they were illusionistic, Klimt immersed himself in the study of ancient art,26 including, it would seem, the most recent archaeological discoveries. For example, he enclosed each of the Apollo and Dionysus altars in elaborate U-shaped structures derived from the great Altar of Zeus at Perga- mon. Excavations of the Pergamene Altar had only just been completed, so that its reconstruction in Berlin's Staat- liche Museen was being carried out concurrently with the decoration of the Burgtheater ceiling. Even more relevant to the Altar paintings' Nietzschean message are Klimt's de-

pictions of the two cult images. He gave Apollo the hand- some features and flowing hairstyle of the Early Classical "Kassel type" representations of the god.27 For Dionysus's image (Fig. 6), Klimt instead chose an earlier, Archaic style, whose pronounced linearity and broad areas of patterning are particularly striking in comparison with the softer, more

fully modeled sculpture of Apollo. Also in contrast to

Apollo's image, which appears in the form of a herm, Dion-

ysus's cult "statue" is composed of a squared pillar sur- mounted by what seems to be a mask: a face only, without neck or shoulders. This highly unusual configuration is ac-

tually consistent with Dionysian imagery of the Archaic period; in fact the Altar painting's entire composition (Fig. 7) has precedents in a number of early fifth-century vases, including a kylix by Makron (Fig. 15) that Klimt, a decade later, would copy more directly.- On these vases maenads dance in celebration at the altar of Dionysus, who is represented by the same type of bearded mask, once again placed atop a column or pillar.29 Even if Klimt's translation of this imagery has a peculiarly nineteenth-century cast - in comparison with their Archaic prototypes, the Burg- theater maenads seem moved more by the spirit of languor than of music - his Altar paintings are nonetheless impressive for their accurate display of ancient Greek styles and iconography, and for the sophistication with which these are used to convey Nietzsche's conception of the Apollonian/Dionysian duality. The knowledge of both Nietzsche's philosophy and ancient Greek art that Klimt gained from this early project provided him with a store of images and ideas that he would draw upon throughout his career.

The Significance of Ancient Ornament The group's next large commission was a series of paint-

ings for the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna. The

paintings were designed to fill the main stairway's span- drels and intercolumnations with figures and ornamental motifs borrowed from each of the major historical periods represented in the museum's collection. The space provided for forty-two separate paintings, of which Klimt did eleven, including both of the images of Greek antiquity.

Klimt himself would later acknowledge the importance of the Kunsthistorische Museum murals in his artistic development; they were the earliest of the paintings he selected for the retrospective survey of his work published in the Secessionist journal Ver Sacrum.30 Of these paintings, significantly, it is the two of ancient Greece, Athena and the Girl from Tanagra (Figs. 8 and 9), that art historians

point to time and again as heralds of Klimt's mature style. Certainly these two images have the most direct descen- dants in his later oeuvre, with paintings such as Music II

(Fig. 14) and of course the Pallas Athene of 1898 (Fig. 2). But their importance is even more far-reaching, and to

25 Nietzsche, 33. 26 See also Comini, 10. 27 It is difficult to judge how closely Klimt copied the type because of the

painting's height from the floor and the poor quality of photographic reproductions. From what can be made out, the Apollo seems to resemble a head in the Barracco Collection in Rome, especially in its elaborate treatment of the hair. For illustrations of the Apollo Altar and the Bar- racco head respectively, see J. Dobai and S. Coradeschi, L'Opera completa di Gustav Klimt, Milan, 1978, 91, fig. 39F; and Furtwangler, 377, fig. 53.

28 See the discussion of Klimt's Music I and Music II (Figs. 12 and 13) below. 29 Sometimes, as is the case on the Makron kylix, the pillar is clothed in an elaborate robe; at other times it is left bare. For a discussion of the

Dionysiac imagery of these vases, and illustrations of others of the type,

see the entry on "Der Maskengott" in the Lexicon Iconographicum My- thologiae Classicae (LIMC), miii, 424f; and A. Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, Oxford, 1968, 30f. Klimt probably knew the Makron kylix from E. Gerhard, Trinkschalen und Geflisse des K6n-

iglichen Museums zu Berlin, Berlin, 1848-50, pl. iv.v, a source he seems to have consulted on at least one other occasion (see n. 38). Gerhard, 5, in his description of the vase, says: "Vor einem giebelf6rmig bedeckten, von einer Palmette bekr6nten und mit fliessenden Blut benetzten Altar ... ist das Idol eines efeubekrintzen biirtigen Dionysus aufgerichet. Nicht als kunstreich durchgefiuhrtes Standbild erscheint dies Idol, obwohl, zu- mal wenn Fiisse angedeutet sind, minder unbeholfen als einige ihnliche Dionysusbilder sich zeigen; hier kann es ein Akrolith sein, aus Haupt, Fiissen und einem Saulenschaft bestehend, welchem des Gottes Festkleidung

umgehingt ist."

30 March 1898. See Novotny and Dobai, 295.




6 Gustav Klimt, The Altar of Dionysus, detail. 1886-1888. Burgtheater, Vienna (from W. Hoffmann, Gustav Klimt, pl. 15)

7 Gustav Klimt, The Altar of Dionysus, 1886-1888. Burgtheater, Vienna (from J. Dobai and S. Coradeschi, L'Opera completa di Gustav Klimt, fig. 39)

understand their significance fully, it is necessary to see how the Greek murals fit into the decorative program as a whole.31

Despite frequent claims to the contrary, the Museum

paintings are neither conventional allegories nor simple personifications of the periods they are intended to represent. Rather, they refer to the art of each period, through images characteristic of the age. Thus the biblical hero David is the representative not of the Israelites, but of the Florentine Renaissance. Much of the confusion surround-

ing the status of these figures arises from Klimt's deliber-

ately disorienting portrayal of them. His David bears little likeness to either Donatello's or Michelangelo's statues, as his Athena resembles no other image of the goddess so much as his own later version. Compounding the ambiguity, Klimt used a clear, volumetric modeling and an abundance of descriptive detail to animate his figures, and to throw

them into sharp relief against the flat, ornamental designs with which they are paired. (For example, a characterist-

ically Greek meander pattern and several trails of grapevine provide the contrasting two-dimensional backdrop for Athena.) As a result, the depicted works of art seem to

spring into life; the walls play host to a Pygmalionesque gathering of the history of art there in the stairwell of the Kunsthistorische Museum.

The Girl from Tanagra departs somewhat from the structural scheme just described. Instead of a flat backdrop of classical ornament, the painting's shallow space is filled with several works of Greek art: a small statuette of Aphrodite,

31 For a complete list of the paintings in this cycle, and illustrations of those by Gustav Klimt, see Nebehay, 99-105.




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8 Gustav Klimt, Athena, 1890-91. Spandrel painting in the stairway of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (from Novotny and Dobai, Gustav Klimt, fig. 48)

which Klimt modeled after a bronze in Naples,32 and a much larger than life-size version of a black-figure amphora now in the Vatican Museum.33 Although Aphrodite clearly seems to have been added to heighten our awareness of the Tan- agra maiden's sensual charms, the vase's presence is perhaps more enigmatic. To a large extent, the format of such Archaic amphorae may have motivated its inclusion; the vase's juxtaposition of figural representation with ornamental bands recalls the arrangement of the adjacent spandrel paintings. Klimt's selection of this particular amphora, however, was probably guided by the mythological subject it bears. On the belly of the vase is an image of Herakles at one of his labors, luring the dog Cerberus away from the gates of Hades. In the context of his deeds, the en- counter with Cerberus represents Herakles' closest brush with death and his ultimate triumph over it. The dispro- portionately large scale of the amphora in Klimt's painting seems to indicate that its message is intended as a comment on the girl from Tanagra as well. The enlargement not only fills the background with ornament, it allows the Archaic imagery to be seen and appreciated by the viewers below.

Excavations of the Boeotian city of Tanagra had been carried out during the course of the 1870s and eighties. Of particular interest to artists were the yields of the cemetery:

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9 Gustav Klimt, The Girl from Tanagra, 1890-91. Intercolum- nar panel from the stairway of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (from Novotny and Dobai, fig. 56)

thousands of terracotta statuettes, most of them representing young women simply standing or engaged in every- day activities.m Clearly the Girl from Tanagra is meant to personify these figures, as the spandrel Athena drew life from the Parthenos and other Greek statues of the goddess. No doubt Klimt was intrigued by the delicate charm of the Boeotian terracottas, so seemingly full of life, but even more by their almost paradoxical placement within the grave chambers. The simple but appropriate comment offered by

32 It is a tribute to both Klimt's familiarity with ancient art and his skills at draftsmanship that, of the nearly forty extant bronzes of this particular type, we have no difficulty in identifying the version in the Museo Na- zionale as his model. For a discussion of the type and an illustration of the Naples statuette, see M. Bieber, The Sculpture of the Hellenistic Age, 2nd ed., New York, 1961, 144 and fig. 606.

33 Identified and illustrated by Kilinski, 1979, 97, fig. 5. The vase belongs

to the Leagros group, as classified by J.D. Beazley, Attic Black-Figure Vase Painters, Oxford, 1956, 368, no. 107.

34 Terracotta statuettes were produced at Tanagra from approximately 625 to 200 B.C. The Hellenistic figurines of women, however, are the most common and best known. R. Higgins, Tanagra and the Figurines, London, 1986, 163f., deals briefly with the impact of the figurines' discovery on artists and the art market.




10 Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Joseph Pembauer, 1890 (photo: Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck)

the inclusion of the Vatican vase within the painting is that, like Herakles, the Tanagra maidens had returned from the underworld.

The Kunsthistorische Museum murals are especially im-

portant because Klimt adopted their strategy of combining two-dimensional ornament and fully modeled human figures in much of his subsequent work. His Girl from Tan-

agra, with its Archaic vase as backdrop, emphasizes the

significance of ornament throughout the Museum paintings. The Herakles vase, which we might ordinarily con- sider "mere decoration," instead serves to supplement the main image, to add to it a dimension of understanding (in this case by reinforcing the ontological ambiguity of the

figure). Klimt also would include Archaic vases, or selec- tions from them, with increasing frequency in his paintings, continually experimenting with their forms.

One such painting, commissioned the same year as the Kunsthistorische Museum murals, is the portrait of the musician Joseph Pembauer (Fig. 10). This time, instead of

copying a vase whole and rendering it illusionistically,

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Klimt extracted individual figures and motifs from at least three different Archaic vases and added them to the painted gold frame of his portrait. From an Attic black-figure amphora in the British Museum (Fig. 11), he copied the image of Apollo, reversing the color of his skin and garments so as to assimilate the figure to the other decorative elements, but otherwise remaining so faithful to the original vase as to reproduce a small crack extending across the bottom of the peplos.35

Prior to Nietzsche's analysis, Apollo had been the Greek deity most closely associated with music, the god whose kithara-playing had no equal. His presence on Pembauer's portrait was thus a fitting tribute to the Viennese musician. Klimt, in order to make the tribute even more clear, included a second kithara in the background of the canvas itself, with the scale of the instrument now the same as the figure of Pembauer. The tripod at the left edge of the frame, copied from a red-figure hydria by the Berlin Painter, 6 is likewise part of the iconography of Apollo. As the seat of the oracle, the tripod became a symbol both for the god

35 The crack has since become a full-fledged break, as seen in the photo reproduced here. This vase, and the others used in the Pembauer portrait, are discussed by Kilinski, 1979, 96-97.

6 J.D. Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1963,

209, no. 166. The identification of the Berlin Painter hydria, now in the Vatican Museum, was first made by A. Comini, Gustav Klimt, London, 1975, 10. See J. Boardman, Athenian Red-Figure Vases: The Archaic Pe- riod, London, 1975, fig. 157, for a more complete view of the vase.




12 Gustav Klimt, Josef Lewinsky as 'Carlos' in Clavigo, 1895. Vienna, Osterreichische Galerie (from Comini, Gustav Klimt, pl. 2)

and for his prophetic powers. Additionally, and perhaps more to the point of the portrait, tripods were awarded to mortals (Hesiod being the best known example) in recog- nition of their outstanding artistic performance.37

The other ornamental additions to the frame include motifs - for example, the two heads near the lower left corner - that were again directly appropriated from red-figure vases, though they have become part of a more personal iconography.m The elaborate Ionic column to the right, on the other hand, is an inventive adaptation by Klimt of a Greek motif. The patterned necking of the column includes

a band at the bottom that resembles, more than any ancient decoration, a piano keyboard. Its reference to Pembauer's fame as a pianist is clear and provides yet another instance of Klimt's interest in the signifying potential of ornament.

In retrospect, the Portrait of Joseph Pembauer marks an important step in Klimt's artistic development because its skillful manipulation of ancient Greek ornament coincides, both temporally and physically, with the painter's first use of gold. By excerpting individual motifs from vases, rather than illusionistically rendering them whole as he had in the Girl from Tanagra, Klimt restored the original two-dimensionality to the Archaic designs. As a result, the painting achieves an even greater separation into two modes: a descriptively detailed, seemingly photographic realism; and a flat, gold-colored, largely Greek-inspired ornamental mode, which serves as commentary on and complement to the other.

Complementary Modes: A Return to the Apollonian/ Dionysian Duality

Several years later, in 1895, Klimt adopted a format similar to that of his Joseph Pembauer for the portrait of another performer, the actor Josef Lewinsky as Carlos in Goethe's Clavigo (Fig. 12). Again two distinct modes are readily observable within the painting: a descriptively accurate style, in which the figure of Lewinsky is rendered, and a flat, ancient ornamental mode marked by the use of gold. Here gold is applied more sparingly than in the earlier work, now primarily to highlight the ancient motifs against the painted frame that, as before, encloses the portrait proper. These particular motifs have also been seen previously in Klimt's oeuvre. The tripod at the right is a mod- ification of Apollo's tripod from the Pembauer frame, while the trails of grapevine are taken over from the background of the Kunsthistorische Museum Athena. Paired with the tripod, the grapevine - throughout antiquity a symbol of Dionysus - now acquires a specifically Nietzschean meaning, a meaning that must be understood in its association with Lewinsky as a tragic actor.

Nietzsche's dualistic conception of the origin of tragedy informs the Lewinsky portrait. The nonvisual nature of Dionysus's art is conveyed through the relative emptiness of the painting's vined left edge. In contrast, a number of theatrical figures and masks, Apollonian images, spew from the tripod opposite, The Apollonian and Dionysian in the Portrait occupy what amount to the wings of a painted triptych, joined at the center by, and in, the figure of Lew- insky as the tragic prince Carlos. By modifying elements from his earlier paintings, Klimt, in this return to a Nietz-

37 Kilinski, 1979, 96.

38 The two heads are a quotation of votive heads depicted on a kylix by the Foundry Painter that is now in Berlin. (See J. Boardman [as in n. 36], fig. 262.2.) It is likely that Klimt worked from the reproductions in E. Gerhard, Trinkschalen und Gefiisse des kiniglichen Museums zu Berlin, Berlin, 1848-50, pls. ix.xii and xiii. As the name given to the Foundry Painter implies, this kylix (his Name Vase) depicts a sculptor's workshop and bronze foundry. It is possible that this association with artists induced

Klimt to include the heads in his own painting. (However, it seems that he mistook the shape of the head on the right, omitting the neck and beard, probably because the latter is painted on the vase in the same black slip as the background.) The small spade and "G.S." to the right of the heads are the trademark of Spaten beer, which also seems to have had special associations for Klimt with a group of his artist friends. See Nebehay, 116 (fig. 170) and 118.




schean theme, achieved the structural equivalent of the Burgtheater ceiling design, which he had worked on some seven years before (Fig. 5). In each case the composition is framed by the Apollonian/Dionysian duality, the space between filled with the creative product of their union.

That same year Klimt produced another work with Nietzschean underpinnings, though this time an exclusively Dionysian subject matter. The painting, referred to retro- spectively as Music I (Fig. 13), provided Klimt the opportunity to explore the nature of the Dionysian and its particular relevance to his art. He resumed and intensified those explorations three years later in a second version (Fig. 14), painted for the music salon of Nikolaus Dumba. The gen- erally disquieting, "Dionysian" nature of Music I and Music II owes much to the mythological figures that Klimt incorporated in each image. On the left is a grinning theater mask of a satyr, Nietzsche's Dionysian being par excel- lence, and, to the right, an Archaic statue of the Sphinx.39 The Sphinx's simultaneously frightening and alluring qualities, which made it a favorite of Symbolist artists begin- ning with Moreau, are particularly emphasized in Music II, where the "maenad" has become its living mirror, pro- vocatively addressing the viewer.

Additional, and rather more specific, Dionysian references are carried in the paintings' gold ornamentation. The centrality of these ornamental forms to the meaning of Mu- sic I and Music II is indicated by their prominent placement within the images. No longer are they consigned to the pe- riphery or frame, as in earlier works. Instead, they are fully integrated within the composition, if still differentiated from the other elements by their gold coloring. As before, the paintings' golden motifs have their origin in Archaic vases. The kithara is very much like those of Pembauer's portrait, now taken over from Apollo into the Dionysian realm. Behind it is a grapevine lifted from a red-figure kylix by Makron; it is elaborately drawn - though initially difficult to recognize (Fig. 15).40 As noted earlier, Makron's vase depicts a Dionysiac celebration at which ecstatic music-playing maenads dance before an elevated mask of their god. Klimt copied in detail the fruit-laden grapevine that seems to issue from this improvised cult statue. He even included in his painting the unusual perforated disks that represent ritual offering cakes; and he added an extra disk in the space where, on the kylix, the image of Dionysus had appeared.

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche had argued that during the very earliest Dionysia - celebrations even older than

that depicted by Makron - "Dionysus, the real stage hero and center of the vision, . . . was merely imagined as present, which means that tragedy was only 'chorus' and not yet 'drama'."41 It was only later, when the musical dithy- ramb of the chorus was supplemented by Apollonian images (at first simply a mask of the god Dionysus), that "drama" in the narrower sense began. The dramatic appearance of Dionysus had been Apollo's contribution to the birth of tragedy.

Significantly, it is precisely Dionysus's image that is ab- sent from Music I and Music II. Only the patterned, relatively abstract form of the grapevine that had surrounded the column and mask of the god was appropriated by Klimt for the gilded ornamental areas of his paintings. Ironically, the exclusion of Dionysus from this "ornamental mode" had the effect of more closely associating the two. By omitting the cult idol and all figural content from the gold-flattened areas of his composition, Klimt further differentiated them from the more imagistic, and therefore "Apollonian," elements of each painting. In this sense at least, the isolated motif of the Dionysian grapevine became, in the context of Klimt's art, more purely "Dionysian."

In subsequent paintings, despite their less explicitly Nietzschean content, Klimt further developed and even

purified the dual modalities of Music I and Music II. His Danae, ca. 1900-04 (Fig. 16), is an important case in point.42 The painting's imagistic "figural mode" consists of but a single female nude, while its unmodulated gold ornamentation is more abstract than in any previous work. Cer- tainly Klimt was attracted to the myth of Danae by its erotic content, but more particularly by the fact that gold is the vehicle for that eroticism, since it was as a shower of gold that Zeus availed himself of the future mother of Perseus. As Freud had been convinced of the universality of what he later called the Oedipus complex by the power of the Greek myth over even a modern audience, perhaps Klimt found in the sexually charged story of Danae a confir- mation of his own belief in the potent and seemingly innate symbolism of gold - the affectivity of its sheer color and luminosity. In any event, in his Danae he represented Zeus's shower of gold as a cascade of highly abstract shapes: ir- regular circles and "chromosome-like biological forms."43 These are balanced by gold filigree disks in the lower right corner of the painting that are vaguely Mycenaean in character" and absolutely nonrepresentational.

Nietzsche defined pictorial art as thoroughly Apollo- nian, but he did so on the basis of paintings and sculptures

39 Comini, 15, fig. 22, first identified the satyr in Music I as a copy of a Melian terracotta mask in the British Museum. For an illustration of this and other masks, and a discussion of their role in dramatic performances, see Pickard-Cambridge (as in n. 28), 190-196 and 223-230, especially fig. 127. Klimt's image of the Sphinx resembles, particularly in its hair and the modeling of its breast, a marble sculpture acquired by the Staatliche Museen, Berlin, in 1865. See C. Bliimel, Katalog der griechischen Skulp- turen des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts, Berlin, 1928, pl. 41. Except for its size, Klimt's sphinx perhaps even more closely recalls sphinx-figured aryballoi; note that in Music I it is used as a vase for flowers. For examples of such aryballoi, see J. Sieveking, Die Terrakotten der Sammlung Loeb, Munich, 1916, 1i, pls. 127-129.

40 It should also be mentioned that the maenad of Music II wears the same loose, frizzy hairstyle and crinkled chiton as many of her Archaic ances- tors on Makron's vase. 41 Nietzsche, 66. 42 The exact date of the Danae is not known. It is customarily labeled

"ca. 1907" because Ludwig Hevesi, in a review of the 1908 Kunstschau Wien, calls the painting "totally new." But a drawing of a nude done ca. 1900 was probably the basis for Danae, which is stylistically and the- matically consistent with Klimt's other works done between 1898 and 1904. See Novotny and Dobai, 342.

43 Schorske, 272.




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with their roots in fifth-century claims of mimesis, highly illusionistic works grounded in the visual perception of ob-

jects. Conversely, the music he discussed was limited for the most part to nonrecitative forms, so that he could con- cur with Schopenhauer on its uniqueness:

This deep relation which music has to the true nature of all things also explains the fact that suitable music played to any scene, action, event or surrounding seems to dis- close to us its secret meaning, and appears as the most accurate and distinct commentary upon it. This is so truly the case that whoever gives himself up entirely to the

impression of a symphony, seems to see all the possible events of life and the world take place within himself; yet if he reflects he can find no likeness between the music and the things that passed before his mind. For, as we have said, music is distinguished from all the other arts

by the fact that it is not a copy of the phenomenon ... but an immediate copy of the will itself, and therefore

complements everything physical in the world and every phenomenon by representing what is metaphysical, the

thing in itself.45

The distinction that Nietzsche, and before him Schopen- hauer, seems to have made was less between the full range of art and of music than it was between iconic representation based on (in this case, visual) likeness, and a non-

objective, and therefore seemingly instinctual, form of

symbolic expression. Klimt's so-called "Gold Period" paintings from the early part of the twentieth century manifest a similar distinction. In the gold ornamentation coupled with his image of Danae, Klimt attempted to develop pure, nonrepresentational forms nonetheless laden with meaning, powerful shapes that could be the visual counterpart of Dionysian music.

As David Summers and others have argued, the belief that meaning could be conveyed (and even best conveyed) by nonrepresentational forms was to some extent ushered in by the methods and assumptions of nineteenth-century German art historians.46 Their writings, grounded in

broadly Kantian, idealist aesthetics, which celebrated the constitutive role of the mind in art, focused on those as- pects of a painting or sculpture that seemed to transcend material and mimetic concerns. The history of art came to be written as the history of form, defined as the images' nonmimetic components. The practice was especially strong in studies of Classical antiquity, in part because the con- tinuity of Greek artistic traditions from one era to the next seemed to allow the at least theoretical isolation of "pure" form. Against the background of a constant subject matter (whether the freestanding male nude in sculpture or vase paintings of a repeated figure or motif), "formal" differences stood out as if in relief, distinguishing one work from the next. Accordingly, these distinguishing formal traits became the primary object of study, both the basis for at- tributing works to a certain region or period, and the ma-

44 See J. Leshko, "The Influence of the Mycenaean Discoveries on Modern

Art," M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1968, for the impact of Heinrich Schliemann's Mycenaean excavations on Klimt and other modern artists. The relevant section of this thesis also appears in Leshko, "Klimt, Ko- koschka und die Mykenischen Funde," Mitteilungen der Osterreichischen Galerie, LvII, 1969, 16f. Given Klimt's interest in Archaic Greek art as the precursor to the Classical, it is understandable that he would have been attracted as well by Schliemann's discoveries. The excavations at

Mycenae dramatically pushed back the known origins of Greek culture, and revealed a Hellenic art even more patterned and abstract than that

of the Archaic period. It seems, however, that the "Mycenaean" decoration in the lower right corner of the Danae was a late (ca. 1907-08) addition to the work. See Novotny and Dobai, 342.

45 A. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea, I, 239, quoted in The Birth

of Tragedy, 101-102. 46 D. Summers,

" 'Form,' Nineteenth-century Metaphysics, and the Prob-

lem of Art Historical Description," Critical Inquiry, xv, Winter, 1989, esp. 375; and M. Iverson, "Style as Structure: Alois Riegl's Historiography," Art History, II, 1979, 62.




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16 Gustav Klimt, Danae, ca. 1900-1904(7). Private Collection, Graz (from Novotny and Dobai, pl. 68)

terial out of which might be read that region or period's essential identifying character.47 Archaic works of art in

general, because they were so patterned and stylized - because their form was not (yet) dominated by mimetic intent - appeared to offer a glimpse of the Attic or Ionian, late sixth- or early fifth-century, spirit in very concen- trated dosage.

The Viennese art historian Alois Riegl applied the same rationale to ancient ornament and decorative arts.48 His studies were motivated by the belief that the collective spirit or, to use his term, Kunstwollen of a people is registered primarily in form rather than in content, and that form accounts for the most significant historical, as well as re-

gional, differences (and similarities) among works of art. Ornament, to the extent that it is unencumbered by subject matter, offers the most economic crystallization available of the Kunstwollen. By studying ornament and nonmimetic craft, Riegl deliberately set himself in opposition to the pre- vailing bias against such "lesser" or "minor" art forms. "But

precisely in these forms," he wrote, "man himself is creative. Here he uses no model; here he creates out of himself."49 It was this conviction that led Riegl, in his early writings at least, to a strong appreciation of stylized archaic

ornament, precisely because of its difference from more

representational and imitative - one might even say "Apollonian" - kinds of art.

A similar interest in stylized archaic ornament guided its use throughout Klimt's "Gold Period." For his Water-

serpents, ca. 1904 (Fig. 17), as for his earlier Music paintings, Klimt looked to ancient Greek vases for suitable

Dionysian motifs. However, he selected a remarkably ge- neric grapevine for the Waterserpents. The motif is both rather simple and common - it appears on any number of Attic amphorae, usually accompanying the image of Dionysus.50 Particularly in comparison with the elaborately ornate grapevine of Music I and Music II, the vine in the

Waterserpents' upper half seems almost minimalist, pared of all extraneous flourishes: a pictographic rendering of a grapevine as small, spadelike shapes arrayed on either side of a thin, gently undulating line. Klimt further simplified its design through a series of formal variations at the bottom of the painting, in which the leaves become mere dots, some gold, some silver, others a plain white. Still other versions of this now highly abstracted Dionysian vine appear in later, essentially unrelated works.51 Additionally, in the Waterserpents itself, the brown-and-tan patterning to the left of the serpent-women is reminiscent of Triton's scaly fish body, but here it is dissociated from any figure or object, from any sort of referential specificity.

In the ornament of subsequent paintings Klimt continued this process of generalization until, eventually, explicit quotations of ancient Greek (or any other) motifs became impossible to distinguish. Perhaps he decided that appro- priation was a form of "Apollonian" imitation, no matter how nonmimetic the borrowed design. His aim was instead to create a mode of "pure form" that would be at once abstract and innately expressive, and therefore entirely separate in style and effect from the objective, figural representation with which it was paired. Both of these modes persisted in Klimt's work until the end of his career, even after the gold had been dropped in favor of strong color combinations, and the ornament had become more like

spontaneous improvisation. The Bride (Fig. 18), found un- finished on the easel at the time of Klimt's death in 1918, reveals the distinctness of these modes most clearly. The body at the right of the canvas, presumably that of the bride, had been painted almost in its entirety, from chest to ankles. Just before his death Klimt had begun a second layer of paint on top of the first, a loose, painterly, seemingly intuitive orgy of color and line.

47 For a particularly clear example of formal analysis serving for the identification and ordering of regional schools, see H. Brunn, Griechische

Kunstgeschichte, Munich, 1897. Once again (see n. 18), it is worth men-

tioning (and bemoaning) the fact that we do not know for the most part which books Klimt read or consulted.

48 Of particular importance in this regard are Riegl's Stilfragen, Berlin, 1893, and Die spiitr6mische Kunstindustrie, Vienna, 1901; 2nd ed., 1927. For general discussions of Riegl's work, see 0. Picht, "Alois Riegl," Bur-

lington Magazine, cv, 1963, 191f; H. Zerner, "Alois Riegl: Art, Value, Historicism," Daedalus, cccv, 1976, 177-189; and M. Podro, The Critical

Historians of Art, New Haven and London, 1982, 81-95.

49 A. Riegl, Die historische Grammatik der bildenden Kiinste, ed. O. Piicht and K.M. Swoboda, Vienna, 1966, 254. The statement, made ca. 1900, is quoted by Iverson (as in n. 45), 67.

50 One such example is illustrated by Kilinski, 1979, 99, fig. 17.

51 For example, a similar, green vine encircles the mother and child of The Three Ages of Woman (1905); the gold, triangular-leaved variety trails from the robe of the woman in The Kiss (1907-08).




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Conclusion: The Fraternal Union As many of those who have written on Klimt acknowl-

edge, the appearance, side by side, of these two separate modalities "is the central paradox to which one returns in any examination of Klimt's art."52 Some, however, have seen this as his peculiar weakness. Klimt fares especially badly when lumped with the Symbolists, who vehemently rejected all notions of painting as a description of phenom- enal appearance and claimed instead to produce intrinsi- cally evocative images in which form was perfectly har- monized with expression. Of course, there is some validity in considering Klimt's ornamental mode to be Symbolist; but to label his paintings so unequivocably is at best half accurate. One too easily points then to their "awkward di- chotomy" of representation and abstraction, their lack of complete fusion of theme and style, as an index of Klimt's failure as an artist.53 Such a judgment, however, is belied by his career-long struggle to develop and preserve these separate modalities. Even early in his career, Klimt was incorporating ornamental designs within the context of his representational images. He had been attracted to ancient Greek vases, perhaps by their own juxtaposition of figure and ornament, perhaps by the patterned linearity of their Archaic style. Whichever the case, by 1890 he was selec- tively borrowing ancient motifs for use in his figural com- positions and accentuating the two-dimensionality of the Archaic designs through a rich application of gold. After the Portrait of Josef Lewinsky, in which this dualistic tech- nique was used to convey a specifically Nietzschean meaning, Klimt's art changed significantly. In the paintings that followed, those now considered early examples of his mature style, Klimt sought to realign these two distinct modes into the effective equivalents of the Apollonian and Dionysian.

As Nietzsche had written, it was in "this fraternal union of Apollo and Dionysus [thati we had to recognize the apex of the Apollonian as well as the Dionysian aims of art."54 In Greek tragedy it was Dionysus, according to Nietzsche, who was able to embrace the metaphysical, and to convey the rapture of "the primal unity." But Dionysus's appearance had been the work of Apollo, whose image of the god provided the chorus of singing and dancing satyrs with the object of their frenzy. These Apollonian and Dionysian strains are equally evident in Klimt's later works, from Danae to The Bride. Yet those paintings are in no way illustrations of The Birth of Tragedy. (Perhaps the Burg- theater paintings come closest to being that.) Instead, they are attempts at pictorially operative equivalents, function- ing on their own visual terms. As Nietzsche recognized and brought to the fore the Dionysian elements of Greek tragedy, Klimt found in Archaic ornament the stuff of a visual Dionysia and, combining it with an Apollonian world of images, produced his own unique form of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

52 Novotny and Dobai, 22.

3 See, for example, R. Goldwater, Symbolism, London, 1979, 248-249.

4 Nietzsche, 139.




Ab

18 Gustav Klimt, The Bride, 1917-18. Private Collection, Vienna (from Novotny and Dobai, pl. 97)

The present article is Lisa Florman's first scholarly publication. She is currently completing a dissertation titled

"Myth and Narrative in Picasso's Graphic Work, 1930- 1937" at Columbia University [38 Canterbury Street, Cam-

bridge CB4 3QF, England].

Frequently Cited Sources Kilinski, K., "Classical Klimtomania: Gustav Klimt and Archaic Greek Art," Arts Magazine, April 1979, 96-99.

1_ "Classical Klimtomania: An Update," Arts Magazine, March 1982,

106-107.

Nebehay, C., Gustav Klimt: Dokumentation, Vienna, 1969.

Nietzsche, F., The Birth of Tragedy, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York, 1967.

Novotny, F., and J. Dobai, Gustav Klimt, London, 1968.

Schorske, C.E., Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, New York, 1961.



Documents

Klimt and the Precedent of Ancient Greece by Lisa Florman