Klimt And Schiele Poem by gershon hepner

Take an “m” away from Klimt
and your imagination may
be tickled, for you’ll find you’re limbed
organically, prepared to play.
Often, though, a sexy Sheila
will find far more excitement in
the dark ways shown by Egon Schiele
in his epiphanies of sin.

Roberta Smith reviews a new exhibition of art at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan, Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections (“Sensualist With a Cause in Old Vienna, ” NYT, October 19,2007) :
Klimt was born into humble circumstances in 1862, but his gift for drawing propelled him into art school and under the wing of Hans Makart, an immensely successful academic history painter. Klimt worked first on Makart’s commissions; by the early 1880s he was receiving his own and increasing acclaim. But by the mid-1880s, his allegorical figures sometimes looked like contemporary women, and their gold-patterned gowns presaged Art Nouveau. The breaking point came in 1900 with the hostile reaction to his “Philosophy, ” a public commission for the University of Vienna in which Klimt’s historicizing realism began to turn toward a darker, more distorted Symbolist treatment of figures and space. Klimt died too soon to achieve genuine greatness as a painter. He never abandoned his original conviction that the highest form of painting was architectural decoration that tackled big themes, even as his idea of decoration expanded to include the influence of Egyptian and Japanese art, Byzantine mosaics and the flattened surfaces of Monet and Seurat. It is not surprising that his best paintings are the portraits, which escape his penchant for universalized melodrama. His even more modest drawings, which he produced in quantity, may be his greatest, most modern works — though they too have their problems. Their erotic depictions of women have frequently been seen as sexist, a charge strengthened by Klimt’s habitual womanizing….
It could be argued that Klimt worked through his feelings about women in his drawings, if not in his life. Those here trace his progress from the academic idealization of his early years, through the neurasthenic demonization of his middle years, to his last decade or so when his depictions of women start to seem more benign. At that point they begin to resemble ravishing precursors to the our-bodies-ourselves liberated women of the 1960s. The subjects are usually shown reclining, in various states of undress and/or arousal; they may be alone, with male lovers or girlfriends, asleep or lost in thought or fantasy. The spare languorous lines of their bodies contrast with the bubbly scribbles of their richly patterned robes and coverlets. All told, they sum up in figurative terms the less-is-more simplicity of the Wiener Werkstätte designers, and reflect an empathic understanding of female sexuality that easily exceeded Freud’s. The star of the painting selection here is, of course, Klimt’s dazzling gold-on-gold portrait, “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” from 1907, one of the five Klimts the Austrian state returned to Maria Altmann, Mrs. Bloch-Bauer’s niece, in March 2006 after a six-year restitution battle. Within months Mr. Lauder had purchased “Adele I” for $135 million and given it to the museum. Its price made it an instant one-canvas blockbuster and tourist draw. “Adele I” doesn’t crack open its medium the way Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon” does, but it expertly juggles naturalism, high artifice and abstraction. Adele’s pale skin, dark hair, limpid eyes and long, delicately clasped hands are isolated by the blazing Byzantine patterns that define her gown and armchair. The patterns in turn are surrounded by a softer Japanese-screen, gold-flecked field punctuated with a few squares of silver leaf. In the lower-left corner a portion of green floor set off by checkered black-and-white molding suddenly defines the gold-flecked area as wallpaper in a Wiener Werkstätte interior.


10/19/07