The very scandalous secrets of genius behind THAT Kiss
One of the art world’s most iconic clinches has adorned countless student bedsits but compared to Gustav Klimt’s other works, it’s positively tame
ASMALL but animated crowd gathered yesterday in front of ‘Black-haired nude girl’ – an arresting drawing of a young girl dressed in nothing but a pair of black stockings.
Her black hair is tousled, her skin has a greyish hue, her eyes are sexually insolent and her erogenous zones – all of them – have been carefully picked out in salmon pink paint. She looks alarmingly young.
Nearby are drawings of other women pleasuring themselves – luxuriating, eyes closed, heads thrown back, legs pulled apart in abandonment. Two naked girls with pink bottoms lie – float, almost – on what could be a bed. Another two women are enjoying each other in close proximity nearby.
Everyone in the group at the exhibition stares hard, murmuring in excitement until one smartly dressed woman draws so close her half moon specs are almost touching the very rude pencil strokes. She marvels at the ‘sensual fluidity’ and the masterful lines with a rapturous sigh.
Yet these pictures are not pornography but just some of the prime works in the latest blockbuster exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, Klimt/Schiele: Drawings From The Albertina Museum, Vienna, which will open on Sunday.
They were produced by two artistic geniuses. One was Gustav Klimt, born in 1862, whose painting Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I sold for a record €113 million in 2006 and whose sensuous The Kiss adorns countless student bedrooms as a poster. The other was his scandalous protegé Egon Schiele, born in 1890.
The critics have gone wild about the exhibition. ‘Sexy, cringe-making and unmissable,’ said one reviewer. ‘An encounter with these two groundbreaking figures at their most intimate,’ rhapsodises another.
Though I rather suspect that, even a century on, some of the works – perhaps Schiele’s full frontal Nude Self Portrait 1916, or Klimt’s Reclining Nude With Leg Raised, 1912-13 – might be just a little heady for some gallery regulars.
OH, TO be a fly on the wall when a visiting group of tourists disembarks from its coach to come face to face with Schiele’s explicit self-portrait, with its hairy forearms, furry legs and plenty else. No wonder the exhibition breaks new ground at the often staid academy, an intensely traditional institution founded in 1768 – festooned as it is with warnings about ‘adult content’.
But what else would you expect from this couple of sexually obsessed artistic rogues? They had plenty in common. Both came from modest backgrounds, and both lived and worked and thrived in turn-of-the-century Vienna.
Here the intellectual elite were experiencing an explosion of sexual awakenings and embraced Sigmund Freud, the music of Gustav Mahler and the plays of Arthur Schnitzler with a fervour.
But even in this avant-garde society, arch modernists and expressionists Klimt and Schiele managed to scandalise – both with their art and their lifestyles.
They were nothing less than obsessed with sex – painting it, enjoying it, watching it, but perhaps most of all depicting the abandonment of post coitus, the arm flung back, the arch of the body. They painted real sex, with sprawled bodies, splayed legs and raw flesh.
And never just from their imagination, but from models who were always ready to ‘flower’ when required. One visitor to Klimt’s Vienna studio wrote of naked models who ‘wandered up and down, stretched, lazed and blossomed till ready to stay obediently still at a gesture from the master’.
But Klimt, who wore sandals, a big floaty blue kaftan, no underwear and had a thick beard and balding pate, did not just look. He had a ferocious sexual appetite and such a physical magnetism and ‘strong animal smell’ that, after desporting themselves for their maestro’s art, his models would humour him, in pretty much any way he chose.
While all seven of Klimt senior’s children were talented, young Gustav stood out. But the family was poor and he left school at 14 to train as a craftsman to earn money. Soon his skills with a paintbrush were so good he was in demand to produce decorative friezes for public buildings, along with his equally talented brother, Ernst.
Then in 1892, when Gustav was 30, Ernst died of pericarditis – inflammation of the heart sac. Klimt was too traumatised to work. But when he finally picked up a brush again, he was determined to paint something more controversial than murals.
He and Schiele met in 1907 when the latter, by then a budding young artist, sought out Klimt as a mentor. Klimt showered Schiele with attention, and two years later Schiele was exhibiting at the 1909 Vienna Kunstschau, where he encountered the work of Edvard Munch, Jan Toorop, and Vincent van Gogh. In 1910 Schiele started experimenting with nudes.
While Klimt favoured redheads, Schiele liked his models alarmingly young. Inevitably, his licentious lifestyle brought him derision and notoriety. As a teenager, he was worryingly close to his younger sister Gertrude. When he was 16, he spent the night in a hotel room with her in Trieste. It wasn’t his only scandal. In 1912, he was briefly imprisoned (and one of his paintings burned by the court officials) for seducing a girl below the age of consent. After many affairs, he eventually married Edith Harms and moved out from the shadow of his mentor with his own style, punctuated by dark, tangled limbs, twisted torsos, full frontals and an awful lot of despairing, moving self-portraits.
KLIMT, meanwhile, never married. He had endless affairs – including a 12-year relationship with Adele BlochBauer, the wife of a prominent banker, but never even lived with a partner.
Instead he lived a strange double life. By day he was a serial philander – allegedly fathering up to 14 illegitimate children – but at home, with his mother, sister and beloved cats, he remained for ever strait-laced ‘Little Gustav’. Then the story of these extraordinary painters ends, suddenly, in 1918. Aged just 28, Schiele died three days after his pregnant wife, Edith, of Spanish flu. Klimt also died of a stroke that year, aged 55.
It wasn’t until the Fifties and Sixties, and the dawn of the sexual revolution, decades after their deaths, that their work – and its monetary value – really took off.
A century on, the critics are raving about the astonishing simplicity and the ‘delicate sensuous treasures’.
These are not all, admittedly, the sort of pictures you’d want hanging in your dining room. Many might well put you off your food – particularly those on display in the exhibition’s Erotic Room, where pretty much everyone seems to be at it, in stockings, or diaphanous sarongs.
Despite the critical acclaim accorded this new exhibition, many regular gallery goers may well find it all a bit much.
My own mother – open-minded, liberal and well read – is among them.
‘I’m not sure I want to travel to London just to look at drawings of front bottoms,’ she says. ‘However skilfully done.’