Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

There were of course exceptions. In the 1880s, for example, there was a movement in the arts known as Naturalism, inspired in part by the novels of Émile Zola in France, the aim being to describe the social ills and injustices caused by industrialism. But in comparison with the literature of other European countries, the German Naturalist movement was half-hearted in its attempt to make radical criticism and the Naturalists never turned their attention to the political dangers that were inherent in the imperial system. ‘Indeed,’ writes Gordon Craig, in his history of imperial Germany, ‘as those dangers became more palpable, with the beginnings under Wilhelm II of a frenetic imperialism, accompanied by an aggressive armaments programme, the great majority of the country’s novelists and poets averted their eyes and retreated into that Innerlichkeit which was always their haven when the real world became too perplexing for them.’

⁴⁶ There were no German equivalents of Zola, Shaw, Conrad, Gide, Gorky or even Henry James. Among the major (German) names of the day – Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal – hard, harsh reality was subordinated to feeling and the attempt to fix on paper fleeting impressions, momentary moods, vague perceptions. Hofmannsthal’s concept of Das Gleitende

, the ‘slip-sliding’ nature of the times, where nothing could be pinned down, nothing stayed the same, where ambiguity and paradox ruled, is discussed in Chapter 36. Gustav Klimt did exactly the same thing in paint, and his example is instructive.

Born in Baumgarten, near Vienna, in 1862, Klimt was the son of a goldsmith. He made his name decorating the new buildings of the Ringstrasse with vast murals. These were produced with his brother Ernst but on the latter’s death in 1892 Gustav withdrew for five years, during which time he appears to have studied the works of James McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley and Edvard Munch. He did not reappear until 1897, when he emerged with a completely new style. This new style, bold and intricate at the same time, had three defining characteristics: the elaborate use of gold leaf (using a technique he had learned from his father), the application of small flecks of iridescent colour, hard like idl, and a languid eroticism applied in particular to women. Klimt’s paintings were not quite Freudian: his women were not neurotic, far from it. The women’s emancipation movement in Germany had been far more concerned than elsewhere with inner emancipation, and Klimt’s figures reflected this.

⁴⁷ They were calm, placid, above all lubricious, but they were still ‘the instinctual life frozen into art’, as Hofmannsthal said. In drawing attention to women’s sensuality, Klimt was subverting the familiar way of thinking every bit as much as Freud was. Here were women capable of the very perversions reported in Richard Krafft-Ebing’s book Psychopathia Sexualis

, which made them tantalising and shocking at the same time. Klimt’s new style immediately divided Vienna but it also brought about his commission from the university.

Three large panels were asked for: ‘Philosophy’, ‘Medicine’ and ‘Jurisprudence’. All three provoked a furore but the rows over ‘Medicine’ and ‘Jurisprudence’ merely repeated the fuss over ‘Philosophy’. For this first picture the commission stipulated as a theme ‘The triumph of light over darkness’. What Klimt actually produced was an opaque, ‘deliquescent tangle’ of bodies that appear to drift past the onlooker, a kaleidoscopic jumble of forms that run into each other, and all surrounded by a void. The professors of philosophy were outraged. Klimt was vilified as presenting ‘unclear ideas through unclear forms’. Philosophy was supposed to be a rational affair; it ‘sought the truth via the exact sciences’. Klimt’s vision was anything but that, and as a result it wasn’t wanted: eighty professors collaborated in a petition that demanded Klimt’s picture never be shown at the university. The painter responded by returning his fee and never presenting the remaining commissions.⁴⁸ The significance of the fight is that in these paintings Klimt was attempting a major statement. How can rationalism succeed, he is asking, when the irrational, the instinctive, the unconscious, is such a dominant part of life? Is reason really the way forward? Instinct is an older, more powerful force. It may be more atavistic, more primitive, and a dark force at times, but where is the profit in denying it?⁴⁹