Death in Vienna

Portrait of Ria Munk III, Klimt

In the beginning is Beethoven and in the beginning is the end.

The National Gallery’s new exhibition, Facing the Modern: The portrait in Vienna 1900, is, on the surface, a look at the portraiture of the cultural centre of fin-de-siècle Mitteleuropa.

This is not, though, a city of Strauss waltzes, but a haunting look at a clash of old and modern, life and death, at Europe’s heart.

We start with the mask of Beethoven’s face taken after his death in 1827.

The cast is not the finest: so scared was he of poisoning that he insisted that his demise should be followed by a postmortem. Both the damage done by that process and by the time lapse between death and the casting mean that the ‘final expression’ – the aim of a death mask – has been blurred.

Yet still it retains power; a face pinched by pain or the fire that always consumed the composer.

This is all context: the absorption with death that becomes pronounced as we encounter later works started long before the works that constitute the core of this exhibition and before Freud, whose own work seems to hang over the paintings.

Contextually too, Beethoven was one of the fathers of German romanticism. Like the artists of the Vienna Secession, whose work follows, Beethoven kicked down the old and created a new artistic language.

The Secession understood this and its 14^th exhibition was dedicated to the composer.

The exhibition has left some critics grumbling about the context of that mask, and about how the exhibition as a whole is arranged – in other words, not chronologically. But this has benefits for the visitor.

For instance, seeing Oskar Kokoschka’s 1909 Portrait of Lotte Franzos hanging right next to Hans Canon’s Girl with a Parrot from 1876, presents an unusual opportunity to grasp what a shock the modern must have been to a public weaned on an art form that was as constrained by convention as society itself.

We move through rooms covering different themes, from initial context to the family to Jewish identity in the city to death.

The Family (Self Portrait), Shiele

Although Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Kokoschka are well represented here, the exhibition has brought together work by a number of other artists, including Jewish and female ones, to create a wider picture

The presence of works by Teresa Ries (a self portrait of great self-confidence), Broncia Koller and Elena Luksch-Makowsky all make the point that women were involved at the highest levels of artist endeavour and were exhibiting as such. It’s subsequently that they appear to have been largely forgotten.

But death is a dominant theme here: so often the outcome as the modern and the old collided; as anti-semitism rubbed against the flowering of secular Jewish artists, intellectuals and businessmen; as Vienna became a magnet for émigrés from central and eastern Europe; as liberalism collided with conservatism; as people started to question religious conventions and social mores, and as individualism warred with the subjugation of the id in the name of society and family.

But to begin with, there is death and convention.

Passing through the rooms, we discover Friedrich von Amerling’s Antonie von Amerling on her Deathbed from 1843, Franz Eybl’s The Artist Franz Wipplinger, Looking at a Portrait of his Late Sister, from 1833, Gyula Benczúr’s Portrait of Empress Elisabeth from 1899 (painted a year after she was assassinated, and representing her some 40 years earlier, portrayed against a stunningly-realised background of gold) and even Emperor Franz Joseph on his Deathbed, by Franz von Matsch from 1916.

There’s work by Richard Gerstl, who killed himself when 25, after a short affair with Schönberg’s wife, and was only later recognised as a seminal Austrian Expressionist.

Of the Klimt works, while two early ones are astonishing for their photographic quality, the latter ones exhibited here all seem connected to death.

A deathbed portrait of Ria Munk (1912), after she had shot herself in the heart, aged 24, following an affair, sets the scene for one of two posthumous portraits of her that is displayed here.

And then a pastel of Klimt’s dead infant son, Otto Zimmermann, together with a photograph of the child in a coffin.

Such postmortem photographs were so popular in the Vienna of the time that the government enacted a law banning the presence of corpses in photographic studios.

Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl was being worked on even as Austro-Hungrary itself was in its death throes, and was unfinished when Klimt himself died in 1918.

As if reflecting those ends, you look at this work and sense that you know where Klimt’s characteristic gold would have gone, but while the spaces are there, they remain ungilded.

But death had not had its fill of this portrait: Zuckerkandl herself would later be murdered in a Nazi death camp.

And then there is Schiele.

Ah yes: this notoriously ‘difficult’ artist.

The Family (Self Portrait) dominates a room – light years away from the chocolate-box sentiment of Alois Delug’s The Markl Family (1907) that hangs just a few metres from it (another illustration of how effective the design of the exhibition is in presenting stark contrasts).

Schiele’s gaunt figures, blank-eyed, stripped almost of flesh and with brushstrokes that could be the underlying muscles; angular, and devoid of what the artist considered to be aesthetic hypocrisy, seem to be the perfect visual metaphors for a Europe brutalised and shattered by the war that was finally grinding to an exhausted halt.

Death mask of Gustav Mahler

Later, there is Schiele’s Portrait of Edith Schiele, dying, from 1918 – just days before his own death, also from the Spanish flu.

And more death masks follow, like a frame of the exhibition: of Klimt, of Schiele, of architect Adolf Loos and of the composer Gustav Mahler.

The latter, made in 1911, is unusual in that it was cast by an artist, Carl Moll, and includes much of Mahler’s head and neck as well as his face. The detail is staggering: eyelashes and pores on the neck: it as though you are looking at the composer himself, sleeping.

There are aspects of this exhibition that seem full of life as opposed to death.

Moll’s Self Portrait in his Study, from 1906, may on the surface be conventional, but it has some interesting touches and is beautifully executed.

Gerstl’s Portrait of Lieutenant Alois Gerstl (1907) seems to have something of both van Gogh and Chagall about it.

Schiele’s Portrait of Albert Paris von Gütersloh (1918) has the same blank look of The Family (Self Portrait) from the same year, but his subject sits, utterly modern, against a red and gold background that recalls to mind the icons of Orthodoxy.

There are other patches of the gold that is so familiar in the work of the Secession, as behind the head of the subject in Koller’s Nude Portrait of Marietta (1907), but also in Isidor Kaufmann’s Young Rabbi (1910).

Anton Romoko’s portraits of Isabella and Christoph Reisser from 1885 both hint at the same thing in their blank backgrounds, while some of Kokoschka’s earlier backgrounds do something similar, with their mix of reds and golds.

It is the exoticism of the East blurring into the West.

Portrait of Heinrich Mann, Oppenheimer

Max Oppenheimer’s Portrait of Heinrich Mann from 1910 obviously attracted my attention as a fan of Lübeck’s literary family.

There’s the discovery that Arnold Schönberg was not only the creator of the 12-tone scale, but a painter of some note.

Works by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller from the pre-Secession era show, however, that not every artist was trapped completely in conventionality.

Gerstl’s Nude Self Portrait with Palette from 1908 (the year of his suicide) is striking too – not least for its apparent prefiguring of Schiele’s angularising of the human body.

And the exhibition as a whole is fascinating because it offers the chance to see how European artists outside France and Spain (Matisse and Picasso, in other words) explored, dissected and made the anew.

If I have a quibble, it is the odd way in which sex is treated – or rather: not.

It’s skated around: mentions that Klimt fathered a number of children by several mothers, and of painters and subjects and their affairs.

One can, in Schiele’s 1912 Portrait of Erich Lederer (left), even see a harbinger of Weimar androgyny.

Yet Koller’s Nude Portrait of Marietta is the point at which the curator chooses to inform of us that it is ‘different’ from other nudes of the era in being ‘non-sexual’.

Which is one interesting – not least, as, in our time, we seem increasingly to be seeing any nude as sexual: see the moral panics that have been thrown up by pictures of naked children being snatched by the police and the photographers arrested, even when they are the parents.

Yet there seems also in this an attempted rejection of the fact that human beings are also sexual beings. However much some may try to pretend otherwise, we view our fellow humans at least partially in terms of sex.

In fin-de-siècle Vienna, as in so many other places and at other times when conventions were being torn at, the rejection of sexual conformity was a vital part of that. And in a Freudian world, and one where individuality is being explored and old beliefs dumped, this seems even more the case.

In Schiele’s oeuvre it’s impossible to miss this.

In 2007, at the Barbican’s Seduced: Art and sex from antiquity to now, works by both Schiele and Klimt were included.

It’s difficult to see how, for instance, Schiele’s Two Girls Embracing (1915) can be seen as pornographic – the gaze from the two women is a challenge to the viewer as voyeur. And Eros, from 1911, of a male nude with vast, erect penis and, again, a challenging look at the observer, does not seem intended to arouse.

Perhaps, rather, they confuse in their lack of shame, and the frankness and boldness of that challenge.

But if Nude Portrait of Marietta is a portrait, then so, surely, is Eros.

That is, however, a relatively minor quibble.

If you expect a Vienna of gaiety and Strauss, this may not be for you. But Facing the Modern is an intellectually challenging exhibition and one that brings great rewards on that score. Gemma Blackshaw deserves great credit for her work on it.

And it’s also an exhibition that will, I suspect, stay in the mind for a very long time to come.

• Facing the Modern: The portrait in Vienna 1900 is at the National Gallery, London, until 12 January. Find out more here.

So what about all those books?

Phillip Marlowe: more integrity than any Nabakov creation

After all the fuss about what books I was going to cart from London to the south of France, the question now is: was it worth it?

Well, the list ended up very much as I wrote on 6 August: I was half way through Marco Vichi’s Death in August, the first Inspector Bordelli mysteries, and so brought that to finish it.

Then, in order of how they were read, came Gore Vidal’s Julian, Nabakov’s Laughter in the Dark, Paul O’Grady’s At My Mother's Knee ... And Other Low Joints, Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister, Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron, Chandler’s The Long Goodbye and finally, a collection of Thomas Mann’s short stories, including Mario and the Magician and The Black Swan.

Briefly: it took me until about half way to get into Vichi’s tale, but once there, I was planning getting the subsequent books.

An intriguing and pleasantly intricate plot, plus some very human development and back story.

The Chandlers are – well, wonderful. Chandler was a poet. And Marlowe is a superb creation.

The Newman was thoroughly enjoyable: I was slightly wary of his era on this one, being as the first world war was so horrific, but I think he gets away with it (it is an alternative history, after all). It’s well written and loaded with very clever literary and history references. This is vampire fiction for people with brains.

Paul O'Grady as the magnificent Lily Savage

The first volume of Paul O’Grady’s autobiography is excellent – I bombed through 500 pages in little more than a day. Massively readable – a superb and utterly convincing memoir of growing up in post-war working-class Birkenhead: funny and poignant and very honest. I look forward to reading the second volume.

Now (cracks fingers) for the somewhat longer considerations.

Vidal’s Julian is superb: light and yet based on serious historical knowledge and understanding. It’s not for nothing that Vidal was so highly regarded as a writer of historical fiction.

It’s witty, catty, bitchy, sharp, and also humane, human, poignant and, in the end – and despite what one might expect – very moving. Remarkably, even though he doesn’t create a set of characters that are intended to be easily likeable, by the denouement, you actually hold the eponymous Julian in enough regard that you care what happens to him and how.

In the meantime, the book has Things to Say. And the biggest thing that it has to say is about the nature of religion as a whole and Christianity specifically.

The dominant point about Christianity that Vidal makes is that none of it was unique: that it was all plagiarised from other, older religions.

But he does it, as you would expect, beautifully.

Then we move to the Nabakov.

Now I’ll say, to begin with that I rate Lolita as an astonishing and brilliant book, and Pale Fire is just sheer genius. I don’t think that anyone in the 20^th century used language in the way that Nabakov did.

The Blue Angel – well before Laughter in the Dark

And to be strictly fair, the author himself never claimed to ‘say’ anything or ‘mean’ anything.

But in lacking any morality – for want of a better word – his books leave a certain coldness. And Laughter in the Dark is no exception.

Indeed, the idea of the upright man brought low by a woman wasn’t even an entirely original premise: to mention just one, Heinrich Mann had done it in 1905 with Professor Unrat, which became the iconic movie, The Blue Angel.

So what does Nabakov bring to that theme? Well, nothing, except the cleverness.

Yes, it’s clever: he wrote it in Russian originally, but translated it into English himself – another mark of the genius of the man – but for all the cleverness, it’s lack of a soul is telling.

I wonder how much Nabakov has influenced more recent English literature (and the “English” is deliberate and intended to be quite specific).

How many writers have felt that they wanted to rise to the challenge of Nabakov’s literary brilliance, but cannot offer even that in order to compensate for what are, essentially, the stories of nasty people with no redeeming features?

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying I won’t read any more. Nabakov can dazzle. But his entire oeuvre doesn’t have the integrity that Chandler brings to a single short volume.

And it leaves you with a slightly uncomfortable taste – almost as though you were guilty of some verboten indulgence.

And so to Mann. Well, I’ve only just started the collection in question, but what a joy to be back with him. And he makes for a fascinating comparison with Nabakov.

Maybe it’s just my rather puritanical, northern European Protestant background, but I found myself relieved to be back with Thomas: moral, ethical, thinking, questioning, doubting Thomas. Nothing rushed, but everything planned and executed with the greatest care and deliberation.

Mann might have lacked the obvious flair that Nabakov had, but I know which I prefer. And I know which, in spite of the surface cleverness, I think is actually the better writer – and the writer whose work and thought continues to have genuine relevance for our times.

Although the more I think of it, perhaps Nabakov is the writer for our days: all style and no substance. Just as Dalì was an artist that was the father of an art for our times, in much the same mode.

So if you don’t like such depressing thoughts, stick with Mann for real substance: or Vidal, for that matter. For all the literary fireworks, both ultimately show Nabakov wanting and leave him standing. And if that's heresy, I'm with Vidal on that subject.