Gustav Klimpt and Mark Twain: Wittgenstein's Vienna

Not your typical Victorian lady

Moldering on my bookshelf is a book called, "Wittgenstein's Vienna."  It was given to me by a friend who loved Wittgenstein, thought he was the best philosopher of all time. Never got around to reading it. I will now. 

Even the Nazis couldn't resist stealing this one

I'm deep into "Lady in Gold" by Anne Marie O'Connor, about a painting by Gustav Klimt, an artist I've never heard of, or if I had, made no impression on me. He was painting around the same time as Vincent Van Gogh and Gauguin, which must have been like playing for the Washington Senators when Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were playing for the Yankees. 

Not exactly what the Pope ordered

But Klimt was good. You look at his stuff, and you say, "Wow."  It's very different from Van Gogh, who I like better, but it is just as innovative in its own way, and every bit as riveting.  

And remember, he was painting at a time, and in a society, when women were not supposed to enjoy sex. This was a time when Mahler, the great composer told his wife, who was emerging as a composer of some merit she had to stop writing music because it would distract her from her real mission in life, to serve his needs. 

Women simply tolerate sex

The thing was, Klimt was not painting in Anvers, or in the fields of Southern France or the mountains of Austria; he was working in Vienna, and unlike Van Gogh, Klimt was the court artist, having been trained in the best Austrian art school, having a father who was a master craftsman in gold gilt and Klimt had to reject all that to go his own way. While Van Gogh raged in the countryside, shouting in the wilderness, Klimt was running among the Austrian elite, and had, eventually,  to say, "No."

Gustav Klimt

But what is really astonishing about this book is the depiction of what Vienna was like as the 19th century turned into the 20th.  Freud was there, going to lectures by the artists in Klimt's crowd. Wittgenstein, of course was writing there and Mahler and Schubert were composing music there.  And who should show up?  Samuel Clemens, aka, Mark Twain, who was there trying to work his way out of a clinical depression and severe case of writer's block. 

Philo Semite

Like Klimt, Twain fell in with a Jewish crowd.  Twain wrote a friend, "The difference between the brain of the average Christian and that of the average Jew--certainly in Europe--is about the difference between a tadpole's and the Archbishop's."

Actual Semite

O'Connor describes Twain as a philo-Semite, someone who liked Jews. Who knew? Who knew this about Mark Twain? Who knew there even was such a thing as someone who likes Jews? Ask Woody Allen:  Nobody says nice things about Jews, except occasionally, other Jews, but even that is rare.  But it wasn't just Mark Twain:  Klimt found the women attractive and, yes, the Jews of Vienna tended to be the folks who saw value in art, in the arts in general, and they spent money supporting artists, but they were also, apparently, charming, asking all the right questions and responding positively to the revolutionary ideas Klimt was espousing. That's not all the Jewish women were responding to, apparently.  Klimt had what we might now call, "animal magnetism," and the ladies, and often the adolescent females, responded.

Of course, where ever you find a concentration of Jews in a developed society, you find rabid anti Semites, and the vitriol O'Connor relates is savage and virulent.  Hitler did not spring fully formed from his own egg--there had been decades of haters fulminating in Austria.  Hitler, of course, was rejected from the same art school and establishment which embraced Klimt, who was not Jewish but who found support among Jews. 

The Emperor 

The Austro-Hungarian royalty and the bourgeoisie were mainly Catholic, and very proper and uptight and sexually fundamentalist, officially, but the king and his court had well known affairs and Klimt was eager to partake in the feminine pulchritude surrounding him.  Despite outward appearances, free love abounded in turn of the century Vienna; unfortunately for some of the women, there was free love without much in the way of contraception.

This is one of those "Who Knew?" stories. Lots of famous people, seminal thinkers and educated classes struggling against what would take a few decades to fester until the underlying malignancy of that society erupted and destroyed it. 

Yet, if you were Sally Bowles, you wanted to be singing in a cabaret in Vienna.  Yes, Paris was exciting and alive, but Vienna, that's where the earthquake would be centered.