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PUBLIC DEBATES AND PRIVATE JOKES IN GUSTAV KLIMT’S THE KISS 29 Chapter 2 PUBLIC DEBATES AND PRIVATE JOKES IN GUSTAV KLIMT’S THE KISS: Effeminate Aestheticism, Virile Masculinity, or Both? JILL SCOTT Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss is now so popular that it borders on kitsch. No longer the purview of art cards and posters alone, the image decorates fridge magnets, drink coasters and even key chains. One might say that this frenzy for The Kiss cheapens it,but its iconic status also demonstrates the timeless,universal appeal of the work. Another indication of its current status, and of Klimt’s, is that, although The Kiss belongs to the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere and is therefore not likely ever to be auctioned, its sister painting, a portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (1907), broke the record for the highest price paid for a painting,fetching more than 135 million US dollars in June 2006 (see Vogel). While Klimt lived quite well from his art during his lifetime, not even the master himself could have predicted such success. Yet by the time he painted The Kiss, in 1907–08, Klimt was no longer interested in pleasing the public. After the scandal surrounding the “University Panels,” his paintings for the University of Vienna, during the first five years of the new century, Klimt was known as the enfant terrible of the Viennese art world and was not about to bow to the state authorities.The artist had never been all that interested in art for the masses in any case. Inscribed on his Nuda Veritas (1899) are Schiller’s words: “If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few. To please many is bad” (Whitford, 52). Klimt’s radical resistance to popular opinion and aesthetic norms led to his patent withdrawal from public life GaMiCE.indb 29 4/6/10 8:00:07 PM 30 GENDER AND MODERNITY IN CENTRAL EUROPE and state-commissioned art.It is thus highly ironic that The Kiss should become so popular, so public and so political. This paper argues that, in addition to these qualities, the painting also speaks to the artist’s potency and, indeed, to his masculinity. I want to consider the question of popularity and potency within a larger re-evaluation of Klimt’s Kiss and the place it occupied in the Viennese imagination around 1900. This paper builds upon recent ground-breaking work by the classicist Ross Kilpatrick, of Queen’s University, Ontario, who has found evidence that The Kiss has, contrary to accepted scholarship, an embedded reference to the ancient myth of Dionysus and Ariadne. Kilpatrick argues that the presence of ivy, the signature plant of Dionysus, and the codification of a particular constellation of stars link Klimt’s painting to Ovid’s version of the myth. I will summarize Kilpatrick’s findings in brief and then show that this new interpretation of the iconography of The Kiss challenges the view that Viennese artists were effeminate aesthetes. It is true that Klimt turned to painting portraits,embedding himself in domestic interiority and the psyche, but I argue that Klimt’s deliberate use of allegory after the fiasco surrounding the University Panels makes strong political statements, setting him apart from the hermetic aestheticism of writers in the Jung Wien movement such as Hermann Bahr, Hugo von Hofmannsthal or Stefan Zweig. Klimt’s leadership of the revolutionary Secessionist movement, his refusal to bend to authority and even his womanizing, as scandalous as it was, all speak to his masculinity and, indeed, his virility. Vienna,with its decadent and excessive aestheticism,has been predominantly gendered feminine, in contrast to other urban centres, such as Budapest and Prague, with their growing political dissidence and appetite for military conflict. Although the city’s architecture is described as monumental and even bombastic, Vienna’s urban beauty is also organic and even Venetian (Stewart, 157), with a tendency to baroque exaggeration. Not only were intellectuals and artists fascinated with the power of the feminine and the concrete “woman question” (see Schwartz, 5–6, Scott, 12, and Whalen, 189), but, I would argue, the city’s landscape itself was codified as feminine (see also Marcin Filipowicz’s paper in this volume for a discussion of misogyny in Czech modernist poetry). However, this paper calls into question such stark gender stereotypes by showing that at least one of Vienna’s artists was also a “man’s man.” That said, my reading...

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