The German Genius

(1841–1918) won fame for his “Beardsleyan imagination” when he was awarded a commission in 1894 to build the Vienna underground railway. 18 This meant the construction of more than thirty stations, plus bridges, viaducts, and other urban structures. Wagner broke new ground by not only using modern materials but showing them. For example, he made a feature of the iron girders in the construction of bridges. These supporting structures were no longer hidden by elaborate casings of masonry, in the manner of the Ringstrasse, but painted and left exposed. His other designs embodied the idea that the modern individual—living his or her life in a city—is always in a hurry, anxious to be on his or her way to work or home. The core structure therefore became the street, rather than the square or vista or plaza. For Wagner, Viennese streets should be straight and direct; neighborhoods should be organized so that workplaces are close to homes, and each neighborhood should have its own center, rather than there being just one center for the entire city.
    Adolf Loos (1870–1933) was close to Freud and to Karl Kraus, editor of Die Fackel , and the rest of the Café Griensteidl set, and his rationalism was more revolutionary than Wagner’s—he was against the Zeitgeist. 19 Architecture, he declared, was not art. “The work of art is the private affair of the artist. The work of art wants to shake people out of their comfortableness [ Bequemlichkeit ]. The house must serve comfort. The art work is revolutionary, the house conservative.” Loos, who had lived in Chicago, extended this perception to design, clothing, even manners. 20 He was in favor of simplicity, functionality, plainness. He thought men risked being enslaved by material culture, and he wanted to reestablish a “proper” relationship between art and life. Design was inferior to art because it was conservative, and when he understood the difference, man would be liberated. “The artisan produces objects for use here and now, the artist for all men everywhere.” 21
    Weininger especially, but Loos too, was carried away with rationalism. Both adopted scientistic ideas, but quickly went beyond the evidence to construct systems as fanciful as the nonscientific ideas they disparaged.
    Nothing better illustrates this divided and divisive way of looking at the world in turn-of-the-century Vienna than the fight over Gustav Klimt’s paintings for the university, the first of which was delivered in 1900. Klimt, born in Baumgarten, near Vienna, in 1862, was, like Weininger, the son of a goldsmith, but there the similarity ended. Klimt made his name decorating the new buildings of the Ringstrasse with vast murals. 22 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 Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, and Edvard Munch. Klimt did not reappear until 1897, when he emerged at the head of the Vienna Secession, a band of nineteen artists who, like the Impressionists in Paris and other artists at the Munich and Berlin Secessions (see Chapter 27), eschewed the official style of art and instead followed their own version of art nouveau. (In the German-speaking lands this is known as Jugendstil .)
    Klimt’s style, bold and intimate at the same time (as photos show the man himself to have been), had three defining characteristics—the elaborate use of gold leaf (a technique learned from his father), the application of small flecks of iridescent color, hard like enamel, and a languid eroticism applied in particular to women. Klimt’s paintings were not quite Freudian: his women were not neurotic, far from it. They were calm, placid, above all lubricious, “the instinctual life frozen in art.” Nevertheless, in drawing attention to women’s sensuality, Klimt hinted that it had hitherto gone unsatisfied. His women were presented as insatiable—here were women capable of the perversions reported in Krafft-Ebing’s book, tantalizing and shocking at the same time. Klimt’s new style immediately divided Vienna, but it quickly culminated in his commission for the university. 23
    Three large panels were asked for: Philosophy , Medicine, and Jurisprudence . All three provoked a furor but the rows over Philosophy came first. For this picture, the commission stipulated as a theme “The Triumph of Light over Darkness.” What Klimt actually produced was a