N.

Bennett ARH 530 1

Images of the Floating World

Gustav Klimts Mythopoeia and the Allegorical Utopia of Anti-Modernism
Everyone who has ever built anywhere a "new heaven" first found the power thereto in his own hell. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (Essay 3, X) While other animals look downwards at the ground, he gave human beings an upturned aspect, commanding them to look towards the skies, and, upright, raise their face to the stars. So the earth, that had been, a moment ago, uncarved and imageless, changed and assumed the unknown shapes of human beings. Ovid, Metamorphoses (Book I: 84-89)

Artists have employed allegory, the immemorial stylistic palimpsest, since the ages of antiquity. Throughout its history, allegory has functioned in the liminal spaces of time, of the past and present, between reality and fantasy concomitantly. The allegorical image is itself an illusion, the reflection of something outside of itself, transforming and transcending the boundaries of reality. Craig Owens seminal essay, The Allegorical Impulse (1980), attests two fundamental drives in the artists employment of the allegorical image: a conviction of the remoteness of the past and a desire to redeem it in the present.1 This allegorical impulse thus represents, in the realm of visual art, a desire to encapsulate the ephemeral; it gives form to that which is essentially formless, a manifestation of an ideal. Through allegory, the emotion becomes emblem, the meaning metaphorical, and the myth becomes real. It is from the standpoint of the allegorical impulse in art that we can conceive the concept of the utopia. A powerful trope in western culture, the idea of utopia informs and animates many of our foundational works of art, literature, and philosophy. In its simplest form, utopia alludes to a better place, a place where the problems that plague our current condition cease to exist and where contemporary concerns are transcended or resolved. Utopia is the castle in the sky, the idyllic setting of our dreams that exposes the limitations of the world in which we actually live. Yet, this place of our imagination is precisely that; a place imagined but never realized, literally no place from the ancient
1

Owens, Craig. The Allegorical Impulse, 1980. Printed in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory: 1900-2000, 1026.

N. Bennett ARH 530 2

Greek words.2 Like allegory, utopia itself is an illusion; it offers a vision or intimation of a different, better place than the here and now we inhabit. But in imagining a better world, the realities of the real world come sharply into focus. The modern world provides the concrete for the construction of our utopias; it is only from our current standpoint that we can imagine the other side. Utopias, Michel Foucault tells us, present society itself in perfected form, they present a sort of mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live, found in every culture, in every civilization.3 This placeless place, as Foucault calls it, represents there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. For the modern artist, utopia, like the reflection of the mirror, exerts a sort of counteraction on the position they occupy; the modern utopia functions in relation to reality, in the creation of another real space, not of illusion, but of compensation. In what I term the allegory of utopia, I will attempt to clarify the basic architecture of the utopian drive as it comes to us from a range of attitudes and practices in art, outlining what remains of one of the most important legacies of modernism: the utopian dream of social transformation, as it was embodied by the modernist, or more accurately, antimodernist4 avant-gardes. The great obsession with the nineteenth century, Foucault states was history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world.5 In an act of Postmodern, antiEnlightenment thinking, Foucaults assessment rings true. Aesthetic modernity emerged in the new avant-garde modernist movements and subcultures of the nineteenth century, which rebelled against the alienating aspects of industrialization and rationalization, while seeking to transform culture and to find creative self-realization in art. Modernity entered everyday life through the dissemination of modern art,

2 3

Translated from Greek ou not + topos place. First used in 1516 by Thomas More in his novel of the same title. Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces (1967), printed in Richard Noble, Utopias (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 51. 4 T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), xv. 5 Foucault, Of Other Spaces, op. cit. 60.

N. Bennett ARH 530 3

the products of consumer society, new technologies, and new modes of transportation and communication. In the field of cultural history, the term anti-modernism is used to refer to what Lynda Jessup defines as, the pervasive sense of loss that coexisted in the decades around the turn of the century along with [the] enthusiasm for modernization and material progress.6 This sense of loss no doubt engendered countless daydreams of a better life; the optima res publica7, the best state, that Thomas More had in mind. The utopia of the anti-moderns involved a transformation of the world to the greatest possible realization of social happiness, and involved what Jackson Lear has defined as the recoil from an overcivilized modern experience to more intense forms of physical or spiritual experience.8 Anti-modernism describes what was in effect a critique of the modern, a perceived lack in the present manifesting itself not only in a sense of alienation, but also in a longing for the types of physical or spiritual experience embodied in utopian futures and imagined pasts. It proceeds from an awareness of the imperfections of the social and political conditions towards some understanding of, and possible solution to, what the artist perceived these to be. As such, the anti-modern utopian allegory embraced what was then a desire for the type of authentic immediate experience supposedly embodied in pre-industrial societies9 in the sexualized subservience of the Orient, the intimacies of a newly discovered Japanese society, or the tropical island paradise of French Polynesia. While these places do exist in the real world, to the anti-modern artist, they were projections of myth, socially constructed categories, and the sites par excellence for which their utopian dreams could be built. The discourses on Orientalism, Japonisme, and Primitivism have more in common than just their -isms; they all play a role in the perpetuation of race, class, and gender construction in modern society, as well

Lynda Jessup ed., Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 3. 7 The phrase used by Bloch regarding the history of utopia as an exclusively social program as denoted by the full title of Mores book, De optima statu rei publicae deque nova insula Utopia , or On the best kind of State and the new island Utopia. From Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno, Somethings Missing (1964), printed in Noble, Utopias, 51. 8 Lears, No Place of Grace, xv. 9 Ibid., 3.

N. Bennett ARH 530 4

as in the deconstruction of the boundaries of modernism.10 For art, as Konrad Fiedler tells us, is nothing else but a means by which man escapes reality.11 The focus of my research is the critical assessment of the ways in which various modern artists used such anti-modern constructs in formulating work they saw as responding to, or expressing modernity. The previously mentioned -isms all become means to the same end: the imagining of a utopia, an alternate space far-removed from reality (whether in time, geographic location, or both), onto which they could project their psychosocial dreams. These isms are cut from the same cloth; although each a distinct pictorial development, they are the products of a dense interweave of social invention, projection, sublimation, and transposition. The visual art produced during the second half of the nineteenth century became a means of departure, a pictorial escapism that demanded a release from crisis, and took shape in the form of the Other. The anti-modernist mentality, implicit or explicit, is a fundamental theme within the works of modern artists at the fin-de-sicle. Perhaps the leitmotif of the era, the creative inclination for the non-modern subject exemplifies the paradoxical nature and contradictory issues of the time. At the core of the modernist aesthetic is the awareness of social and cultural decline; the nineteenth century, as Foucault furthers, found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermodynamics, in the irreversibility of history and societal entropy. The great age of modernization engendered an overall atmosphere of urban development, technological advancement and industrialization, however with it came the shadow of the end of an age, the destructive consequences modernization would have on the primary areas of modern experience: nature, culture, and religion. Anti-modernism became a fundamental aspect in the creative impulse of the modern artist. In essence, it represented an effort of self-preservation, or regeneration, affording an escape from the ruinous modern landscape to an alternate space that could exist outside of their modernity. Anti-modernity in art offered imaginative freedom from reality without the burden of
10 11

Robin Kelley, Notes on Deconstructing the Folk, Ibid., 4. Peter Selz, The Aesthetic Theories of Wassily Kandinsky and Their Relationship to the Origin of Non-Objective Painting, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 39, No. 2 (June, 1957), 127-136.

N. Bennett ARH 530 5

actually altering the conditions of society as a whole; the concept of anti-modernism across the arts became heavily embroiled in utopianism, particularly in the ideological phase.12 The whole project in the visual arts hinged on the motivation to construct utopia, about realism and radical critique. Modern utopianism was driven by social concerns, its construction dependent on social conditions, in which the content changes accordingly. More than a political structure, sociological experiment, or literary myth, utopia is a state of mind, and as such, relates closely to idealism and radical critique as psychological outlooks on the modern mind.13 Throughout various currents of modernism(s) in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, painters and sculptors maintained utopia as a conceptual element in the construction of their style; while relatively few tried to conceive of an entire and complete new world, all contained an ingredient of utopianism in their thinking and perceived their art to be, in part, a template for a mode of higher existence. The vast majority presented utopia as a place in stasis, a beautiful terminus at the end of a historic struggle.14 The main characteristic of most, or perhaps all, anti-modern Utopias is that they are static; the antithetical notion of progress and virtue of eternal stability cloaked in a highly selective and nostalgic ideology. In engaging with modernity, an artist of the fin-de-sicle tended to construct styles by reinventing the past, and evidences a tendency to embrace previous golden age societies as models. Insofar as these styles implied a sense of timelessness, the absence of the historical dynamic of progress that represented Western modernism, consciously or not, carried with it an implicit judgment of the past by the present, bearing a historical comparison and sense of progress, or evolution to the present, and by implication both consequent upon and superior to the past. In the late nineteenth century, Western society was pictured not simply analogous to but synonymous with the processes of natural selection.15 The rapid establishment and institutionalization

12

Paul Greenhalgh, The Modern Ideal: The Rise and Collapse of Idealism in the Visual Arts (New York: Henry A. Abrams, 2005), 38. 13 Ibid., 38. 14 Ibid., 40 15 Ibid., 110.

N. Bennett ARH 530 6

of anthropology and ethnography as academic disciplines, along with the socio-biologist publications of Charles Darwin, proliferated literature on the adaptation and advancement of humankind, and the evidence for evolution was an omnipresent theme in modern society. Modern artists, in engaging with an anti-modern aesthetic, employed a manipulation of exotic and historical idioms in order to create a new modern symbolic order. But a priori, this new visual language, based upon a particular memory of the past, negated the idea of modern progress. The depth of dissemination, importation of goods from other nations, and wholly pervasive concept of imperialism shifted the context of the non-Western cultural presence. Enhanced contact with East Asia, Oceania, the Americas, the Near East, and the whole of Africa, by means of trade and empire, fostered an exponential increase in the exposure of the art and design of those regions to the Western sensibility. The second half of the nineteenth century democratized exoticism on an unprecedented scale.16 The modern artist, in an effort to be anything but, internalized this newfound fascination with the exotic and employed it as an exercise in chimera; constructing utopias in the Roman Forum, the Sultans harem, the Japanese bathhouse, or the Tahitian cabana. The utopian impulse, anti-modern in theory and escapist in nature, provided an allegory for the crisis of modernism itself. A number of similarities, tropes, and thematic motifs can be drawn in anti-modern utopianism; discourses such as sexuality, fetish and eroticism, misogyny, the crisis of identity, racism, decadence, degeneration, and alienation abound. In particular, however, the period between the nineteenth and twentieth century is one of the most fascinating cultural chapters in Central Europe, as it was in Paris and other Western cultural capitals such as Berlin and London. Austria played a preeminent role in generating and propagating fin-de-sicle sentiments and modern twentieth century Western culture. Indeed, Hapsburg Vienna gave its long lasting contribution to modernity and intellectual history through significant figures in the arts, science, and philosophy.17
16 17

Ibid., 118. Agatha Schwartz, Gender and Modernity in Central Europe: The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and Its Legacy (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010), 10.

N. Bennett ARH 530 7

The political landscape of modern Vienna was an atmosphere full of contradictions and conflicting ideologies. Notions of liberalism, anti-liberalism, nationalism, and anti-Semitism all contributed to a general feeling of insecurity often linked to discussions of cultural crisis and decadence. The debates of modernity in Austria-Hungary revealed the anxieties and shifting identities engendered by a multi-national, multi-ethnic empire.18 By examining the reception of the processes of modernity on a pan-European scale, the discourses of anti-modernism and utopianism expand beyond the canonized cultural boundaries, and foster a more complete understanding of the impact modernity has had on the critical centers of artistic production at the fin-de-sicle. In my effort to clarify the various facets and intricacies surrounding the development of exoticist and utopianist aesthetics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it is my contention that the study must be stretched to include aspects not only of Western ideologies, but those of Central Europe as well. By incorporating and examining the art of Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), specifically those works created between the last decade of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth century, it is my hope to achieve a panoramic and comparative approach of the influence modern styles and movements have earned across borders and time. The conception of modernity is not a linear history; rather, it is a discourse that must consider various manifestations and individual receptions in distinct, albeit analogous ways, and in a shared consciousness of the modern spirit.

18

Ibid., 6.

N. Bennett ARH 530 8

Of Blissful Fields and Perpetual Spring

I propose a toast to Klimt, the dazzling pagan. Out there where they think they know everything, it is assumed that he is only playing around with lines. Those poor fools: quite unable to comprehend the unspeakable power of this hallowed vow to wantonness! Here is the sole artist who refuses to darken burgeoning nature with the bourgeois sense of shame. The only one to reclaim the pagan gaze. Hermann Bahr19

Among the treasures of ancient Rome less monumental than the Coliseum but just as long lasting are its myths and dreams of a Golden Age. These ancient figures of thought, which invoke imagined, and still more remote times and places where there was perfect easefulness and plenty, are represented in the poetry and prose of Ovid, Virgil, Hesiod, myriad other Roman authors, and in the classical art and sculpture of antiquity. Ovid references the great Golden Age, the final era of creation where nature itself came to resemble art. In Roman Arcadia, beauty never fades and death is notable only because of its rareness. Roman frescoes depict a mythic, pastoral, Dionysian landscape, where flora and fauna intermingle freely with marble sculptures, architecture, and fertile fields, where distinctions between city and country are erased and Gods disport with mortals. This ancient, utopian tradition, the beautiful land of dreams, has survived as a balm for cultures and societies themselves marked by violence, poverty, and exploitation, and as a compass for the revolutionaries who aspire for change. Nearly two millennia after Virgil, it became central to the art of Gustav Klimt. Disillusioned by the realities of modern life, the myths of blissful immortality, of the perpetual spring and shady groves of Elysium, with its own sun and lit by its own stars, Klimt found divine inspiration. Klimt evoked the metaphorical language of Virgil and Ovid in what is perhaps the most potent and misunderstood facet of his artistic oeuvre. In what Gabriella Belli describes, as Klimts supreme contribution to the history of mythico-symbolist art,20 is the artists development of allegorical representation, where emblematic figures drawn from the world of his imagination provide an

19

Hermann Bahr, Drei Briefe an den Herausgeben in Franz Blei, ed., Die Opale: Blatter Fur Kunst und Literatur, vols. iii and iv (Leipzig, 1907), quoted passage 217ff. 20 Gabriella Belli, Gustav Klimt: Masterpieces (Canada: Little, Brown & Co., 1990), 7.

N. Bennett ARH 530 9

extraordinary meeting place between the evocative power of poetry and the potential of myth to become a force for liberation. The hermetic environment of nineteenth century Vienna incubated a system of rigid moral and cultural values, nurtured by a conservative, Catholic bourgeoisie that sought to repress social emancipation with strict authority and confidence. The fossilized social structure of Vienna cultivated an implosive avant-garde that took great strides in developing radical ideas and innovations in the arts, science, and philosophy, adopting a subversive strategy of irony and ambivalence in the face of repressive, constrictive mentalities of Viennese conservative authority. Inspired by a plurality of inventions and ideas, and motivated by the hopes of liberation, a small group of avant-garde artists and thinkers (Klimt himself a founding member) established the first independent exhibition society in 1897. The society, collectively titled The Secession, took their name from the revolt. Evoking the ancient Italian ritual, Ver Sacrum, of consecration in the sacred springtime, the Secessionists embodied the Sacrani in the face of adversity and founded their own New Roman Order.21 Liberating Truth, elusively hidden at the bottom of her sacred spring, was the Secessionists raison d'tre, explicitly pronounced on the Secessionist building; their motto read: To the age its art. To art its freedom. Fostered, perhaps, by the eras love for the exotic (such as the newly discovered Orient, the opening of borders with Japan, and archeological discoveries in the Middle East), Ancient Greece and Rome became the focus of much fascination in the modern mind. The artists of the Secession, different in style, medium and process, shared a general collective need for change in the status quo, and jointly opposed to the Academy-based tradition that had preceded and trained them.22 Klimt, already classically trained at Viennas Academy of Fine Arts, and an avid admirer of the Neo-Baroque styling of Makart and the art of the Pre-Raphaelites that spread across
21

Donald McClelland, To the Age its Art. To the Art its Freedom, Secessionism and Austrian Graphic Art 1900-1920 (Linz: Landesverlag, 1990), 9. 22 Belli, 15.

N. Bennett ARH 530 10

Europe in the 1870s, had already acquired a rich repertoire of mythological iconographies and themes of antiquity by 1890. Indeed, from this point forward, the choice of mythological subject and pictorial allegory would remain a constant fixture in his artistic oeuvre. This repertoire, however, was not simply an accumulation of historicist and academic training. Klimts depictions of mythological subjects are of a particular sort, chosen specifically and imbued with idiosyncratic nuances and characteristics. Deliberate and cognizant choices, Klimt introduces traditional iconography in a modern context; although appropriating images and designs from a variety of cultures and sources, Ancient Greece received his most sustained and thoughtful consideration. In his deliberate formulation of a personal style, Klimt turned to antiquity for example.23 Klimts metaphorical language and mythopoetic allegories delineate the emotional depths of the psyche, the archetypal human impulses that could be recognized on a universal scale.24 Klimts sense of pathos developed distinctly from that of his Pre-Raphaelite precedents, utilizing irony and ambiguity to create the vision of professional voyeur. Klimts treatment of the mythological subject is the goddess above all; saturated with an erotic sensuality which he believed only a woman could embrace. A master of the voyeuristic gaze and the power of erotic stimulation on the mind (of both the empowered subject and viewer participant), Klimt transforms the classical myth into pornosophic phantasm, interweaving eroticism, art, entertainment, and cultural codes. Klimts poignant allegories reveal intimations of contemporary life, and contemporary concerns, by exploiting the non-modern subject. Klimts innovative pictorial strategy embodies the fundamental paradox of modernity, employed by an artist occupying an unusual niche at the crossover point between the two centuries, and straddling the cultures of both. Through his mythological narratives, Klimt visualizes the complex and contradictory forces, the backward and forward tendencies underlying modernity. Ancient mythology and allegorical representation constitute the essential aspects of Klimts continual search for beauty and truth; his is a utopian procession

23 24

Lisa Florman, Gustav Klimt and the Precedent of Ancient Greece, The Art Bulletin, vol. 72, no. 2 (June 1990), 310. Belli, 7.

N. Bennett ARH 530 11

inwards, a journey within the mythology of modern man. Erotic bliss, both utopian and degenerate, is the organizing principle of Klimts theatrum mundi: a kingdom pleasured by subaqueous sirens, emaciated nymphs and masturbating studio models,25 a Dionysian retinue, through which Klimt investigated the depths of the human condition.

Golden-Age Girls
It is man, in his naivety, who secretes Utopias, one of them precisely woman. And woman being a living Utopia, has no need to produce any such thing Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories II (1990)26

Turkish Delights
When Mahatma Gandhi came to England and was asked what he thought of European civilization, he replied, I think it would be a good idea. Salman Rushdie (1982)27

The Orient, to the nineteenth century Western mind, designated the large, sundry area of land across the Mediterranean Sea, the eastern region in relation to the Occident. The term referred to the areas in and around the Near East and North Africa, including the Balkans and parts of West Asia. The Orient, for all intents and purposes, was the umbrella name signifying the diverse lands formerly under the Ottoman Empire. Orientalism, the study of and interest in the cultures of this Orient, developed as a uniquely nineteenth century phenomenon, encouraged by developing new sciences such as ethnography, improvements in travel and transportation, as well as European colonization in North Africa and the Near East. In his seminal text Orientalism (1978), postcolonial scholar Edward Said provided a revisionist definition for the term as an aspect of Western discourse or an imaginative construct, a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the Middle and Near East. This body of scholarship is marked by a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic
25 26

Colin B. Bailey, Gustav Klimt: Modernism in the Making (New York: Henry N. Abrams, 1999), 16. Jean Baudrillard, as quoted in (ed.) Nicole Pohl and Brenda Tooley, Gender and Utopia in the Eighteenth Century: Essays in English and French Utopian Writing. Abingdon: Ashgate Publishing Group, 2007, 2. 27 Quoted in Anne E. Coombes, Ethnography and Formation of National and Cultural Identities, ed. Susan Hiller, The Myth of Primitivism (New York: Routledge, 1991), 9.

N. Bennett ARH 530 12

peoples and their culture," and established a mythicized and stereotyped Orient in the Western imagination.28 Beginning with Emperor Napoleons invasion of Egypt in 1798, followed by the subsequent conquest and colonization of Algiers in 1830, French Academic painting would forever be transformed. Few writers did more to suggest a psychology for European exoticism than Charles Baudelaire; in his collection of essays for The Salon of 1859, Baudelaire looks to the East as a place to repair the deficiencies of life in modern France:
I catch myself envying the lot of those men, who are lying outstretched amid their azure shadesa feeling of blissful happiness inspired by an immensity of light.29

Contemplating an oil painting at the Salon, Baudelaire becomes envious of those men whom he understood as creatures entirely given over to their senses, and we can feel his desire for expatriation. The licked finish30 of the canvases of the mid-century Realists is an illusory device presenting ideologically charged, iconic images as objective reality, unveiling deeprooted prejudices and unfavorable attitudes towards the East encapsulated in Orientalism. The treatment of the female subject is the clearest indicator of attitudes towards women in the nineteenth century, reflecting the ambivalence, complexity, and chronological transformations of Victorian attitudes and conservative mores. Indeed, the ubiquitous theme throughout the Orientalist canon is the hedonistic, sensual world of the harem, where odalisques and Circassian beauties abound. In what Linda Nochlin identifies as the utopia of the flesh, these works presented harmonious, ageless bodies, frictionless groupings of classical nudes amidst a landscape of Poussin-esque unspecificity.31 The harem was the utopia of (idealized) desire, in

28

Homi Bhabha and W.J.T. Mitchell, Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 9. 29 Quoted in Roger Benjamin, Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa 1880-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 11. 30 Linda Nochlin, quoted by John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (New York: Palgrave, 1995), 46. 31 Linda Nochlin, Seurats Grande Jatte: An Anti-Utopian Allegory, ed. Mary Tompkins Lewis, Impressionism and PostImpressionism: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 205.

N. Bennett ARH 530 13

which all aspects of Western imperialism and historical progression are markedly absent, implying a timeless quality more Arabian Nights than correspondent reality. Jean-Lon Grme (1824-1904) was the precursor, and often the master, of a number of French Salon academicians in the later part of the century; his works were often visibly salacious, featuring scenes in harems, public baths and slave auctions, and responsible, with others, for "the equation of Orientalism with the nude in pornographic mode."32

Figure 1. Harem Pool, 1890 Jean-Lon Grme Oil on Canvas 29 x 23.5

The Harem Pool (Fig. 1) represents the full extent of Oriental motifs and eastern ornamentation that fascinated Grme, which characteristically adorn the erotic narratives inhabited by female phantasms of the artists colorful imagination. The women in the scene suggest the artists personal sexual neuroses in relation to contemporary attitudes towards women,33 the abused personifications of a mythicized East. Grmes fair-skinned concubines are signifiers of an elaborate myth of tyranny that located its essence in the imperial harem, a legendary site where orgiastic sex and slavery were the norm under the Ottoman sultan. Grmes escape from the trifling mores of the West takes a sharp turn East, where repressive cultural codes and heavy-handed virtuosity were at a safe distance from European reality; a distant space, unfamiliar in time and place, open for the liberation of sublimated desires. The perpetual concern for illusionistic truth in his works demonstrates Grmes intimate understanding of the power the erotic subject has on the mind. For Grme, Klimt, and the modern avant-garde alike, it is a utopia of the body. Both artists, fundamentally anti-modernist, albeit antithetical in perspective, aspire to escape the modern world, not only in time, but also in place.
32

Nicholas Tromans and Rana Kabbani. The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 136. 33 MacKenzie, Orientalism, 46.

N. Bennett ARH 530 14

Grme presents an anti-modern allegory of an ancient region, unchanged by time, where he is free to colonize the female form, the ultimate utopia of the erotic gaze.
Figure 2 Moorish Bath Jean-Lon Grme 1890 Oil on canvas 29 x 23.5 Figure 3 Goldfish (For My Critics) Gustav Klimt 1901-02 Oil and gold on canvas. 181 x 66.5 cm.

For Klimt, the Orient meant Byzantium. Austria-Hungary was an empire colonized from within, a buffer between East and West, the offspring of Rome, the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Turks. In the beginning phases of his golden period, Klimt begins to employ gold leaf on his canvases, adding an element of metallization to his scenes that heightens sensuality, deifies beauty, and compresses all the ambivalent seduction of life into the inaccessible, seductive face of a woman. With all of the shimmer of a Byzantine mosaic, he presents the femme fatale, the intoxicating deadly seductress, and the embodiment of Klimts myth par excellence. Empresses, instead of slaves, Klimts femmes parody the prototypical versions of the classical female nude, and call into question the validity of such works as Harem Pool and their relevance to modern society. His siren in Goldfish (Fig. 3) represents the same blatant sexuality as Grmes Moorish Bath (Fig. 2), but Klimt transforms the misogynist implications and assumptions of the age into an emblem of admiration and veneration. The female forms appear as characters in the same fairytale; they have smooth, porcelain skin, round, fleshy thighs and long, scarlet-red hair. The arched curve of their backs mirror one another; their highlighted spines slope downwards and shift the viewers gaze along the way. While both women offer only a view of their back, the gestures and poses reveal distinctly different attitudes; the young woman of Grmes erotic imagination recoils inward and solemnly gazes down to her feet; she imparts a

N. Bennett ARH 530 15

foreboding sense of hopelessness while we are left to fantasize about her appearance. Grme wishes to posses his young beauties, to control them, and thus he subjugates them by situating the artist-viewer, the male audience, in a position of power that renders the female subject vulnerable and dependant. Klimts mischievous maenad, on the other hand, leans forward to expose her backside to the viewer and stares back teasingly, in fact, she almost seems to giggle. Indeed, Klimt renamed his picture To My Critics after the scandalous Faculty Paintings ordeal in 1901, which attests to the sirens roguish gesture. Grmes Slave Market in Ancient Rome (Fig. 4) depicts an elderly man selling his wares, female slaves that stand on stage in a dramatic auction for all the men to bid. In Grmes erotic and sadistic theatrum mundi, a classically posed fair-skinned beauty covers her eyes with her raised arm, a gesture normally utilized in classical art to indicate the shame of sensuality or lust. Shaved of her pubic hair and displayed like a doll, she
Figure 4 Jean-Lon Grme Detail, Slave Market in Ancient Rome Oil on Canvas c. 1884 36 x 29 State Hermitage Museum St. Petersburg

becomes Trojan Barbie, packed full of anxiety and tumultuous meaning, she is begging to be played with. Klimts Nuda Veritas (Fig. 5), on the other hand, approaches the viewer as a modern Venus or Aphrodite. A

motif Klimt would revisit often, Nudas Veritas personifies the quest for Truth, the all-important virtue for the Secessionist movement. In a clear gesture of defiance, and by way of a commentary on Viennese social mores, Klimt images a full-frontal depiction of a preternaturally elongated nude female figure, proudly displaying her fiery red pubic hair; Nudas Veritas strikes a note of unrepentant naturalism, confirmed by the Schiller quote: If you cannot please everyone by your actions and your art please a few. It is not good to please the many. As Carl
Figure 5 Nuda Veritas 1899 Oil on Canvas 260 x 64 cm Austrian National Library Vienna

N. Bennett ARH 530 16

Schorske tells us, Nudas Veritas represents a crucial turning point in the emergence of a new culture from an old.34

Fleeting Moments in a Floating World

To lose firm ground for once! To float! To err! To be mad! That was part of the paradise and the debauchery of bygone ages [] Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science (1882)35

After over two hundred years in seclusion, 1854 saw the island nation of Japan open their borders for trade with the West. The dissemination of Ukiy-e, or Japanese woodblock prints from metropolitan Edo, spread rapidly throughout Europe; small, light, and easily transportable, by the fin-desicle there was surely not one artist left who did not own a piece of East Asia.36 Ukiy, or floating world, (the e serves to indicate the print medium, images or pictures) is the mantra of the fleeting moment, the philosophy of impermanence; it is the conception of physical transience and ephemeral beauty. Indeed, where it is impossible to step in the same river twice, the floating world is literally buoyant. The printed images of Ukiy, the most popular genre of woodblock prints, depicted scenes of hedonism and entertainment in the pleasure quarters of Edo (modern Tokyo), such as kabuki theatre, courtesans, geishas, and often featuring motifs of Japanese landscape and historical narratives. Ukiy-e artists also engaged in the production of shunga, the genre of erotic art that demonstrated the ideal Ukiy lifestyle, depicting characters in unrealistic, sexually explicit positions and with hyper-exaggerated genitalia. The floating world, to the Japanese, was a euphemism for the indulgent aspects of life, where it was possible to detach from the tiresome responsibilities of reality and take pleasure in the floating moment. The Ukiy-e, along with many other imported arts and goods from Japan, became a source of inspiration for a generation of European artists who desperately sought change in modern times. Ukiy-e
34 35

Schorske, Carl E. Fin-De-Sicle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York: Vintage Books, 1981. Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Gay Science (New York: Random House, 1974), Book I, 111. 36 Johannes Weininger, Gustav Klimt and the Art of East Asia, ed. Jane Kalli r, Gustav Klimt: In Search of the Total Artwork (New York: Prestel, 2009), 52.

N. Bennett ARH 530 17

prints and illustrated books arrived in the West at a fortuitous moment, just as realism and naturalism had reached their peaks, and artists were searching for inspiration. The generic themes, bright colors, flattened shapes, unconventional spatial effects, and asymmetrical compositions attracted, foremost, the attention of the French Impressionists.37 The Impressionists began collecting the prints in large quantities in the 1870s, and the floating world of Japan offered creative, new ways for looking at art, as well as the world around them. The aesthetic interest in the exotic art of Japan became a widespread phenomenon; the term Japonisme was coined around 1872 in Paris by art critic Philippe Burty who referenced a craze sweeping over the visual arts for everything and anything Japanese, describing the pervasive influence of Japanese style on French art.38
Figure 6 Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub 1885 Charcoal and pastel on light green wove paper Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Among the first generation of Ukiy-e collectors, Impressionist painter Edgar Degas (1834-1917), was one of the initial French artists to begin using Japanese aesthetic principles in his art.39 The significance of Ukiy-e on Degas work is conspicuous because it was the distinctly non-Western qualities that interested him; for the anti-modern artist, the appeal lay in suggesting a means to render contemporary life more vividly than the styles academic and Salon art permitted.40 Degas primary interest in Ukiy-e was in the innovative compositional devices they presented; the artist frequently employed various characteristics of the prints in his own paintings and pastels, such as flattened spatial depth, thick contour, asymmetrical composition, flat areas of unmodulated color, unusual or shifted perspective, partitions, intense
37

Julia Meech-Pekarik, Early Collectors of Japanese Prints and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum Journal (Vol. 17, 1982), 93-118 38 Weininger, Gustav Klimt and the Art of East Asia, 52. 39 Gabriel P. Weisberg, and Petra ten-Doesschate Chu. The Orient Expressed: Japan's Influence on Western Art, 1854-1918 (Jackson: Mississippi Museum of Art, 2011), 119. 40 Gerald Needham, Degas and Japonisme, ed. Gabriel Weisberg, Japanese Influence on French Painting, 1854-1910 (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1975), 120.

N. Bennett ARH 530 18

cropping, and obscurity of form. However, the content was not altogether disregarded, and both its consumption and appropriation intersected with nineteenth century concepts of gender.41 The most pervasive manifestation of the gendering of Japonisme appeared in the countless depictions of women, both Japanese and Western, immersed in Japanesque settings that epitomized the fantasy of the island nation as a floating world of sensual pleasure. Depiction of women from Japan became an accepted form of erotica in the fine arts; Japanese women were portrayed at their bath in uninhibited ways (Fig. 5), and the ritual of the toilette became a symbol for the allure of the female form. The candid and innocent behavior of the Japanese women, who unselfconsciously dress and undress, [and] wash themselvesin a context that appeared essentially naturalistic suggested a photographic image of interior life that greatly interested Degas.42 This verisimilitude included recognition of human frailty and commonplace desire that could be seen in both the blatantly erotic and mildly suggestive prints alike, and introduced a mild note of voyeurism into the narratives. This suggested voyeurism would become a central component of Degas work, namely in his series of female bathers beginning in the 1880s, where he incorporated the untraditional formats, innovative compositions, and dramatic use of modified perspective in his modernist depictions of women at their toilette.

41 42

Weisberg, The Orient Expressed, 107. Jill DeVonyar and Richard Kendall, Degas and the Art of Japan (Cambridge: Yale University Press, 2007), 72.

N. Bennett ARH 530 19

The Tub (Fig. 6) is one of the many nude bathers Degas produced in the 1880s and 90s. Offering an intimate view into the everyday lives of women, Degas employed a keyhole effect that posits the viewer also as voyeur. The angle of the floorboards and wide view of the tub suggest a downcast perspective, where the bather is seen chastely self-absorbed and oblivious to the spectator. Like the Ukiy-e prints, her back is given center focus as she squats before us; however, as the Japanese women themselves are too engaged to notice the observer, the fact that it is possible to see their faces changes the narrative entirely. If Degas bather would to return the gaze, instead of averting it, the politics of our vision would change entirely. For Degas, the candidacy of the moment became the primary focus, and the artist considered himself a Realist constantly seeking the essence of reality behind the superficial faade of daily existence.43 Degas sketches reveal a personal quest for ritualistic gestures and movements, in which the artist could explore the artifice of painting and modern life, and reveal the inner truth behind the spectacle. For Degas, utopia could be reached through absolute truth; however, truth must be constructed, and is fettered with implications along the way.

43

Weisberg, 12.

N. Bennett ARH 530 20

Figure 8 Gustav Klimt Dana 1907 Oil on canvas 77 x 83 cm Galerie Wrthle, Vienna

The whole of Europe experienced the Japonisme fascination, and Klimt was no exception. France did not have a monopoly on Japonisme; the presence of Japan during turn-of-the-century Vienna was anything but hidden; in fact, it was a pervasive influence on modern Viennese art and design.44 Also a collector, Klimt filled his studio with Japanese Ukiy-e prints, kimonos, robes, screens and other exotic treasures. But like Degas, the content of the prints were not his main attraction, rather, their compositions were what mattered; all of the lines, colors, and surfaces directly contradicted the accustomed and studied rules of traditional art. The floating world revealed itself in another dimension; seemingly without space, and hence without time, the integration of art and ornament, the freedom and fluidity with which an artist of the modern age was able to, and permitted, to express himself.45

44

Toshio Watanabe, Review: Hidden Impressions: Japonisme in Vienna 1870-1930. Vienna, sterreichisches Museum fr angewandte Kunst, The Burlington Magazine, (Vol. 132, No. 1048, Jul., 1990), 510-511. 45 Weininger, Gustav Klimt and the Art of East Asia, 51.

N. Bennett ARH 530 21

A Fallen Idol is Still a God

[]to leave this Paradise, but shalt possess A paradise within thee, happier far. John Milton, Paradise Lost (XII.585587) Nothing is made with nothing, and the way good inventions are made is to familiarize yourself with those of others. The men who cultivate letters and the arts are all sons of Homer. Jean L. Ingres (1821)46

Perhaps the most pervasive, albeit diversified, tendency of pictorial exoticism is the visual manifestation and discourse in reference to modernist Primitivism. Historically signified as the thematic representation of images from non-Western cultures and/or pre-historic societies, the primitive is articulated by the West as a spectacle of savagery, a state of grace, of a society without history or cultural complexity; or as the site of originary unity, symbolic plentitude, and natural vitality. 47 What William Rubin has famously identified as the pivotal topic in twentieth century art, Primitivism, the interest of modern artists in tribal art and culture, as revealed in their thought and work,48 is a discourse entangled in racial implications and cultural fetishism; a recognition-and-disavowal of difference, involving a (mis)construction of the other.49 In theory, Primitivism can be loosely defined as the Modernist appropriation of visual forms from non-Western cultures or peoples identified as tribal or primitive, predominantly of African or Oceanic origin, and manifestly an ideology of the simplification and renewal of modern society. The modern primitivist engages in a dialogue that emphasizes a return to origins, the period antecedent to the corruptive, detrimental consequence of
46 47

Quoted in ed. Charles Wood, Art and Theory: 1648-1815: A Critical Anthology, 1172. Hal Foster, The Primitive Unconscious of Modern Art, 1985, printed in ed. Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch, Primitivism and Twentieth Century Art: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 384. 48 William Rubin, Modernist Primitivism (1984), ibid,, 315. The printed text is an excerpt from Rubins introductory essay for the catalogue of The Museum of Modern Arts highly controversial exhibition Primitivism in 20 th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and Modern of the same year. 49 Foster, Primitive Unconscious, 386.

N. Bennett ARH 530 22

modernization and civilization. The discourse of Primitivism generally refers to those essential qualities of life uncontaminated by modernity, said to be closer to nature and universal to mankind. Analogous to other modern exoticist movements, such as Orientalism and Japonisme, Primitivism arouse within the historical context of nineteenth century Europe, fostered by the continuing advancement of ethnological and anthropological study and the Wests heightened fascination with foreign cultures. However, the ideological reach of the primitivist discourse prevailed on a much larger scale, developing myriad conceptual and philosophical notions, engendering a ubiquitous vocabulary and multifaceted iconography that can no longer be delineated by a particular structure of psychological or aesthetic motivations. The artistic Primitivism of the second half of the nineteenth century is not merely a matter of iconography, subject matter, or social history. The primitivist aesthetic actively produces, cultural meanings through the invention of visual codes for the modernist experience of the city,50 and thus can be regarded in terms of an anti-modern allegory; it is through the pictorial construction of the work, its formal strategies, that the utopian is allegorized. For the primitivist discourse, distance not in time but geographic distance, functions as the utopian catalyst. Primitivism is widely associated with the flight from bourgeois life, materialism, and civilization; but no less mythically important than the things escaped are the things sought: earthly paradise; its plentitude, pleasure, its alluring and compliant female bodies,51 to be found in the putatively archaic, spiritual, Edenic culture of the tropical islands. Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), the quintessential modern primitivist, embodies the archetypal mythic hero and father of an artistic movement not only through his expansive trope of primitive subjects and themes, but also through his commitment to cultural assimilation into the lifestyle of French Polynesia. An artist completely disillusioned with modern Parisian society and bourgeois value, sought

50 51

Nochlin, Anti-Utopian Allegory, 28. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist Modernism, (1989) printed in ed. Maurice Berger, Modern Art and Society: An Anthology of Social and Multicultural Readings (New York: Icon Editions, 1994), 75.

N. Bennett ARH 530 23

refuge in what he conceived to be a utopian paradise on earth; the island of Tahiti, replete with primitive natives, tropical vegetation, and an abundance of hammocks. Gauguin, in searching for alternatives to the decadent and materialistic values of European society, formulated his subject matter, from his imagination, and from the imagery of other cultures which he synthesized in an eclectic, evocative way.52 In imagining his utopian paradise, Gauguin constructed an anti-modern allegory informed by European imperialist brochures,53 ingrained religious principles, contempt for superficial modern values, and an undeniable urge for sexual liberation; all of which tenuously referred to the realities of Tahitian life and revealed a surfeit of contradictory intentions. Gauguins mythicized island paradise, infused with the primitive essence, was the anti-modern utopia par excellence; to the artist, Tahiti would become Eden, a primitive society that had not yet fallen from the grace of God, a garden of earthly delights, where Gauguins Tahitian Eve was his spiritual conduit, his exotic idol of sensual pleasure. Before departing for Tahiti in 1891, Gauguin knew nothing of ancient Polynesian religion, but rather, set out to invent the kind of savage deity that he was hoping to discover in the course of his voyage.54 Gauguin embarked on a syncretic, spiritual journey in which he reinvented the role of Eve the original seductress and harbinger of sin to more aptly suit his enthusiasm for unbridled sensuality and spiritual purity.

52

Naomi E. Maurer, The Pursuit of Spiritual Wisdom: The Thought and Art of Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 117. 53 For many artists, as well as the general public, exposure to the primitive cultures came about most notably through the government sponsored colonial expositions that displayed a wide range of exotic art and artifacts, and information about economic resources and opportunities in the newly established colonies, whose primary purpose was the justification of imperialist projects. James F. Knapp, Primitivism and Empire: John Synge and Paul Gauguin, Comparative Literature (Vol. 41, No.1, 1989), 59. 54 Henri Dorra, The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin: Erotica, Exotica, and the Great Dilemmas of Humanity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 152.

N. Bennett ARH 530 24

Figure 9 Varaumati tei oa [Her Name is Vairaumati] Paul Gauguin 1892 Oil on canvas 91 x 68 cm The Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow

Tahiti offered Gauguin the opportunity to harmoniously synthesize the antithetical appropriation of religious motifs and subjects within his erotically charged pictures, enabling the artist to visually unite spirituality and sexuality; a reconciliation firmly rooted in Gauguins escapist discourse, which emphasized the exegetical power of exotic Primitivism. The premise of transposition is the linchpin of Gauguin's creative process, which demands unfettered freedom to achieve true originality. The Tahitian Eve naturally embodied this unification, shedding her Biblical implications of death and disaster, replacing the forbidden fruit with a ripe mango. In a painting dating a year after his arrival, Varaumati tei oa (Her Name is Varaumati, Fig. 9), Gauguin depicts the mythological dispute between Hina and Tefatou. The myth's appeal for Gauguin, 'judging from the number of times that he returned to it, implies that the subject had a value for the artist that enriches the significance of transposition. As Vairaumati, the Tahitian goddess of regeneration, the woman with a fan incarnates the transcendence of the soul, thereby giving form to the journey of the spirit as well as the creative process. Gauguin emphasized pointed parallels with the Bible. The exegesis on the "Eternity of Matter" recounts the dialogue where Tefatou, god of the earth, mandates the death of all living things, which the divine Hina counters to secure their rebirth.

N. Bennett ARH 530 25

It is through Eves physical, postural evolution in Tahiti that Gauguin represents his desire to break away from the restrictions of Judeo-Christian Europe, and attempt to spiritual terms with himself.

Et in Arcadia Ego
Isnt desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isnt the object always absent? Roland Barthes (1979)