The Lady in Gold by Anne-Marie O'Connor Page B

forum for new ideas and art. In the process, the women who hosted them would gain influence they could never have aspired to in Vienna’s hostile tradition-bound institutions.
    Adele was one step closer to joining this world on December 19, 1899, when she emerged a bride from Vienna’s grand Stadt Temple and stepped carefully onto the cobblestones of Seitenstettengasse.

“I Want to Get Out”
    Klimt is often described as a recluse. But at the turn of the century, he was a doting intimate to the host of loyal patrons who supported his search for a new language of art. Klimt’s most important private patron that year wasSerena Lederer, the wife of spirits manufacturerAugust Lederer, who belonged to the same circle of prominent Jewish businessmen as Moritz Bauer and Ferdinand Bloch.
    Serena, high-spirited, outgoing, and extroverted, had appeared in Klimt’s Burgtheater painting. Klimt had painted an 1899 portrait of Serena in a flowing white dress, and stayed on to give Serena drawing lessons.
    Klimt was a regular at the Lederer dinner table, and his complaints about “petit-bourgeois” narrow-mindedness were familiar to the family. “If only people would analyze less and create more,” Klimt lamented.
    Klimt was nervous, and rightly so. He was working on the most important, high-profile commission in the empire. He was to create a series of immense ceiling murals for theUniversity of Vienna, to immortalize the quest for knowledge ofone of the oldest universities in the Germanic world, which had opened its doors in 1365. Klimt was to illustrate the themes of Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence.
    Klimt was now working on
Philosophy,
using the passages of life, from conception to death, as a visual representation of the drama of human existence. He was apprehensive about the reaction. The various officials were probably expecting a neoclassical tableau of great philosophers in Greek togas. They might not appreciate Klimt’s attempts to visually grapple with mortality and a search for meaning in which God played no evident role.
    At Klimt’s studio, Serena’s daughter Elisabeth, age six, found his work-in-progress difficult to comprehend. Klimt told her gently that he “liked it this way, and I could only understand this when I was older.”
    Klimt unveiled
Philosophy
at theSecession in March 1900, revealing a world in which men and women floated in frightening uncertainty. The figures were naked, realistic, with wrinkles and bony hips. A vulnerable old man with shriveled genitals bowed his head in despair. A woman clutched her breasts in anguish. A man and a woman embraced, as an almighty being in the guise of a woman surveyed a dystopian abyss of existential angst.
    The painting was subtitled
Victory of Light over Darkness.
But this shapeless void didn’t reassure anyone that darkness had been vanquished.
    This vision of an uncertain future could not have been comforting to an imperial family shaken to the core bythe suicide, in January 1899, of Crown Prince Rudolf, after apparently shooting his nubile mistress, Marie Vetsera, a month after she turned seventeen. The shocking deaths at the royal estate at Mayerling robbed the emperor of his son—and the empire of an heir to the throne.
    To the correspondent of a Munich art magazine, Klimt’s
Philosophy
showed mankind as “a dull, spineless mass” that “struggles in its battle for happiness and knowledge and remains a mere pawn in the hands of nature.”
    Once they recovered from their shock, nearly a hundred university professors protested. The university rector,Wilhelm Neumann, said Klimt’s mural was too vague. Philosophy should not be “portrayed in a puzzling painting; as a puzzling sphinx,” he said, “at a time when it sought to find its source in the exact sciences.” The Vienna writerKarl Kraus found the mural solipsistic: “Who is really interested in how Herr