The Portrait in Vienna 1900

London

by Jill Lloyd

If the exhibition Facing the Modern. The Portrait in Vienna 1900 (to 12th January)1 had been shown in Vienna at one of the excellent museums devoted to the cultural history of the city – such as the Wien Museum or the Jüdisches Museum Wien – it would have seemed an interesting and appropriate project. Unfortunately, staging a show of this kind at the National Gallery, London, is an entirely different matter. In the context of this great international museum displaying masterpieces of European art through the ages, Facing the Modern comes across as flawed and oddly parochial. Sadly, it represents a missed opportunity to introduce the British public to the splendours of fin-de-siècle Viennese art.

Given the number of exhibitions that have been devoted to this subject in recent years – including Vienna 1900 at the Fondation Beyeler in 2010–11, Vienna 1900, Style and Identity at the Neue Galerie, New York, in 2011, and Vienna Art and Design at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, that same year – the London organisers may well have considered themselves under pressure to come up with an alternative approach. The National Gallery’s own Klimt portrait, representing Hermine Gallia clad in an ethereal white robe designed by the artist’s companion, Emilie Flöge (cat. no.1; Fig.42), is a logical starting point for a portraiture exhibition; the concept for Facing the Modern was undoubtedly developed with this in mind. Unfortunately, to a British audience, this tour de force at the heart of the show is all too reminiscent of Whistler’s Symphony in White No.1: The White Girl, 1861, and thus fails to convey the originality and genius of Klimt’s portrait style. The National Gallery was apparently unable to secure loans of any of Klimt’s other great, classic female portraits (such as Fritza Riedler, Adele Bloch-Bauer, Margarethe Stonborough-Wittgenstein, Elisabeth Lederer or Friederike Maria Beer), whose inclusion would have placed Hermine Gallia in context, lent substance to the narratives concerning patronage and Jewish identity that underpin the exhibition and – perhaps most importantly – guaranteed a level of aesthetic quality appropriate to the National Gallery’s walls. As it is, Klimt-lovers have to make do with a small selection of the artist’s moving but unfinished late work, including his striking Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl, which has become embroiled since the opening of the exhibition in what will undoubt­edly be a costly restitution battle between the Austrian state and the Bloch-Bauer heirs.

As anyone involved in the field knows, the problems surrounding loans of fin-de-siècle Viennese art are extremely complicated, not only in terms of restitution disputes but also because Austrian state museums must comply with a five-year rest period between international loans. This means that the National Gallery had little chance of producing a high-quality exhibition that could match those recently shown in Basel, New York or Melbourne. Their decision to restrict themselves to the genre of portraiture further limited their possibilities, resulting in a specialised exhibition padded out with loans of secondary importance that are wholly inappropriate for a major international museum. This is all the more the pity, given that London has never experienced a full-scale Vienna 1900 exhi­bition – which would necessarily include a survey of the city’s spectacular and essentially interrelated achievements in architecture, fine art and design.

The problems of Facing the Modern are compounded by the curatorial decision to present a thematic display that quickly descends into pedantry. The exhibition is divided into six sections variously titled ‘The Old Viennese’, ‘The Family and the Child’, ‘The Appeal of the Artist’, ‘The New Viennese’, ‘Love and Loss’ and ‘Finish and Failure’, which are collectively intended to construct a narrative of the role of the city’s burgeoning middle class, many of whom, we are informed, were ‘immigrants with Jewish backgrounds’. The basic idea is to demonstrate the interaction of this new stratum of Viennese society with the artists of the period, and to show how portrait­ure was used to define social status and identity, while also reflecting a sense of individual and social alienation. This is a perfectly valid historical approach, well suited for a book about Vienna 1900, an essay in an exhibition catalogue or an academic lecture. However, when it is translated into visual form in an exhibition involving the subtle phenomenon of real works of art, such an approach inevitably disappoints by treating paintings as mere illustrations to an argument. We are thus confronted by a disjointed display of works with jarringly different styles, grouped solely in terms of comparable themes and subjects. No consideration is given to the complex problems involved in hanging radically avant-garde paintings such as Richard Gerstl’s The sisters Karoline and Pauline Fey (1905; no.24) and Egon Schiele’s The family (Self-portrait) (1918; no.27) next to traditional works such as Anton Romako’s The artist’s nieces Elisabeth and Maja (1873; no.23) or Alois Delug’s society portrait of The Markl family (1907; no.25).

This distressingly simplistic approach descends on occasion to the level of farce when we are informed that a relationship exists between one of the finest paintings in the show, Kokoschka’s iridescent Portrait of Lotte Franzos (no.2; Fig.43), and a mediocre nineteenth-century portrait hanging alongside it, because of a slight, chance similarity in the positioning of the women’s hands. Thus the exhibition ignores questions of historical context, stylistic difference and aesthetic value in favour of simplistic thematic parallels. Truly interesting problems, such as the by no means clear-cut division between innovation and tradition in the work of an artist such as Klimt, are left by the wayside as the exhibition veers between an academic and a populist approach. The didactic labels attached to each exhibit do little to help; in one instance the writer remains apparently unaware of the anti-Semitic implications of the label accompanying Hans Makart’s Portrait of Hanna Klinkosch (c.1875; no.28), which informs us that she is represented ‘with enlarged eyes and an inclined head to minimise the size of her nose’.

Only in the last two rooms displaying the themes ‘Love and Loss’ and ‘Finish and Failure’ is there a sense that the National Gallery’s exhibition has got into its stride. Sparsely hung with high-quality works, the rooms are beautifully orchestrated to convey their message about a lost society’s obsession with failure and death. There is exactly the right combination of the unusual, the unexpected – Klimt’s chalk drawing of his dead baby son (1902; no.66) – and the classically beautiful. Where ‘secondary’ works are included, such as Gyula Benczúr’s Portrait of Empress Elisabeth (Sisi) (no.61; Fig.44), they are aesthetically convincing and act as rogue elements to offset the modernist exhibits rather than drowning them in a sea of mediocrity. This is high-level curating; but coming so late in the day it leaves us with the impression that far from being borne of experience, the requisite curatorial skills have been learnt on the job. This is shocking for an institution of the National Gallery’s standing, as is the revelation that one of the highlights of the show, Klimt’s Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl (which the lawyer representing the Bloch-Bauer heirs insists was wrongly withheld by arbitration in 2006; no.33), should be described in the national press as ‘Nazi loot’.

Whatever the outcome of this dispute, the National Gallery should surely have been more cautious and better prepared. As for Vienna 1900, the opportunity of seeing another exhibition in London devoted to the subject that better reflects its splendour and complexity is now lost for a generation.

1    Catalogue: Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900. Edited by Gemma Blackshaw. 216 pp. incl. 140 col. ills. (National Gallery Publications, London, 2013), £19.95 (PB). ISBN 978–1–85709–546–3; £35 (HB). ISBN 978–1–85709–546–3.