Klimt and Me: A Mess of Contradictions

I bet you’ve seen this painting before:

It’s The Kiss by Gustav Klimt, which was the subject of a film presented by The Katherine Hepburn Cultural Center in Old Saybrook, Connecticut on August 10.

The film’s commentators both lauded this piece’s intimacy and sweetness, and suggested it was creepy, questioning why a lover would put his hand on his beloved’s throat as if he were choking her. And is she clawing at his hand—or caressing him? As for the decorative gold surrounding her—is that his cloak? Is it light? Is it part of her dress? And while there is a field of flowers below them, her feet hang off the edge, as if she might fall off into the vast darkness of...is that night sky? The unconscious? Freedom? Nothingness?

What struck me most about the film is that it didn’t talk about Klimt in the context of Freud, who would also have been working in Vienna at the time. I saw a lot of connections between the psychological excavations Freud was exploring and what appeared on Klimt’s canvases, particularly in terms of his relationship to women.

Early in his career, Klimt did a series of three controversial paintings for the University of Vienna to celebrate the three faculties of Philosophy, Medicine, and Law. The paintings reflected the general theme of “the triumph of light over darkness,” which could also apply to The Kiss—all that bright love surrounded by the dark void.

In the first of these paintings (above), Philosophy, the void is portrayed as feminine (see that face on the right?). On the left, are humans in despair, with a woman at the bottom looking away from the viewer as if she doesn’t care about human problems. In the second painting, Medicine, the woman at the bottom has become Hygiea, but she denies her healing powers to humanity. In the third, Jurisprudence, Klimt puts a man in front of three judges, the three female Furies. Why embody these three faculties as female and have them appear so disinterested?

Perhaps Klimt was engaged in a struggle with the feminine forces within himself—the forces of the unconscious, the creative, the void, which he managed in his own psyche through creative expression and physical passion.

His relationships with real women tended toward his own comfort. He never married; he lived with and was cared for by his mother and sisters; he had sexual liaisons with models of all social classes—his studio had separate entrances for street models and society models—and he apparently sired fourteen children, only two of whom were formally recognized during his life.

In his paintings, Klimt empowers his female subjects by putting them in rich settings, allowing them to stare off the canvas at the viewer to claim their power and identity. The scholarship I’ve read supports this, suggesting his portraits of women are sympathetic. Yet this analysis makes me uneasy. What woman wants to be locked into a decorative mural? What dark part of femininity is he rendering in that face in the void, or his powerful Judith painting, where her post-murder face is also post coital?

The woman in The Kiss appears circumscribed by the golden halo of cloak, beyond which lies the void. Perhaps Klimt is suggesting that the only thing that stands between us and the void is eros. Maybe the “us,” for all his focus on women, is male because clearly the void has the power to terrify. Passion is the way to escape death, since it creates new life, but Thanatos always wins. All this feels Freudian.

Maybe the paintings represented his working toward understanding. Maybe he didn’t know what it all meant. He didn’t write much, saying that the way to know him was through his work. As artists, we tend toward certain ideas, symbols, corners of our lives that we excavate over and over, trying to figure out their importance. Sometimes, we never do.

Good art tends to contain challenging oppositions, which is what makes it fun to think about. I like being a little uneasy in front of art. How about you?

Thanks for reading.

You can find me on Instagram and Facebook, and at my website.

All artwork courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

If you’re in Connecticut and want to drop by, I’ll be leading a discussion between writers Tim Parrish and Jeffrey Mock, both professors at Southern Connecticut State University, on September 18 at the Norwalk Public Library, One Belden Avenue, Norwalk, Connecticut at 6:30 PM. All are welcome.