A Mused (Pt. 1)

A dedicated reader knows the value of the right book at the right time – that’s my excuse, anyway, for amassing so many huge piles of them. Lately I’ve been binging on books about turn of the century Vienna, specifically those two peerless artists Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. It’s a fascinating period and place, the trembling, decadent end of that unreal assemblage known as the Austro-Hungarian empire, and, I’m more and more convinced, one of the crucial nodal points of modernism.

I’ve been fascinated by the subject before, but what set me off this time was a little aside I found on a Christian conspiracy site (  http://watch.pair.com/virgo-antichrist.html ) while idly googling in which one Barbara Aho says of Klimt:

Of course Aho means this to be cautionary but to me it sounds more like tally ho!

Although unfortunately I haven’t found any more about sexual intercourse with demons, this siren call led me to The Naked Truth: Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka and Other Scandals edited by Tobias Natter and Max Hollein, which is large, handsome book, the catalog to what have been a pretty fabulous exhibition, and a darn good peep into that wacky Viennese artistic milieu, although, in what today so sadly passes as art criticism, there are several essays in it that are typical feminist examinations of the role of women as object and subject and blah, blah, blah, and which have almost nothing to do with the artists that are the putative subjects of the book.

The whole scene is so interesting to me, with its emphasis on the primacy of the erotic (after all Freud, Schnitzler and Wedekind were part of the same Zeitgeist) and the artistic regeneration of the female nude, which passed from the bloodless allegorical depictions of the academic painters to the glorious personal symbolism and private imagery of Klimt (using the same insight that the Pre-Raphaelites discovered, that is, if you paint a historical or mythological subject as someone you know there will be an emotional resonance that is lacking in the mere portrayal of a type or model) to the shocking directness of Schiele, who didn’t even bother to veil his nudes with historical or fictional allusions – and all this nakedness was taking place in a very elaborately clothed society. Klimt’s nudes are haughty and otherworldly, exalted emblems of an ideal, if somewhat abstract, freedom, both artistic and sexual, while Schiele’s are more real, nakedly expressing the ambiguous guilt and danger (both psychic and, in that age of unchecked venereal disease, physical) inherent in erotic desire.

The feminists may brand these images as exploitative pornography, but they are much more than that. Klimt and Schiele’s nudes express their deepest spiritual aspirations, and are, among so many other things, a reflection of their artistic inspiration and mission as well – their muses if you will. So all this imagery of women, and, let’s face it, as Aho points out, supernatural women, made me dimly remember a book I’d found at the library sale, and which now lay buried in one of the dusty piles that surround my bed, and I somehow knew it was the one I had to read next.

It took me a minute to find it, mostly because I couldn’t quite remember the title or what it looked like. I did dig up a book called Evil by Design: The Creation and Marketing of the Femme Fatale by Elizabeth K. Menon which looks interesting and which I may yet read, but from the title alone you can tell it’s a feminist job – the research is impressive but the slant is oppressive. Besides, the femme fatale template wasn’t exactly appropriate. Yes, there is something supernatural, genus vampire, about the femme fatale, and the Klimt/Schiele woman can be predatory and threatening, but there’s more to her than that. One of the reasons I like the pagan gods so much is that they are multifaceted, with many manifestations, as mutable and inexplicable as the natural world that perhaps inspired them. Certainly even Jehovah, the winner of the god elimination contest, Mr. Unchanging Love Everywhere, was a very moody entity back when he just had an Old Testament.

Aphrodite is not only seductive and perfectly beautiful, but emotional and peevish as well. Demeter, the great all giving mother was just one of several aspects of an essence which encompassed Persephone, the innocent maiden, and Hecate, the malevolent crone. I’m very attracted to goddess worship, but unlike the smiley face new age crowd, I recognize that the goddess’s power can easily become cruel, and that these aspects frequently came to the fore in the ancient world as evidenced by the castration of Isis’s priests or the human sacrifice that Robert Graves suggests was the basis of the original goddess religion.

But there’s a positive glory there too, a kind not personified by the traditional femme fatale, which is the expression of just one facet of female sexuality, a facet particularly troubling to turn of the century man, but also a figure that makes an only too handy stick with which the feminist critic may belabor patriarchy. Klimt’s Judith is predatory and deadly, but very glorious, lovely and inspirational too – Klimt’s vision of the eternal feminine spirit manifesting itself in the person of a hot Viennese society lady. There’s that ambiguity in Schiele too – his nudes are exposed and vulnerable, but also disturbingly aware of the power of their own sexuality.

No, I wanted more than the stock femme fatale, and I finally found it, pretty much where I thought it would be, in the third pile from the left, a book called La Belle Dame Sans Merci and the Aesthetics of Romanticism by Barbara Fass, published by, of all places, Wayne State University Press. It’s from 1974, an underappreciated period in criticism, still fired by the energies of the sixties and not yet ossified into the political cant of today. (For example by 1995 Fass was writing a book with the subtitle "a narrative of folklore and gender.") And it was the right book, one that fiercely percolated my thinking, as will be evidenced by the next installment of this essay, which will hopefully appear in the not so distant future.

Try to hang on till then,

Yr Pal,

UBU