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Gustav
Klimt's "Hope I"
by Johannes Dobai
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Such an interpretation finds support in Goldfish, exhibited by Klimt in the Spring of
1902. (41) In the foreground a
voluptuous nude sits with her back turned, glancing provocatively
over her shoulder, while two other nudes, accompanied by a round
fish, are represented as mermaids (nixies) in the depths of the
sea: in other words, uninhibited, sensuous beings as seen in
paintings by Bocklin, Watts or Klinger. The real meaning of this
painting only emerges with the knowledge that the work was
originally to have been entitled To My Critics, so that the
main figure in the foreground may be derived from a print by Félicien
Rops, Appel aux masses. (42) The painting was intended as a
reply to critics who considered the University paintings, especially
Medicine,
indecent.
A study of the events connected with the University paintings might
reveal in Klimt certain Whistler-like traits. (43) However, these were
not basic, but secondary characteristics of a man inclined to
introspection, and it was really Klimt's friends who urged him into
belligerence. For example, in 1903, when Hope l was
painted, Hermann Bahr (following Whistler's example of The
Gentle Art of Making Enemies) published a collection of hostile
criticisms of Klimt, Against Klimt, with his own comments. His
objective was to expose the philistine stupidity of Klimt's
attackers, among whom were not only critics but professors of Vienna
University and politicians. There are other instances of the
belligerence with which Klimt's friends replied to hostile remarks,
and Klimt's own remarks - like those in the interview with Bertha
Zuckerkandl mentioned above - at times show his own uncompromising attitude.
Moreover, many of Klimt's works show that his
artistic direction at this time is to be understood by the motto
"Nuda Veritas" on his painting of 1899 (fig. 9) (44) - in
which artistic freedom, of truth, and contempt for the judgement
masses are expressed in the quotation from Schiller inscribed on the
painting: "If you cannot please all by your actions and your
art, please the few. To please the many is bad. - Schiller. Nuda
Veritas."
Yet another level of meaning can be seen in Hope l if
we observe that the symbolic scenery, as in the painting Goldfish,
seems to be in the depths of the sea. This is suggested less by
the ornaments, which look like a collage avant la lettre, than
by the large, dark sea-monster - a strange, balloon-like shape that
looks a little like a polyp or a tadpole, with a claw-like hand and
dull, expressionless eyes. This creature's size approximates that
of the pregnant woman, and it could perhaps be compared with the
gigantic gorilla in the group of "hostile figures" in
Klimt's Beethoven frieze of 1902. (45) These "hostile
figures", based in part on Beardsley, are nude women who in the
composition symbolize "sickness, madness, death, debauchery, unchastity and excess". (46) The gorilla too falls into the
category of the animalistic and merely sensual, though the grotesque
form seems to be also an ironical self-comment on the theoretical,
moralizing contents of the frieze.
The sea-monster in Hope l is also related to the two tadpole-shaped
mermaids of Nixies, a less successful painting Klimt
completed around 1899. (47) They too hover in deep waters, but have
female faces; one would expect these creatures to pull a man into
the farthest depths, like the mermaid in a painting by Edward Burne-Jones. (48)
In Hope I, therefore, the sea-monster seems
to be a symbol of animal nature in a negative sense: the main
figure among the "appalling grimaces" and the
"grotesque and lascivious demons of life" mentioned by
Hevesi, from which the pregnant woman turns away and, like Dürer's
Knight, walks unperturbed between the figures of Death and the Devil
(fig. 3). (49) Nonetheless, this monster, like the gorilla in the
Beethoven frieze, is more comical than threatening, at least for
today's viewers, but it is not easy to say why. Either a sense of
humour carried away the sceptical Klimt, or he lacked the skill to
convincingly depict life's dark forces. Perhaps, too, he was testing
the aesthetic limits available to a painter in Vienna at that time.
Hevesi, who has at times been somewhat inexact in his descriptions
of paintings, writes of "grimaces" in the plural. However,
there is only one really monstrous "grimace", that on
the head in the upper left corner of the painting - a face with a
distorted mouth, with one eye closed and one half-open. In style
this head, with its angular outlines, is the most "modern"
element in the picture: it precedes heads with open I closed
eyes by Egon Schiele that, like this head, are hard to interpret in
words. (50) In Klimt's work there is no real parallel to this face.
Some comparable heads in the group of "hostile figures" to
the left of the gorilla in the Beethoven frieze, which were perhaps
based on African or Polynesian sculpture, are not as startlingly
asymmetrical in their construction as this distorted face. (51)
The two other heads seen frontally in the upper part of Hope
l can scarcely be regarded as "grimaces", half-closed
eyes in the upper-right corner of the painting. These that the
renewal of life can only take place in the shadow of death. Klimt also gave a festive note to the picture by
decorating the hair of the pregnant woman with flowers. Moreover,
the small, round, gold ornaments, with their stylized outlines,
seem playful and are probably derived from Charles Rennie Mackintosh and
the "Four" in general.
After a description of all the motifs of Hope I, one is
inclined to return to Hevesi's sentence in which the pregnant woman,
like Dürer's Knight, walks unperturbed between Death and Devil
"in the holiness of her condition, threatened on all sides by
appalling grimaces, by grotesque and lascivious demons of life".
Hevesi speaks of threats, even of a "path of terror" on
which the pregnant woman must walk, "spotless and made
invulnerable by the 'hope' entrusted to her womb." If one is to
take these remarks literally (as they are probably meant to be
taken), one must assume that Klimt meant to represent symbolically
not only the "holiness" of pregnancy in general, but the
holiness of this condition in an unmarried woman in particular - one
who would be exposed to "threats" and may walk on a
"path of terror." Apart from Hevesi's otherwise
incomprehensible interpretation (a married woman in Vienna at that
time was hardly exposed to threats if pregnant), Klimt's own biography might give us a clue, since we know that he had at least one
illegitimate son, the future stage-manager Gustav Ucicky. Another
look at Nuda Veritas and Goldfish would only confirm
this view, as would Hevesi's further remark that at the time the
picture was painted "all ideas of emancipation come together."
If this interpretation is correct - as I would like to think it is -
we would then see the gloomy, and indeed also the comical, aspects
of the sea-monster in the painting as characteristic of philistine
stupidity, threatening just because of its obtuseness. In this
case the half-comical aspect would not be the result of a lack of
artistic skill, but an apt expression of the hypocrisy of the
conservative majority.
But a deeper and more universal meaning of Hope l is
suggested by the presence of the figure of Death. He is an important
protagonist in the painting, as he is in Medicine, where he
is seen directly to the left of the pregnant woman. The position of
Death in Medicine also helps to explain the role of Death
in Hope I. In Medicine, death is part of Suffering
Mankind, and not a power threatening life from outside, as Klimt
showed it in his large composition Death and Life (painted
about 1911, and reworked in 1915). (52) In Medicine death is
something like an aspect of life, part of a general process that
includes life and death and is broader than both. Life and death
become part of a "world mystery" that, as the overall
meaning of the University paintings suggests, is unfathomable
through mere intellectual analysis by scholars. (53)
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