Gustav Klimt’s monumental Beethoven Frieze executed in 1902 adores the walls of the Vienna Secession Building. This essay will study the detail from the third panel titled ‘My Kingdom Is Not of This World’. It argues that the third panel of the Beethoven’s frieze is a testament to Klimt’s earning for the new modern style, which he achieves by adopting both Viennese Art Nouveau tendencies towards geometry as well as French ones towards curvilinear forms. 

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                         Gustav Klimt, My Kingdom is Not of This World, c. 1902, frieze, Vienna, Austria, 

                        https://www.meisterdrucke.uk/fine-art-prints/Gustav-Klimt/352044/The-art,-the-choir-and-the-kiss.html

 

Modern style or Art Nouveau had its triumphal appearance at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1900. 1 Prior to that Art Nouveau was introduced to the world in Samuel Bing’s shop of the same name. The London 1900 Art Journal review proclaimed the long-awaited coming of the freshness of thought. Radical artists and designers aimed to create style which reflected the spirit of their time rather than another beginning of another cycle of derivative historicism which corrupted the aesthetics of the century. According to the review, artists had ‘returned [to] nature, to learn her lessons afresh’ which is reflected in the linear forms, feminine curves and organic asymmetrical tendrils.2 This new alphabet created a new decorative language capable to express a wide array of then contemporary feelings and fears in an exhilarating new way. 

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Gustav Klimt was the first president of the Vienna Secession founded in 1897. He wrote a manifesto for the new body to the Kunstlerhaus, the only large exhibition space in Vienna that was trying to unleash itself from the uneasy artistic developments. Klimt mentioned the necessity to bring artistic life in Vienna into a ‘more lively contact with the continuing development of art abroad’ in hope of awakening a ‘purified, modern view of art’ in wider circles and ‘heightened concern for art in official circles’.3 

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Klimt’s long path towards answers to the ultimate questions of human existence brought the artist towards a utopian vision. For Klimt and his fellow Secessionists believed art alone is enough of a power to bring salvation. 4 Klimt created the frieze at the Secession building precisely for the exhibition marked to celebrate Ludwig van Beethoven, who at the time was ‘something of a cult figure’.5 Klimt saw him as genius and believed his symphonies glorifying love and sacrifice are profound enough to redeem mankind from impurity and evil. 

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Klimt’s third panel is the Ideal kingdom to which, according to the exhibition catalogue, we are lead by the arts ‘to find true joy, true happiness, true love’.6 “My kingdom is not of this world”. This is what Christ replied to Pontius Pilate in the Gospel of John when it becomes apparent that Christ’s earthly presence is soon to end. The blissful embrace the couple is in and the presumed kiss is the embodiment of that true love as the end journey of mankind on the path to salvation.7

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The embrace, in other words, the coming together of the feminine and the masculine into a loving unity is symbolically a deeper idea. Klimt was inspired by the Richard Wagner’s Beethoven essay of 1870. Klimt decided to express his idea that the essence of music is essentially unlike that of any worldly phenomena, and that the human struggle as well as yearning for happiness and love reaches its highest fulfilment precisely in the unification of the arts. 8 The arts therefore are unified through the harmony created by Beethoven’s symphony and symbolically expressed by the embrace and the coming together of the wake sun and the sleeping moon in a golden halo-like structure. 

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Klimt had to adopt a new alphabet to communicate complex ideas to the beholder. For the first time, the son of the goldsmith, chose to adopt gold leaf in his paintings. The channel of pure god and the golden cloud around the embraced couple are radiating with golden light from within. This can be explained through the reference to Wagner’s essay which drew a parallel between Christianity and music. He wrote, "so does music now break forth from amidst the chaos of modern civilisation. Both say to us: Our kingdom is not of this world. Which means: We come from within, you from without; we spring from the essence of things, you from the appearance”.9 Klimt’s frieze reflects artists intention to prompt the viewer to imagine the transcendence of immanent circumstance at the time when the contemporary environment was shaking from the socially disruptive events. The frieze attempts to elicit imaginings beyond time and space to psychologically distant, perhaps, unaccessible states of being. These unattainable places are utopias. That is why, Kevin Karens believes, they are, quite literally, kingdoms not of this world. 

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Klimt’s affinity with the fin-de-siècle sprit central to Art Nouveau is evident in the rich use of symbolism in the panel. Indeed, some professors at The University of Vienna did not appreciate Klimt’s Art Nouveau tendencies. They regarded it as ‘too erotic, too symbolic, and too difficult to understand’. 10 Indeed, he was influenced by the decadent and eroticised Symbolist world-view held by Many French practitioners of Art Nouveau. 

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Although Klimt painted other subjects, it is perhaps the women he depicted for which he is best known. Richard Muter, in a newspaper review of 1909, claimed that ‘the new Viennese woman, a specific sort of new Viennese woman - their grandmothers were Judith and Salome - has been invented or discovered by Klimt. She is delightfully vicious, charmingly sinful, fascinatingly perverse’.11 Symbolism and Art Nouveau were sometimes closely linked and themes of decadent eroticism and nature certainly describes this example but women were portrayed as fluid, sexual and powerful while simultaneously restricted to sexual artistic objects.

 

Gustav Klimt’s work demonstrates that he was partly line with the German Art Nouveau and its fascination with nature, a preoccupation with abstract curvilinear forms and an interest in symbolism and spiritualism. His work is relatively dissimilar to French or Belgian Art Nouveau. Klimt’s work can be seen, then, as typical of the work created by the Secession. His desire to be modern is evident in the use of delicate regular and irregular lines inspired by nature. These are not only decorative, they create form and symbolise forces unseen by the human eye, like radiation of light ‘from within’ which is represented by regularly curved lines above the couple. These are echoed by the curving lines on the fabric of angels’ dresses - symbolising both the light rays and the sound waves which make up the Kingdom of the Ideal. 

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There is a sense of the total harmony. Music waves of the Beethoven’s symphony interfere with the laws of gravity allowing the choir singing heavenly angels to be suspended above freshly green flower field. These steps were decisive in finding his own Modernism through creating form with line rather than three-dimensional tonal effect. Klimt abjures any attempt at the creation of illusionistic three-dimensional depth. However, the local modern art developments in Vienna manifested in a tendency towards geometry in decoration, like it is inside the golden cloud. A symphony between curvilinear and straight lines superimposed by geometric structures.12 It was extended to form too as evident by the rectangular and rather flat dresses of singing angels. 

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Decadent tastes and the use of the fluid line stem from the Rococo style promoted by French writers in the 1880s-90s.13 However, although the influence of Rococo can still be seen in a few French furniture designers, it had no influence on the decadent writers like Mallarmé, Baudelaire, or Rimbaud in the later 19th century.

The employment of gold by Klimt has more exotic origins from the golden Byzantine mosaic and frescoes and the ancient Egyptian art with its flat unmodelled figures and extensive use of gold which had strong religious symbolism connected with the sun god Ra. 

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Art Nouveau artists and others such as the followers of the Aesthetic Movement turned to the arts of the Orient. The extreme simplification of the design of Japanese prints and the use of overlapping flat planes to create the space had a profound impact on the way Art Nouveau artists perceived space. It even gained a title - ‘Japonisme’. 

Klimt rejected some of the traditional academic approaches and ‘looked east’. Firstly, there is no horizon in this composition. Secondly, while the bodies making up the embracing couple are rendered in three dimensions, the way Klimt superimposed figures of angels without any reference to space in between them is indeed radical.

 

The general absence of three-dimensional space unlike in Renaissance paintings makes the painting not as a ‘window’ but more of a ‘visual stream of thought’.14 It is not a scene the beholder can walk into, the image is more similar to a momentous snapshot from a dream. This reminds of Freud's description of the unconscious as "disconnected fragments of visual images”.15 Images of perception are different to images in dreams, which compete in intensity and superimposition.16 It further instantiates the vision of the Ideal Kingdom. The angels’ closed eyes can be a reference to the concept of the unconscious, which the Symbolists took to heart. Perhaps, Klimt saw the Kingdom of Ideal not as a physical reality but rather as a different kind of psychological state outside of the human consciousness.

 

After all, Klimt was aware of Sigmund Freud’s writings and Freud's discoveries in the field of psychoanalysis played a major role in the development of modern art and literature. The very concept of the unconscious as the driving force behind human behaviour reveals some truths that do not always satisfy many conservative members of Viennese society. Freud's view that instinctive passions outweigh rational interests creates many problems for cultures based on tradition and dynastic order. Analyzing dreams, Freud discovered that the root of all immorality and even abnormality or "perversion" lies in the center of human beings, that is, in the unconscious of every individual.

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Klimt seems to be confirming Freud’s notion that human life essentially consists of the struggle between Eros and Thanatos, between the life drive and the drive for destruction. But again there is an absolute lack of agency, particularly in the floating body of the naked woman on the right side of the canvas. The wall frieze was created in 1901-02 by which time Klimt was absorbed in the Austrian version of Art Nouveau – Jugendstil. His paintings almost right up to his death in 1918 all include motifs typical of the style.

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Gustav Klimt quit the Secession over growing accusations that his emphasis on architecture and decorative arts sought to ‘undermine traditional easel painting’.17 Nevertheless, the name of Gustav Klimt as a great master is firmly inscribed into the fabric of Art Nouveau style. Despite criticism of some of his contemporaries, today at the hight of our time and at the low point of contemporary art, Gustav Klimt stands as a beacon of aestheticism, symbolism but, most importantly, relevant and nuanced radicalism which influenced artists of the twentieth century and hopefully will still influence the artists to come. 

 

 

References:

1 Eric Escritt, Art Nouvea, (Phaidon Press, 2004) p. 4
2 ibid, p. 11
3 ibid, p. 137-8
4 Gilles Néret, Gustav Klimt, Gustav Klimt: 1862-1918, (Taschen, 2000), p. 40 

5 ibid, p. 37 

6 Kevin Karnes, A Kingdom Not of This World: Wagner, the Arts, and Utopian Visions in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, (OUP USA, 2013), p. 8 

7 Gilles Néret, p. 40

8 Kevin Karnes, p. 10 

9 ibid, p. 10 

10 Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present, (Random House Publishing Group, 2012), p. 100

11 Martin Gayford, ‘Gustav Klimt: A Life Devoted to Women”, 2008, The Telegraph, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3673232/Gustav-Klimt-a-life-devoted-to-women.html

12 Escritt, p. 133
13 ibid, p. 15
14 Eric Kandel, p. 102
15 Sigmund Freud, On Dreams, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1952), p. 40
16 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), p. 359 

17 Escritt, p. 167