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Beethoven’s Farewell: THe Creative Genius “in the Claws of the Secession”

Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen

in Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition

Chapter 2 analyzes the disruption around 1900 of a long tradition of representing genius through postures of contemplation, taking as its point of departure the 1902 Klinger-Beethoven exhibition held ... More

Chapter 2 analyzes the disruption around 1900 of a long tradition of representing genius through postures of contemplation, taking as its point of departure the 1902 Klinger-Beethoven exhibition held by the Vienna Secession. It probes formal and conceptual discrepancies between the exhibition’s central object, Max Klinger’s Beethoven-Denkmal (1885-1902), and Gustav Klimt’s Beethovenfries, created to adorn the space that housed it. While Klinger celebrated Beethoven’s creativity by relying on long-standing corporeal conventions for expressing inner activities of intellect––a clenched hand, heavy head, and seated posture––Klimt upended associations between contemplative intellect and corporeal weight and tension. The Beethovenfries’s disregard for laws of gravity, and visual stress on bodily weightlessness and buoyancy, culminates in a decorative passage where, to express the triumphant mental state evoked by Klinger’s monument, Klimt deploys what the chapter calls the “motif of the levitating head.” Analyzing this motif in the context of Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of “the spirit of gravity,” and alongside analogous strategies in Auguste Rodin’s Balzac, Butterfield-Rosen argues that this motif concretized a period transformation in understandings of creative thought, as various disciplines––from philosophy to scientific psychology to evolutionary biology––insisted upon the role of sexuality and unconscious thinking in human mental processes.Less

Cartographies of Complexity: Ruiz’s ‘French’ Cinema Since the Mid-1990s

Michael Goddard

in The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz: Impossible Cartographies

This chapter focuses on Raúl Ruiz's cinema from the mid-1990s to his most recent films prior to his death. In this period, Ruiz's cinema presented cartographies of complexity which are no less ... More

This chapter focuses on Raúl Ruiz's cinema from the mid-1990s to his most recent films prior to his death. In this period, Ruiz's cinema presented cartographies of complexity which are no less subversive than their predecessors of the 1970s and 1980s despite more conventional appearances. The period is represented by the production of the films, Three Lives and Only One Death (1996), which features Pierre Bellemare, a French radio personality famous for his colourful recounting of anomalous and mysterious tales taken from both history and everyday life, and Klimt (2005), which is about the life of Viennese artist Gustav Klimt. In these films, cartography no longer refers primarily to gestures, styles, or places, but to different forms of multiplicity, whether in terms of subjective identity, narrative elements, nationality, or cinematic images themselves.Less

The Education of the Normal Eye: Visual Learning circa 1900

in Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life

This chapter describes the visual representations. The Exners understood visual representations as symbols that “call forth visual memories in the viewer of that which they signify.” Sigmund Exner ... More

This chapter describes the visual representations. The Exners understood visual representations as symbols that “call forth visual memories in the viewer of that which they signify.” Sigmund Exner insisted it was the duty of the artist to compensate for his own visual idiosyncrasies. Hilde and Nora Exner had great success in designing children's books and toys. The Exners became steeped in the great Viennese scandal of the year 1900. Gustav Klimt's mural for the philosophy faculty was to represent the illuminating light of knowledge. Serafin Exner concentrated on the problem of defining a color's “white value.” The concept of the normal eye was rooted in the experience of social intimacy, of private “Verkehr.” Even as the Exners used science and art to communicate their utopian vision to the next generation, they sought to impart a disciplined imagination, one that would not stray beyond the limits of the possible.Less

Nuda Veritas: Iconoclash and Incarnation

Catherine Keller

in Intercarnations: Exercises in Theological Possibility

This chapter focuses on a major exhibition at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, subtitled “Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka and Other Scandals.” The exhibition includes Nuda Veritas, a painting by Gustav Klimt, ... More

This chapter focuses on a major exhibition at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, subtitled “Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka and Other Scandals.” The exhibition includes Nuda Veritas, a painting by Gustav Klimt, featuring a naked female figure whose gilded gaze—citing in all irony the icons of Byzantium—is sophic, knowing, grounded in a shameless sexuality. To honor matter, iconoclasm is never enough. And such honor is what John of Damascus directed, against an imperial iconoclasm, to the incarnation, “the matter which works my salvation.” From the Renaissance on, formalized conventions of nudity had overcome the modestly clad figures of medieval art—but ever in the service of allegory. Now emerges this painterly revelation, referred to as realism, that revels in the truth of the flesh itself. The chapter also considers another exhibition, Bruno Latour's Iconoclash.Less

Introduction

Alys X. George

in The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body

The introduction argues the case for “rethinking Vienna 1900,” questioning in particular the status of the psyche as the dominant trope in earlier studies of fin-de-siècle Vienna. It takes the status ... More

The introduction argues the case for “rethinking Vienna 1900,” questioning in particular the status of the psyche as the dominant trope in earlier studies of fin-de-siècle Vienna. It takes the status of scientific materialism in Viennese medicine as its departure point, considers Sigmund Freud’s early medical training, and looks at Hermann Bahr’s programmatic writings about Viennese modernism. After providing an overview of contemporary body studies and situating the origins of Viennese modernism in the body, as opposed to in the psyche, the chapter argues for the centrality of the corporeal within the cultural production of the age and gestures toward its importance as a nucleus of interwar social democratic reform initiatives. The chapter asserts that previous studies’ theoretical focus on the mind has obscured the actual practice of engagement with physical matter in the cultural context. In doing so, it surveys historiographical debates about the character of the cultural ferment that existed in Vienna around the turn of the century and in the interwar years.Less

From the Neck Up: Another Woman and Celebrity

Peter J. Bailey

in The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen

If art in Deconstructing Harry is too much the product of a reprobate to be anything other than corrupt, the bitter cultural satire of Celebrity hardly allows for the existence of art at all. Lee ... More

If art in Deconstructing Harry is too much the product of a reprobate to be anything other than corrupt, the bitter cultural satire of Celebrity hardly allows for the existence of art at all. Lee Simon wants to believe in his genuineness and the honesty of his autobiographical novel, but he’s too much attracted to the hollow, media-crazed world he abhors to remain committed to his art, which a jilted lover ultimately scatters over the Hudson River. Marion Post of Another Womanknows she must change her life from its philosophical deep freeze, and she finds her transformation depicted in the novel of an ex-lover who characterizes the woman modeled on her as “capable of deep passion.” Both Simon and Post, these movies suggest, are guilty of confounding art and life for the purposes of self-gratification and self-aggrandizement.Less