Morning, Vienna, in the last years of the empire. At the end of a garden where the grass grows as it pleases, a low studio hides behind fruit trees, and a heavy man in a long blue smock crosses the lawn with cats at his heels. Inside, the day’s quiet routine has already begun. Models drift through the rooms, clothed or unclothed, dozing on sofas, the whole studio like an orchestra still awaiting the director’s cues. No one performs. Even the light sits down in the studio quietly.
The man moves among them without a word, and the only sound in the room is graphite: a pencil line tracing a body, losing the trail, circling back to try again. Sheets flutter from his board like leaves from a tree too indifferent to notice its own autumn; they pass into the hands of admirers or vanish unsigned into corners. By the end, nearly four thousand will be produced.
He left almost no words. No diary, letters barely worth the postage, and, when Vienna finally pressed him for a self-account, hw ewplied with the slamming sound of a door closing:
Von mir gibt es kein Selbstporträt.
There is no self-portrait of me.
He is not interesting, the artist insists. He is a painter, more absorbed by the mystery of others than by the riddle of himself. Anyone intent on knowing him must do so by studying his pictures, as if reading a diary written in graphite and longing for truth.
Let us, then, accept the artist’s silence. Let us follow the prayer of that Viennese drawing monk by the blue habit.
A Cloister of One
In 1930, twelve years after Klimt’s death, Hermann Hesse published Narcissus and Goldmund, the story of two friends who divide the world between them. Narcissus is the perfect monk, a man of the word and the concept, at home in Greek and in logic, who knows himself completely.
Goldmund arrives at the cloister as a boy meant for the habit and cannot keep it: the world calls him out through the gates, and he spends his life on the roads, learning through everything Narcissus renounced: faces, bodies, women, hunger, the changing of light.
Narcissus lets him go with a sentence that has the calm cruelty of love:
Du bist Künstler, ich bin Denker. Du schläfst an der Brust der Mutter, ich wache in der Wüste.
You are an artist, I am a thinker. You sleep at the mother’s breast, I keep watch in the desert.
He continues:
Mir scheint die Sonne, dir scheinen Mond und Sterne
On me shines the sun, on you the moon and stars.
Two ways of being a self: one that can be said, and one that can only gather, wordlessly, in what his hands will make of the world. Goldmund becomes a carver of figures. He never manages a definition of himself; what he leaves behind are the faces of everyone he has loved, and that, the novel insists, is the only likeness his kind is granted.
Klimt, in a certain way, is Vienna’s Goldmund, down to the costume. The blue smock falls to his ankles like a habit; the studio runs on the rhythm of a cloister, the same office every day; and the appetite inside the discipline, the women inside the devotion, are Goldmund’s exact contradiction, a monastic life whose scripture is the body. Vienna kept demanding Narcissus of him: define yourself, explain the paintings, write something. His one page is Goldmund’s answer: I am not in the words. Look at what my looking made.
The Gold and the Graphite
The world, of course, keeps another Klimt: The Kiss appears in more bedrooms than any living painting, and the golden Adele is called Austria’s Mona Lisa.
Gold is easy to love, and even easier to confuse with the man himself. Gold is the language of the sun, applied last, covering all, designed to dazzle from afar.
The pencil, by contrast, speaks in the language of the moon. A sketch cannot deceive: it is the search itself, caught mid-pursuit, its missteps preserved in graphite.
For the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, more than a hundred preparatory drawings remain, and not a single fleck of gold appears among them: only a tired woman searching an armchair for a pose she can hold, restless hands, a line following her through every failed attempt. None of these sheets is a portrait of Adele; each is a portrait of Klimt’s effort to see her, missing, returning, trying again. The repetition, a hundredfold, is the truth the gold would later conceal.
On one scrap of brown packing paper, a draft for Water Serpents I, he even writes in the margin, three pencil words that are the sum of his collected writings. Kopf, Hals, länger. Head, neck, longer. The sound of a man measuring the gap between what he saw and what he managed to say.
Then 1945 delivered its verdict. In the war’s final days, the Faculty Paintings perished with the castle that sheltered them; that same year, a second fire found its way to Emilie Flöge’s apartment and claimed fifty of his sketchbooks, the private Klimt she had protected for decades.
The Last Sheet
Goldmund’s story ends at a bedside. Dying, he turns to Narcissus, the friend who knows everything and has touched nothing, and asks, in words that Hesse says burned in the thinker’s heart like fire: how will you manage to die, when you have no mother?
Ohne Mutter kann man nicht lieben. Ohne Mutter kann man nicht sterben.
Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.
The artist dies cradled, he means, in the arms of what he loved. Klimt’s death fulfilled the novel that would be written twelve years later. When a stroke took him in January 1918, the phrase remembered from the sickroom was Emilie soll kommen, send for Emilie.
The entire vocabulary of a silent man was distilled, at the end, to a single name. She was the woman to whom he had mailed hundreds of postcards, about trains, weather, lunch, nothing at all. Devotion spoken in its plainest dialect. The man who gave Vienna one page had given her hundreds. She came; she stayed.
He had drawn the dead with tenderness since he was twenty; on the sixth of February, he joined them. And the drawing did not end with him.
Egon Schiele went to the morgue of the General Hospital and drew the dead face three times, the line searching, faltering, searching again. The self-portrait of Gustav Klimt exists at last, and Klimt is not its author. It was made in the only way a likeness can ever be made: by the loving attention of another.
No one draws their own portrait. It is drawn for us, inevitably, out of everything we pause to notice, sheet by sheet, in the margins of our days. One day, a hand that loved us completes it. Somewhere in your own margins, in pencil, yours has already begun.
it's art is free: one essay every few weeks, when something is worth saying.
If you know someone who is more themselves in a margin than in a photograph, send them this.
If this kept you company:
Beautifully written.
I have seen many of Klimt's paintings in person at Neue Gallery in New York City. I was not aware of just how many drawings he made. I think I could look at them all day. I love "Half-figure of a Young Woman".
Loved reading this....