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‘His Wretched Hand’: Aubrey Beardsley, the Grotesque Body, and Viennese Modern Art Nathan J. Timpano

I have one aim – the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing.1 (Aubrey Beardsley, 1897)

Detail from Aubrey Beardsley, Isolde, 1895 (plate 2). DOI: 10.1111/1467-8365.12275Art History | ISSN 0141-6790 40 | 3 | June 2017 | pages 554-581.

© Association of Art Historians 2017

Upon viewing a portrait photograph of the English artist Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98), which was then on view at Vienna’s Galerie Miethke in 1905, the Austrian art critic and playwright Armin Friedmann declared: ‘Beardsley is seen in profile, ravaged, destroyed, annihilated by his inner visions and experiences; his appallingly gaunt, wretched hand, uncannily long and narrow, slender, bony – only bone, nerve, and sinew – represents the sole instrument that draws or depicts the tenderly capricious Beardsley-sentiment.’2 Mesmerized by Frederick Evans’ photograph of Beardsley (plate 1), Friedmann hypothesized that the artist’s tormented imagination was not only the cause of his whimsical and erotic drawings, but that Beardsley’s images were equally dependent upon his eccentric body, particularly his hands. In Friedmann’s encounter with Beardsley’s ‘wretched hand’, the critic thus argued that the artist’s illustrations of grotesque figures were curiously strange precisely because the artist’s own body was peculiar, itself an anti-aesthetic of corporeal beauty. Within the recent literature on Beardsley, Jane Desmarais, Chris Snodgrass, and Linda Zatlin have examined the critical reception of Beardsley’s art in England and France during the fin de siècle.3 Their research collectively demonstrates that Beardsley’s grotesque illustrations enjoyed immense popularity on both sides of the English Channel, having been favoured by French symbolists, yet celebrated and decried by British Victorians.4 In England, Beardsley’s conservative detractors argued that the artist’s morally depraved subjects were inextricably tied to a ‘tainted’ and ‘unhealthy’ aesthetic, which these critics deliberately and damningly linked to French culture and decadence.5 Other English critics, such as Arthur Symons and Roger Fry, contrastingly praised Beardsley’s work, arguing that grotesque bodies that appear in his drawings could be reconciled alongside modern notions of beauty and ingenuity.6 In his biography of Beardsley, Matthew Sturgis posits that the artist’s oeuvre and physical appearance similarly captured the attention of the popular press in Great Britain. Stating that Beardsley had been ‘tainted by tuberculosis even from childhood’, Sturgis writes: He received lavish praise and vehement opprobrium. And not only for his work; it extended to his person. Gaunt, dandified, racked by disease, 555

Aubrey Beardsley, the Grotesque Body, and Viennese Modern Art

Beardsley mirrored the perverse yet elegant distortions of his art. It was a striking connection, promoted by the press and embraced by the public.7 In Austria, critics like Friedmann likewise argued that Beardsley’s pathological imagination and grotesque body were of equal import, particularly when attempting to understand Beardsley’s artistic visions and material output. In neighbouring Germany, Beardsley’s physical body contrastingly received scant critical attention; rather, texts published in the fin-de-siècle German press tended to discuss the ‘newness’ of Beardsley’s artistic taste and ‘modern’ style, thus mirroring much of the artist’s critical reception in France.8 The interest paid to the entirety of Beardsley’s artistic persona in the Austrian capital thus prompts an important query into the genesis of modernism in Vienna:

1 Frederick Evans, Portrait of Aubrey Beardsley, Profile, Head on Hands, c. 1894. Platinum print, 13.7 × 10 cm. London: Victoria and Albert Museum. Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.


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what impact, if any, did the Englishman’s risqué images and seemingly strange persona have on modern artists who viewed his erotic works, or similarly read reviews of his grotesque body in the Viennese critical press? Within the extant literature on Austrian art nouveau, it is well documented that artists and designers associated with the British Arts and Crafts movement, particularly the Glasgow Four, played a significant role in the contemporaneous formulation of Jugendstil, or Secessionstil, at the Vienna Secession and its affiliate workshops: the Wiener Werkstätte.9 Less scrutinized, however, is the manner in which Beardsley’s exploration of erotic or grotesque imagery (see plates 3, 4, 7, 9, 14), profoundly affected the visual culture generated by artists affiliated with the Secession. This oversight is compounded by the fact that current scholarship has been slow to examine the critical reception of Beardsley’s art (or body) in fin-de-siècle Austria. As such, this aspect of Beardsley’s artistic reception and legacy – or what Desmarais aptly calls ‘the Beardsley Industry’ – has not only gone underexplored in the literature on the artist, but equally so in the scholarship surrounding the importance of cosmopolitan or foreign styles in the development of the Wiener Moderne. The aim of the current essay is threefold. First, it seeks to supplement the current scholarship examining the critical reception of Beardsley’s oeuvre by expanding this discourse into the realm of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Secondly, this essay investigates the extent to which Beardsley’s articulation of erotic and grotesque subjects was in dialogue with the material generated by individuals associated with the Secession or Wiener Werkstätte, particularly the celebrated artist Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) and the lesser-known illustrator Julius Klinger (1876–1942). In attempting to situate Beardsley alongside, and within, Viennese modernism, Klimt and Klinger can thus be viewed as arbiters of the Englishman’s international legacy in a manoeuvre that underscores the cosmopolitanism of their own work. This conforms to Griselda Pollock’s theory of the historical avant-gardes, which suggests that emerging or evolving avant-garde artists undertake a process involving the referencing of, deference to, but difference from the art or style of a more critically acclaimed modernist.10 In this regard, the posthumous presence of Beardsley’s ‘wretched hand’ – as both the literal instrument of his art, as well as a synecdoche for his ‘destroyed’ body – can be said to figuratively guide Klimt’s and Klinger’s respective explorations of erotic and grotesque bodies in their own noted contributions to European modernism. Thirdly, this essay builds upon the recent literature examining the proliferation of the ‘ugly’ or pathological body in Viennese modern art, as advanced by scholars like Gemma Blackshaw, Leslie Topp and Patrick Werkner, who have collectively shown that the grotesque bodies that materialize in works by Klimt and the younger generation of Austrian expressionists were considered ‘diseased’ by the contemporary critical press.11 The fact that Viennese critics, like Friedmann, were directly responding to Beardsley’s body and oeuvre at precisely the same moment that Friedmann’s contemporaries were disparaging the pathological and ‘pornographic’ bodies in Klimt’s infamous Fakultätsbilder (Faculty Paintings, 1900–07) further suggests that the Viennese press was promulgating the idea that eroticized and grotesque bodies were synonymous with modernism in Vienna in the early years of the twentieth century.12 Prologue: The Vienna Secession and British Art

To begin this examination of the complex relationship between works by Beardsley, Klimt, and Klinger, it is fruitful to first investigate the role the Vienna Secession played in promoting British art in the Austrian capital. The Secession was principally, if not singularly, responsible for the initial Austrian interest in Beardsley’s art in the © Association of Art Historians 2017

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2 Aubrey Beardsley, Isolde, 1895. Colour lithograph, 27.9 × 20.7 cm (sheet). Published in The Studio, October 1895, vol. 6, facing p. 10. Photo: Author, courtesy of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.


late 1890s. Officially named the Vereinigung bildender Künstler Österreichs (Union of Austrian Artists), the Secession was founded in April 1897 under the direction of Klimt, Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich and others, and was the second Secession (after Munich and before Berlin) to form in the German-speaking art world of the late nineteenth century.13 The principal objective of the Vienna Secession was to promote the fine and decorative arts by foreign and emerging national artists in an effort to challenge the traditional, economic-based politics of the Vienna Academy (Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien) and its affiliate, the Association of Visual Artists (Genossenschaft bildender Künstler Wiens), which exhibited regularly at Vienna’s Künstlerhaus.14 In his seminal study on fin-de-siècle Viennese culture, Carl Schorske argues that ‘the Secession defined itself not as a mere salon des réfusés [sic], but as a new Roman secessio plebis’, insofar as these artists, architects, and writers – as the ‘plebs’ of contemporary visual culture – hoped to establish an alternative exhibition space in opposition to the ‘old’ Künstlerhaus.15 In so doing, members of the Secession sought a new republic of artistic rule, and one centred on modern art. Primary amongst the Secessionists’ grievances was the fact that foreign artists had been banned from exhibiting at the Künstlerhaus. Once the Secession began to mount its own exhibitions, it became the widespread practice of the group and its affiliates to highlight artworks by prominent foreign artists, including those from Great Britain. Hence, when a solo exhibition of Beardsley’s printed works opened in winter 1904–05 at the Galerie Miethke – a gallery closely associated with Klimt and the Secession, and one interested in showcasing works by foreign and national modernists – gallery goers in Vienna would have already had the opportunity to view British fine and decorative art from March 1898 (the date of the Secession’s first exhibition) to its fifteenth exhibition in November 1902.16 During the group’s fifth exhibition, which ran from 15 November 1899 until 1 January 1900, British art was prominently displayed, including a group of lithographs created by illustrators affiliated with The Studio – the London-based arts magazine founded in 1893. Beardsley’s Isolde (plate 2), a colour drawing that first appeared in the pages of The Studio in October 1895, was included in the fifth exhibition, and is most likely the earliest illustration by the artist to be shown publicly in the Austrian capital.17 Prior to the fifth exhibition, members of the Secession, those in their circle, and an affluent Anglophile public would, have likewise been acquainted with reproductions of Beardsley’s drawings in The Studio, which circulated throughout Vienna during the late 1800s and early 1900s.18 It is equally important to note that the majority of the contemporary criticism that appeared in fin-de-siècle Vienna on Beardsley’s art had been published by, or in relation to, exhibitions and publications organized by Secession members or their allies, particularly the Galerie Miethke.19 These reviews, in turn, may have served as a savvy marketing ploy to attract attention to Beardsley’s avant-garde style, and thus highlight 558

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and promote the Secession’s (or Miethke’s) modernist agenda. This would seem a particularly apt manoeuvre for the Secession and its affiliates at a time when Klimt and other Wiener Moderne artists were moving away from a ‘general’ European articulation of art nouveau, and turning instead to eroticized articulations of more localized styles, including Austrian symbolism, Secessionstil, and Jugendstil. With regard to Beardsley’s oeuvre, Viennese critics were not, however, simply drawn to the quizzical features of his particular ‘brand’ of art nouveau. Rather, a number of Austrian critics were similarly intrigued by the artist’s sickly corporeal nature, as if his body suffered from the same grotesqueness that afflicted his drawings. Beardsley in the Viennese Critical Press

Reviews of Beardsley’s ‘shocking’ illustrations appeared throughout the Viennese critical press between 1903 and 1905.20 Somewhat paradoxically, it was the English art critic and poet Arthur Symons, not an Austrian writer, who offered the first of these critiques. The article, titled ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, was a German translation of Symons’ earlier essay of the same name, which initially appeared in his book Aubrey Beardsley (1898). The newly translated version of the essay was subsequently printed in March 1903 within the pages of Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring), the Secession’s monthly art journal.21 As an example of the Secession’s conspicuous support of foreign artists, the entire issue was devoted to the Beardsley essay. Within the text, Symons, who was also a close friend of the artist, praises Beardsley’s radical and novel subjects, mirroring the Secession’s belief that Beardsley’s art embodied a truly modern aesthetic. Symons likewise posits that no other illustrator of the late nineteenth century was better known than Beardsley, and ‘none had so wide an influence on contemporary art’.22 Building upon the artist’s already considerable reputation, Symons sought to further elevate Beardsley’s art by discussing his images alongside Japanese woodblock prints, the writings of Baudelaire, and modern French painting. To this end, Symons highlights distinct parallels between drawings by Beardsley and images by Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and others, in an effort to situate Beardsley within a modernist canon, and particularly alongside French art.23 Symons’ analysis had a seemingly substantial impact on German (not simply Austrian) writers of the period, given that the language he employs to contextualize Beardsley’s art – whether in the original English, or in the German translation of his essay – can be identified in a number of reviews published by his German contemporaries. These continental interlocutors included Rudolf Klein and the well-known novelist, critic, and art dealer Julius Meier-Graefe. Between 1902 and 1904, each of these men discussed Beardsley’s illustrations alongside works by French artists, including Manet, Degas, and Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, respectively.24 As if to echo Symons’ thoughts on Beardsley’s ‘influence’, Meier-Graefe argued in his book Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (Modern Art, 1904) that Beardsley was an indispensable artist to the history of modernism precisely because he so profoundly affected the art of his period, and not simply in England, but in the whole of Europe.25 Although Meier-Graefe was then living in Paris, his book did much to popularize Beardsley’s art in the German-speaking art world.26 In line with this assertion, the German art professor, critic, and artist Otto Eckmann offered, as early as 1899, that reproductions of Beardsley’s images were known to individuals in the Germanic countries through various publications, including Beardsley’s A Book of Fifty Drawings (1897) and The Early Work of Aubrey Beardsley (1899); in 1902, Klein similarly verified the availability of Beardsley’s images to German-speaking readers through these texts.27 In Symons’ Ver Sacrum essay, the critic moreover contextualizes the erotic and grotesque in the artist’s oeuvre alongside modernism’s general interest in non© Association of Art Historians 2017

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traditional modes of picture making. He writes: ‘In those drawings of Beardsley which are grotesque rather than beautiful, in which lines begin to grow deformed, the pattern, in which now all the beauty takes refuge, is itself a moral judgment.’28 A few pages later, Symons further states that Beardsley ‘certainly did not draw the human body with any attempt at rendering its own lines’.29 In these two instances, the critic offers that Beardsley’s choice to draw grotesque and misshapen forms was an attempt to cleverly reference, while simultaneously debase, decorative lines – so central to art nouveau – in order to create something wholly unique: a (Beardsley) repertoire of grotesque figures. Although Symons’ intent was sincere, his use of the word ‘deformed’ suggests that the language of pathology had already begun to infiltrate the critical reception of the artist’s oeuvre, particularly in relation to the lines that constructed ‘grotesque’ bodies in his drawings. Symons makes this point clear when he conclusively posits that ‘it is because he loves beauty that beauty’s degradation obsesses him’.30 Symons’ essay (in both the English and German versions) did not, however, offer the more sensationalistic view that Beardsley’s mind and artistic imagination were depraved, diseased, or the source of his grotesque illustrations. Instead, the critic states: In spite of ill-health, he had an astonishing tranquillity of nerves; and it was doubtless that rare quality which kept him, after all, alive so long. How far he had deliberately acquired command over his nerves and his emotions, as he deliberately acquired command over his brain and hand, I do not know. But there it certainly was, one of the bewildering characteristics of so contradictory a temperament.31 Here, the English critic shows that he did not believe that Beardsley’s poor physical condition negatively affected the hand, or mind, that produced his shocking images. Instead, Hugo Haberfeld, the first Austrian reviewer to engage with Beardsley’s ‘wretched hand’, offered this very sentiment. Following the publication of Symons’ translated essay in Ver Sacrum, Haberfeld, a Viennese gallerist and art dealer, was the next individual to publish a review of Beardsley’s art in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Haberfeld, who served as director of the Galerie Miethke from 1907 to 1938, was the curator responsible for mounting the aforementioned exhibition of Beardsley’s illustrations, which Armin Friedmann likewise attended during the show’s duration from December 1904 to January 1905. In his catalogue essay, Haberfeld reveals, almost immediately, an intriguing bias for Beardsley’s peculiar body, rather than his fantastical drawings. This conundrum was perhaps due to the fact that the exhibition catalogue only reproduced one image: Evans’ portrait photograph of Beardsley (see plate 1). Haberfeld begins his analysis with an anecdote that he likely extracted from Symons’ Ver Sacrum essay concerning Beardsley’s artistic ‘visions on paper’.32 Unlike Symons, however, Haberfeld does not appear to be interested in connecting Beardsley’s material output to iconographies rooted in French modern art. Instead, Haberfeld argues that Beardsley’s figures were directly linked to the artist’s dreams and erotic fantasies. He writes: Beardsley’s purely decorative forms are not stylizations of natural impressions; rather, his figures, which are independent from the outside world, allow his inexhaustible fantasies to instinctively materialize as evocative expressions of his intended effects. His female bodies, which often look as though he has never seen a female body, have contours that appear to have been drawn caressingly by a lustful hand caught in a feverish dream.33


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In this passage, Haberfeld clearly contends that Beardsley enjoys the pleasure of erotic fantasies. According to the critic, Beardsley’s figures are not simply the result of an immoral aesthetic, or even feverish dream scenarios, but part and parcel of the artist’s sickly body. More specifically, when Haberfeld describes images in Beardsley’s better-known print suites, including illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s play Salome from 1894 (plate 3) and The Lysistrata of Aristophanes from 1896 (plate 4), he argues that these images were created whilst the artist was ‘stunted by nervous depressive moods and week-long sicknesses’.34 One is subsequently left with the impression that Beardsley’s corporeal illnesses ostensibly contributed to the ‘power’ of his inner visions. This point is reinforced when Haberfeld contends that Beardsley was capable – perhaps from first-hand knowledge – of showing his viewers ‘the pathological depravity of a

3 Aubrey Beardsley, The Climax, from Salome, 1894. Line block print on Japanese vellum, 34.3 × 27.3 cm (sheet). London: Victoria and Albert Museum (given by Michael Harari, in memory of his father, Ralph A. Harari). Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.


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4 Aubrey Beardsley, The Lacedaemonian Ambassadors, 1896. Pen and ink over pencil on paper, 27.8 × 19.4 cm (sheet). London: Victoria and Albert Museum (purchased with the assistance of The Art Fund). Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

modern sex life’.35 This statement may do more to reveal Haberfeld’s own attitudes toward ‘modern’ sexuality, yet leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind that Beardsley’s drawings can be read as depraved subjects embodying a grotesque eroticism. One is left to ponder, then, if Haberfeld was figuratively – though no less brazenly – conflating Beardsley’s tuberculosis with a sexually transmitted infection like syphilis. This notwithstanding, Haberfeld, who had personally organized the Viennese exhibition of Beardsley’s drawings, seemingly understood that the artist’s ‘depraved’ bodies would promote and sustain critical attention, particularly in a city where hypocritical attitudes about sexuality were so prevalent. © Association of Art Historians 2017

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As mentioned at the start of this essay, Friedmann, like Haberfeld, was another Viennese critic who expounded upon the idea that Beardsley’s corporeal ailments may have contributed to his depictions of sexual depravity. Friedmann’s review of the same Galerie Miethke exhibition was published on 2 January 1905 in the Wiener Abendpost (Vienna Evening Post), and as such, was likely more accessible and more widely read than Haberfeld’s catalogue essay. Friedmann opens his review by addressing Beardsley’s ‘wonderfully strange’ illustrations, which he finds replete with ‘desperate devils’ and ‘wild, adventurous grotesques from a hellishly devious, dreadful fantasy’.36 Believing that the drawings nevertheless reveal immense control, Friedmann determines that Beardsley was a meticulous master draughtsman. But like Haberfeld, Friedmann quickly turns from an examination of the drawings to an exploration of the artist’s corporeal nature as revealed in the portrait photograph by Evans, which likewise hung in the exhibition space. From the photograph alone, Friedmann determines that Beardsley displayed a ‘ravaged’ face and an ‘appallingly gaunt, wretched hand’. Friedmann then dramatically concludes: ‘this ghostly hand, this gryphon’s claw, this grasping organ is from a demon, its resistance dead, its gesture banished, its touch petrified!’37 Friedmann argues, somewhat dramatically, that a symbiotic relationship thus arises between Beardsley’s drawings, his innere Gesichten, or ‘inner visions’, and his physically decrepit body. By employing the words ‘petrified’, ‘destroyed’, and ‘annihilated’, Friedmann essentially leaves his readers (were they not able to observe Evans’ photograph first hand) with the impression that Beardsley was nothing more than a skeletal frame, hung with skin, ragged and worn, a monstrous form subjugated to his art. Friedmann’s analysis concludes that Beardsley’s mind and body were simultaneously overtaken by the artist’s grotesque and erotic fantasies. His words, as well as those offered by Haberfeld, additionally reveal that fin-de-siècle Viennese critics conflated, whether intentionally or not, terminologies related to both psychological and physiological pathology. This slippage in semantics collectively emphasizes the conviction that every nerve, every tendon, every neuron that comprised Beardsley’s being was simultaneously and inextricably linked, and thus ‘destroyed’ by both mental and physical ailments. Haberfeld’s and Friedmann’s respective examinations subsequently parallel, however indirectly, the discourse surrounding pathological disease and the language of modern psychology that surrounded Klimt’s art in the early twentieth century, particularly his controversial Faculty Paintings. Beardsley and Klimt

Beardsley’s critical reception in fi n-de-siècle Vienna coincides with the publication of contemporary reviews that denounced Klimt for placing ‘pornographic’, ‘diseased’, and ‘obscene’ figures in his Faculty Paintings – large-scale works that had been commissioned by the Austrian government in 1894 for the grand hall of the University of Vienna.38 The first painting in the series, Philosophie (Philosophy), received the brunt of the negative criticism. The canvas (plate 5) was unveiled in March 1900 at the seventh exhibition of the Secession, and additionally won a gold medal that year at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. Despite the painting’s success in France, Austrian academicians and government officials lambasted the iconography of the canvas, arguing that Klimt had not adequately illustrated the discipline of philosophy, but instead presented viewers with an ambiguous, ‘ugly’ mass of humanity.39 Two Viennese writers – Hermann Bahr and Ludwig Hevesi – nevertheless sided with Klimt, documenting the various attacks and public criticisms that were directed at the artist and the Faculty Paintings. During the height © Association of Art Historians 2017

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of the controversy, Bahr, a well-known theatre director, playwright and critic, published the book Gegen Klimt (Against Klimt, 1903), which added to Klimt’s notoriety in Vienna.40 Hevesi similarly defended Klimt against detractors who lambasted the artist for portraying ‘diseased’ and ‘sexually depraved’ bodies in his paintings.41 The historical polemic against the Faculty Paintings complicates, moreover, what the celebrated Austrian writer Stefan Zweig called the ‘social morality’ of fi n-de-siècle Vienna, which outwardly promoted conservative cultural and sexual mores, but hypocritically turned a blind eye to the ‘indecent in all forms of life, literature, art, and dress’ that permeated the city.42

5 Gustav Klimt, Philosophy, 1900 (initial version). Oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Destroyed by fire in 1945. Photo: © Austrian Archives/ Scala/Art Resource, NY.


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6 Gustav Klimt, The Hostile Forces, detail of the Beethoven Frieze, 1902. Mixed media fresco: plaster, casein paint, gold paint, black and colour chalk, graphite, and appliqué materials, 215 × 630 cm. Vienna: Secession Building/ Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. Photo: © Austrian Archives/Scala/Art Resource, NY.


In 1904 Meier-Graefe, who was then in Paris, not Vienna, nevertheless offered the following description of the Austrian capital: ‘This young Vienna seemed like a man who grew too quickly, uncannily long, but frighteningly thin, with a weak bone structure and precociously riddled with vices.’43 The English translation of Meier-Graefe’s book, which appeared in 1908, tellingly translated ‘Lastern’ (vices) for ‘disease’.44 More importantly, Meier-Graefe’s words recall what critics in Vienna were uniformly stating about Beardsley’s ‘wretched hand’: that it too was uncannily long – a corporeal appendage rendered diseased as a result of his presumed psychoor physio-pathologies. Given the slippage of terminology used to describe the artist’s corrupted psychological and physical states, the binary of Beardsley’s hand, as both the arbiter of his ‘diseased’ figures and the victim of his grotesque imagination, is illustrative of how pathology was more broadly discussed in the contemporary critical press. Since Haberfeld, also in 1904, compared Beardsley’s real-life corporeal ailments with the artist’s illustrations of ‘the pathological depravity of a modern sex life’, the critic’s language tellingly draws analogies between Beardsley’s drawings and the highly publicized debate surrounding Klimt’s visualization of modern sexuality in Philosophy. This point is significant since it suggests that Klimt’s Philosophy – not images of, or by, Beardsley displayed in the Austrian capital – had initiated the contemporary discourse centred on the pathological body in the Viennese critical press. In turn, the attention afforded to Beardsley’s ‘diseased’ body by Haberfeld and Friedmann can be said to be intricately linked to a particularly ‘Viennese’ phenomenon, in which avant-garde aesthetics were read as visible markers of grotesqueness, or ‘immoral sexuality’, regardless of the artist’s nationality. For his part, Klimt wrote very little about his art. To justify his calculated aloofness, he once declared: ‘Whoever wants to know something about me – as an artist, which alone is worth considering – should look at my pictures attentively and from them try to recognize what I am and what I intend.’45 Even though Klimt was emphatically close-lipped about his paintings, these few words essentially urge the critic or historian to discern what she or he will from Klimt’s imagery or iconographic sources. To this end, it has been noted that Klimt drew upon stylistic sources from numerous foreign modern artists, including the Glasgow Four, Edvard Munch, Franz von Stuck, George Minne, Fernand Khnopff, Jan Toorop, and Beardsley.46 Concerning the latter, a connection can thus be established between the language employed by critics to describe Beardsley’s ‘depraved’ illustrations and the ‘diseased’ bodies that materialize in Klimt’s Faculty Paintings. 565


7 Aubrey Beardsley, Ali Baba, 1897. Line block print, 28.6 × 22.2 cm (sheet). London: Victoria and Albert Museum. Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 8 Gustav Klimt, Hope I, 1903. Oil on canvas, 189.2 × 67 cm. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada. Photo: © Austrian Archives/Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Klimt’s awareness of Beardsley’s erotic and grotesque figures has been previously explored within the secondary literature, though scholars have largely investigated this claim alongside a small portion of Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze (1902) known as Die feindlichen Gewalten, or The Hostile Forces (plate 6).47 The Beethoven Frieze – a large-scale, multi-media fresco that was temporally installed in the Olbrich-designed Secession building in 1902 – was unveiled to the public during the group’s fourteenth exhibition, which was devoted entirely to the German Romantic composer Ludwig van Beethoven. Fritz Novotny and Johannes Dobai were arguably the first art historians to note that the paunchy figure in Beardsley’s Ali Baba from 1897 (plate 7) served as the model for Klimt’s incarnation of Unmäßigkeit (translated as ‘Excess’ or ‘Intemperance’), or the rotund female figure that stands to the right of the Greek giant Typhoeus, which materializes as the grotesque gorilla-serpent in The Hostile Forces.48 Peter Vergo similarly noted this association, arguing that ‘the explicit subject matter of many of Beardsley’s graphics call to mind the significant thread of eroticism that runs through so much of Klimt’s work of this period – allegedly another reason for the persistent and sometimes barbed criticism to which his art was exposed.’49 According to Vergo, the contemporary attacks on Klimt’s © Association of Art Historians 2017

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eroticized art, which include the Faculty Paintings and the Beethoven Frieze, may have been directly linked to the artist’s decision to visually quote from Beardsley’s controversial aesthetics. Fin-de-siècle reviewers equally noted that an illicit eroticism typified Klimt’s oeuvre. Upon viewing figures in The Hostile Forces, Robert Hirschfeld – a detractor of Klimt’s painting – stated in 1902 that these ‘representations of lasciviousness on the end wall of the room are among the most extreme ever devised in the field of obscene art’.50 The writer and painter Anton Faistauer, who was more sympathetic to Klimt’s modernist agenda, comparably argued in 1923 that eroticism had played ‘an overarching role in his art’.51 Beardsley’s Ali Baba was not featured alongside his Isolde in the Secession’s fifth exhibition in 1899, and the Beardsley retrospective held at the Galerie Miethke in November 1904 opened two years after the unveiling of the Beethoven Frieze. As such, Klimt would have had to gain access to the image through private Viennese collectors of Beardsley’s works, such as Fritz Waerndorfer, who may have owned a copy of the illustration. Regardless of how Klimt came to know Beardsley’s drawing, the iconographic similarities between Ali Baba and Klimt’s Excess are readily apparent, even though their erotic nature may not be so conspicuous. Each figure wears an elaborate Byzantine or Orientalist headdress or turban, and each body conveys gluttonous decadence. Klimt’s image is not, however, a mimetic copy or pastiche of Beardsley’s illustration, as gender and artistic perspective materialize as significant differences between the two works. The female figure of Excess appears topless and in profile with exposed breasts, whereas the male Ali Baba is presented frontally to the viewer, with a dandy’s moustache and a dramatic black robe framing his hefty white body. Ali Baba and Excess are similarly not beautiful, yet the totality of Klimt’s fresco pushes the grotesque to the extreme. Excess, with her large protruding stomach and drooping breasts, is surrounded by two other women: the red-headed Wollust (‘Lust’, or ‘Voluptuousness’) and the blonde Unkeuschheit (‘Lasciviousness’, or ‘Unchasteness’), who collectively embody eroticism and illicit beauty when juxtaposed with the ‘ugly’ and corpulent Excess.52 The skeletal, bony body of the lone woman in the centre of The Hostile Forces – a representation of Gnawing Grief – and the skull© Association of Art Historians 2017

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like heads in the upper left corner of the panel – figures known as Sickness, Madness, and Death – additionally convey Klimt’s fascination with marrying the iconography of pathology with explicit eroticism. A further, though unexplored, example of Klimt’s interest in Beardsley’s articulation of erotic and grotesque figures can be found in Klimt’s Die Hoffnung (Hope I, 1903). The painting (plate 8) depicts an extremely pregnant, red-headed nude woman surrounded by a disembodied human skull and other menacing figures. According to Johannes Dobai, Klimt intended to unveil Hope I at the eighteenth exhibition of the Secession, which was dedicated exclusively to his oeuvre.53 Since the show was set to open in November 1903 – precisely when the turmoil surrounding the Faculty Paintings was at its peak – it was believed by contemporaries that the Minister of Education, Johannes Wilhelm Rittér von Hartel, had urged Klimt to remove the ‘shocking’ canvas from the exhibition. However, in an interview from 1905, Klimt countered this claim, stating that he had personally withdrawn the painting so as not to embarrass the greater Secession with further negative press.54 In connecting figures from Hope I with Beardsley’s oeuvre, it is useful to focus on the giant serpent in Klimt’s painting, whose long tail wraps around the legs and feet of the pregnant woman, and whose body and head occupy the left side of the composition. Dobai, who describes the serpent as a sea monster, posits that the creature has: 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 1902.55 Dobai does not note that a drawing by Beardsley served definitively as an iconographic source for Klimt’s sea monster, though Dobai does suggest that the embryonic-uterine motif in Beardsley’s Incipit Vita Nova (1893) may have inspired themes that similarly appear in Hope I, as well as in Klimt’s Medicine (c. 1903), which was one of the Faculty Paintings. In a similar fashion, Emily Braun has suggested that the ‘dark blue, balloon-shaped creature’ in Hope I ‘makes manifest Klimt’s knowledge of embryology’.56 Braun argues that rather than looking to representations of the human foetus ‘found in the work of Edvard Munch and Aubrey Beardsley, Klimt invented a hybrid’ creature based on illustrations of fish and fish-like embryos reproduced in late nineteenth-century biological texts by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel.57 It is certainly plausible that Haeckel’s illustrations inspired the presumably aquatic creature in Klimt’s Hope I, though there is no real indication that the pregnant woman is actually standing in an underwater world. If the creature were instead meant to represent an animalistic embryo or human foetus, then it is more likely that the creature, in the context of Klimt’s symbolist composition, would be swimming through uterine fluid, rather than water. Given the ambiguity in connecting Klimt’s painting to Haeckel’s scientific drawings, it is more likely that the large dark serpent in Beardsley’s Third Tableau of Das Rheingold (plate 9), hereafter referred to as Third Tableau, provided a more immediate prototype for Klimt’s ‘hybrid’ creature. Beardsley’s drawing originally appeared in April 1896 in The Savoy, an illustrated magazine similar to The Studio, but whose arts editor was none other than Beardsley.58 Despite its title, Third Tableau was the first image to be published in the artist’s Rheingold series – a print suite devoted to Richard © Association of Art Historians 2017

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9 Aubrey Beardsley, Third Tableau of Das Rheingold, c. 1896. Print, 25.5 × 17.5 cm (image). London: Victoria and Albert Museum. Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Wagner’s operas Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungs, 1848–74), known informally as the Ring Cycle. The operas were based, in part, on the Nibelungenlied, a Middle High German epic poem that charts the heroic deeds of the valiant dragonslayer Siegfried, and equally describes how the titular Rheingold came to be hidden in the Rhine River. Given that the Nibelungenlied historically served as an important source of pre-Christian, Germanic myths, it is understandable that numerous German-speaking artists explored these tales throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.59 Vergo has noted, furthermore, that Wagner’s Das Rheingold, the first of the Ring operas, directly inspired the iconography and symbolism of Klimt’s © Association of Art Historians 2017

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Philosophy.60 As such, both the Nibelungenlied and the Ring Cycle were known to Klimt by 1900, and arguably more accessible as artistic sources in Vienna’s art world than Haeckel’s scientific illustrations. In Beardsley’s Third Tableau, Wotan (the king of the gods) and Loge (demigod of mischief and fire) conspire to trick the ‘evil’ dwarf Alberich in order to steal the fabled gold of the Nibelungs. Playing upon Alberich’s inflated ego, Loge asks to see a display of the dwarf’s magical powers; Alberich obliges and transforms himself into a giant Wurm (German for ‘serpent’, ‘snake’, or ‘worm’). In line with the opera’s plot, Beardsley depicts the very moment when Wotan and Loge are successful in manipulating Alberich, who materializes as the black snake in the drawing.61 In terms of iconographic similarities, both the serpent in Third Tableau and the dark creature in Hope I exhibit white eyeballs and long prehensile tails that weave around human bodies, creating strong arabesques in each composition. Beardsley’s serpent, with close-set eyes and a curled white tongue, appears almost comical or even cartoonish, whereas Klimt’s serpent lurks in the middle ground of the painting as a more sinister and grotesque form in relation to the more alluring red-head. When Klimt’s monster is visually coupled with the unabashedly nude body of the woman, Hope I can thus be seen to embody the erotic and the grotesque, and in a manner more explicit than in Beardsley’s original drawing. It is not surprising then, that in 1905, Ludwig Hevesi proclaimed that ‘grotesque and lascivious demons’ abound in Hope I, which was then on display in Fritz Waerndorfer’s private picture gallery.62 Hevesi did not suggest, however, that Klimt’s ‘demon’ was related to Beardsley’s ‘evil’ snakelike Alberich. Instead, Waerndorfer, who was a supporter of the Secession, as well as a co-founder and major financier of the Wiener Werkstätte, provides the historical connection between the two works. Hevesi’s writings indicate that Waerndorfer acquired Hope I at some point in 1905, shortly after the controversial painting was exhibited at the Deutsche Künstlerbund (Association of German Artists) in Berlin.63 Waerndorfer then had the work installed in his private salon in a specially crafted, closed cabinet that the Werkstätte artist Koloman Moser designed for Waerndorfer’s house in Währing, Vienna’s upscale eighteenth district. Befitting a wealthy art collector, the Waerndorfer estate boasted a famous music room designed by Charles and Margaret Mackintosh (of the Glasgow Four) and other works by modern artists, including decorative pieces by Josef Hoffmann, and numerous paintings by Klimt.64 Waerndorfer additionally owned an extensive collection of works by Beardsley, comprising twenty-four drawings (many of them erotic), more than a hundred of the artist’s personal letters (which Waerndorfer purchased on various trips to London, and then translated into German), and copies of the plays Salome and Lysistrata with Beardsley’s illustrations (see plate 3 and plate 4).65 In 1911 the US art dealer Martin Birnbaum offered that Waerndorfer had ‘one of the finest existing collections of original Beardsleys’ anywhere in the world.66 Furthermore, Waerndorfer owned a copy of Beardsley’s A Book of Fifty Drawings (1897), which reproduced Third Tableau.67 It is equally known that Klimt and Waerndorfer were friends, that Klimt had visited Waerndorfer’s house and viewed his art collection as early as 1901, and was consequently aware of the importance Waerndorfer placed on Beardsley’s art.68 If the collector acquired works by Beardsley (including A Book of Fifty Drawings) in London prior to 1900, as suggested by Linda Zatlin, then Klimt could have easily viewed Beardsley’s illustration in Waerndorfer’s salon between 1901 and 1903.69 Waerndorfer’s fervour for Beardsley may have subsequently acted as a further catalyst for Klimt’s contemporaneous interest in the artist’s unique iconographies, and not © Association of Art Historians 2017

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simply those in Third Tableau. It is intriguing to wonder, moreover, if Hope I and Third Tableau were ever prominently displayed in Waerndorfer’s private gallery at the same time, or if, as Elana Shapira suggests, Waerndorfer acquired Hope I because it was thematically related to Beardsley’s drawings, particularly his erotica.70 If Waerndorfer still owned his copy of A Book of Fifty Drawings in 1905 when he acquired Hope I, then he presumably kept each work hidden behind closed doors – for ‘adult’ eyes only – as a reminder that not all of modernism was in accordance with the conservative mores espoused by Klimt’s detractors in Vienna. The desire to challenge cultural taboos through the language of Viennese modern art was consistently at play in Klimt’s oeuvre. But Klimt was not the only Austrian artist at the fin de siècle to disrupt societal norms through visual art, nor was he the only individual whose works were in dialogue with Beardsley’s stylistic conventions. Rather, the relationship between erotic and grotesque characters drawn by Beardsley’s ‘wretched hand’, and the materialization of this motif in the Germanic art world, was equally present in a number of works by Julius Klinger, one of Klimt’s lesser-known contemporaries. Klinger, who was active in Vienna and Berlin throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, worked as a graphic designer and writer, but was foremost a poster and magazine illustrator. In this regard, Klinger’s interest in Beardsley’s repertoire of grotesque figures manifested itself through a similar exploration of illustration as a modernist medium, in contrast to Klimt’s application in the realm of painting. Beardsley and Klinger

No relation to the more famous German artist Max Klinger, Julius Klinger was born in 1876 in Dornbach, a suburb of Vienna. Between 1892 and 1894 Klinger trained at Vienna’s Technologisches Gewerbemuseum (today the TGM: the School of Technology), where he studied structural design and technical and commercial drawing.71 In 1895 Klinger worked briefly as a draughtsman for the Wiener Mode (Viennese Fashion) magazine, where he met Koloman Moser, who encouraged him to move to Munich the following year to pursue work at the satirical newspaper Meggendorfer-Blätter (Meggendorfer Pages); that same year, Klinger also served as an illustrator for the wellknown Jugendstil magazine Jugend (Youth).72 Klinger next resided in Berlin between 1897 and May 1915, until he was drafted into the Austrian Army during the First World War. At the close of the war, Klinger returned to Vienna, though he had maintained ties and travelled to Austria throughout his time in Germany. To this end, Klinger had published several illustrations between 1902 and 1904 in the Austrian journals Die Fläche (The Surface) and Der liebe Augustin (Dear Augustin), which allowed him to collaborate with Moser, Josef Hoffmann, and the Viennese modern poet Peter Altenberg.73 Klinger would have known illustrations by Beardsley through many of the same printed sources previously mentioned in this essay – for example, in copies of The Studio – though other opportunities were available to Klinger whilst he was living in Germany. The Berlin Secession exhibited Beardsley’s drawings in 1902, and Rudolf Klein’s book Aubrey Beardsley appeared in Berlin that same year.74 The following year, the Danish art historian Emil Hannover’s essay ‘Aubrey Beardsley’ appeared in the Berlin magazine Kunst und Künstler (Art and Artist), and Meier-Graefe’s Modern Art (1904) was similarly printed in Berlin.75 In addition, Franz Blei, the editor of the erotic literary journals Die Opale (Opals, 1905–06, published in Leipzig) and Der Amethyst (Amethyst, 1907, published in Vienna), routinely reproduced illustrations by Beardsley and other European artists.76 Blei’s transnational pornographic publications certainly demonstrate that a market for obscene literature and illustrations existed in German© Association of Art Historians 2017

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speaking Europe at the fin de siècle, though it is equally clear that images by Beardsley reproduced in The Studio, or in texts like A Book of Fifty Drawings, were available in Austria and Germany prior to the circulation of Blei’s erotic magazines. The Berlin-based critic and art historian Max Osborn was the first scholar to publish a major review of Klinger’s work, and consequently the first to connect Klinger’s illustrations with Beardsley’s oeuvre. Osborn’s essay appeared in 1908 in the pages of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration (German Art and Decoration), a journal that circulated throughout German-speaking countries and Scandinavia between 1897 and 1932. In the article, Osborn praises Klinger for his ‘clownishly exquisite drawings’ that emanate from ‘sly, sharp, impish eyes’.77 He additionally states that Klinger’s oeuvre can be compared to Beardsley’s aestheticism, to works by Klimt, and to Japanese

10 Julius Klinger, BlackWhite, 1907. Black-and-white lithograph, 20 × 15 cm. Published in Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, October 1907, vol. 21, p. 272. Photo: Author, courtesy of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.


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ukiyo-e woodblock prints.78 In more recent years, Anita Kühnel and Bernhard Denscher have respectively argued that Klinger visually referenced Beardsley’s illustrations in an effort to combine the Englishman’s style with other decorative, art nouveau motifs.79 This notwithstanding, none of these scholars – Osborn included – have discussed which works by Beardsley (or for that matter, by Klimt) Klinger was stylistically referencing in order to align himself visually, and commercially, with the more celebrated English illustrator and Austrian painter. And unlike critics in Vienna, who suggested that Beardsley’s grotesque drawings were linked to his grotesque body, and that Klimt’s paintings were tied to diseased or immoral sexuality, Klinger scholars have not suggested that the artist was ‘afflicted’ by the same disorder. As such, the literature on Klinger has sidestepped the Viennese discourse centred on the pathological body entirely. This is perhaps due to the fact that the majority of Klinger’s images were executed in Germany, even though many were available in Vienna through magazines like Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, Jugend and Der liebe Augustin, and likewise exhibited at the 1908 and 1909 Kunstschauen (Art Shows) in Vienna.80 The dearth of iconographic analysis in Osborn’s essay is somewhat surprising, in part because a number of illustrations from Klinger’s Schwarz-Weiss (Black-White) series of 1907 accompanied Osborn’s text. In particular, the frontispiece to the article is an image analogously titled Black-White, which presumably depicts one of two biblical women: Judith or Salome (plate 10). Given that the title offers no clues as to the subject’s identity, this conclusion is cleverly left to the viewer’s discernment or puzzlement. Klinger’s subject, whether Judith or Salome, exhibits a self-confident smirk, has black curling locks, wears a long stylized robe, and holds the decapitated head of either Holofernes or John the Baptist in her right hand. One should note that the dark, wavy tresses of the dead man’s hair conspicuously mirror Judith/Salome’s long tendrils. The body of the female figure and her male trophy are placed visually between two vertical shafts of empty white space, perhaps a reference to the prison bars that caged John the Baptist before his death at the hands of Herod and Herodias. If this were the case, then the white ‘bars’ in Klinger’s print would seem to imply that the young woman is Salome, rather than Judith. To read Klinger’s composition as Salome with the head of John the Baptist brings the work in line with Beardsley’s most renowned image, The Climax (see plate 3), from Oscar Wilde’s Salome.81 When the English version of Wilde’s original French play first appeared in book form in February 1894, Beardsley’s illustrations caused a sensation amongst critics, and prompted the British poet Theodore Wratislaw to argue that the artist possessed an ‘obsession with the monstrous and grotesque’.82 In formulating the grotesque, The Climax displays a floating Salome that resembles a half human, half bat-like creature: the black arabesques that emerge from her head resemble the ears of a bat or the antennae of an insect; the series of black-and-white circles that symbolically ‘emerge’ from Salome’s back likewise resemble art nouveau bat wings that allow her to hover above the pool of black water at the bottom of the composition. Equally grotesque is the strange hairstyle on the head of the Baptist, which recalls the writhing snakes associated with the Greek Gorgon Medusa, who similarly met her demise through decapitation. In articulating the erotic, The Climax hints at illicit necrophilia, insofar as the lustful Salome desires to kiss the lips of the dead saint. Chris Snodgrass has recently argued that the decapitated head makes obvious ‘the fact that the sexualized lilies below Salome are either erect (with accentuated stamens and petals approximating female labia) or wriggling phallically upward, and that the upper part of the broken spike of Iokanaan’s blood is shaped to suggest a penis, reinforcing the castration theme as well as Beardsley’s pun on the scene being a female sexual “climax”’.83 As an exploration © Association of Art Historians 2017

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11 Gustav Klimt, Judith I, 1901. Oil and gold leaf on canvas, 98 × 48 cm (framed). Vienna: Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. Photo: © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.


of pathological or immoral sexuality, Beardsley’s image thus illustrates a lascivious femme fatale who metaphorically morphs into a monstrous hybrid in order to claim her ‘castrated lover’ as a fetishized possession. Like Beardsley’s Salome, Klinger’s femme fatale materializes through a similar articulation of line, is draped in a floor-length robe, and exhibits long black tendrils for hair. The phallic-shaped nose of the male victim in Klinger’s illustration may suggest that this Salome has physically – not metaphorically – claimed the Baptist’s genitals, rather than his head. Klinger’s figure does not, however, appear to sprout animalistic protuberances, nor does she float above a pool of black water. Given these obvious differences, Klinger’s eroticized figure might alternatively be read as Judith with the head of Holofernes, or more interesting still, a conflation of the Old Testament heroine (Judith) and the New Testament femme fatale (Salome) into a singularly complex character. If he intended to express this hybrid identity, then Klinger’s image compares favourably with Klimt’s canonical painting Judith I from 1901 (plate 11). At the fin de siècle, Klimt’s Judith I notoriously ‘suffered’ from an identity crisis amongst art critics who routinely identified Klimt’s sensual beauty as both Judith and Salome, even though Klimt’s original frame bears the title Judith und Holofernes. In an exhibition review published in 1901 in the Munich-based journal Die Kunst (Art), Fritz von Ostini professed that ‘Klimt shows his rich decorative taste in … a “Judith”, which would actually be better identified as “Salome”’.84 Nadine Sine has more recently explored this relationship, showing that contemporary critics like Von Ostini actually favoured the incorrect Salome title.85 Sine’s research additionally highlights that the desire to conflate Judith with Salome was a somewhat quizzical manoeuvre, given that visual depictions of the two women share only one common iconographic feature: a decapitated male head. Biblically speaking, both women were Jewish, and each is credited with the death of a powerful man, though the similarities end there. Tellingly, the binary between Judith – who saves the Israelites from imminent annihilation by the Assyrians – and Salome – the dancing seductress of Judea during the time of Christ – parallels the historical JudeoChristian tradition of treating female nature as one of two extremes: the pious virgin or the corrupt harlot. Like Sine, Klimt scholars Jane Kallir and Susanne Kelley have further analysed, respectively, the contemporary attitudes surrounding Klimt’s painting, as well as the discourse centred on cultural identity and representations of the female Jewish body in fin-de-siècle Vienna. By focusing on the contemporary critical press, Kallir’s and Kelley’s research collectively demonstrates that Klimt’s Judith I confronted non-Jewish male viewers with a powerful female sexuality that unsettled their misogynist and largely anti-Semitic modes of thinking, which, according to these scholars, typified Vienna’s cultural milieu of the period.86 574

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Klimt’s Judith I is certainly sexualized, with her exposed breasts, parted lips (as if caught in a sexual climax), and seductive stare. Her eyes are most intriguing, primarily because they are visually dissimilar from one another: her right eye is more noticeably closed than her left. Klimt’s decision to paint her physiognomy in such a manner may suggest that Judith/Salome is casting her sensual ‘bedroom eyes’ toward the male viewer, who symbolically becomes her victim. But the incongruous eyes might also suggest that the depravity of Judith/Salome’s erotic nature has physically corrupted her body, causing her to suffer from an actual physio-pathological condition like ptosis, or ‘drooping eye syndrome’, where the skin of the eyelid begins to collapse over the eyeball. If this were the case, then her sensual stare fails to be seductive, and instead communicates a grotesqueness mapped onto her otherwise comely face. Given that this is a female Jewish body that exhibits a presumed pathology, it is perhaps all the more clear how fin-de-siècle notions of the diseased body were similarly linked with antiSemitic notions of the ‘grotesque’ Jewish body, which, not incidentally, was a further criticism of bodies in Klimt’s Philosophy, as offered by contemporary critics in Vienna’s anti-Semitic newspaper Deutsches Volksblatt (German People’s Paper).87 Klinger, who was Jewish, may or may not have been aware of this discourse, though he would have been aware of Klimt’s Judith I. Assuming that he was also cognizant of the contemporary trend to conflate attributes of Judith and Salome into the consummate femme fatale of the fin de siècle, it is likely that the figure in Black-White was deliberately created as a hybrid woman in the manner of Klimt’s seductress. It should come as no surprise then, that Klinger’s Judith/Salome displays the same ‘drooping eye’ as seen in Judith I, albeit through more simplified lines. From Beardsley and Klimt, Klinger thus adopted a vogue for representing the ‘diseased’ femme fatale through a body that makes manifest ‘the pathological depravity of a modern sex life’. The climax of Klinger’s exploration of erotic and grotesque imagery came in 1909 with the publication of sixteen untitled illustrations (including the title page) for a German reprint edition of the seventeenth-century English Restoration play Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery attributed to John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester.88 As the title of the play implies, the vast majority of Klinger’s images for Sodom deliberately confront the boundary between erotica and pornography. And rightly so, given that Wilmot’s obscene play – which historically satirized the real-life court of Charles II of England – follows the King and Queen of Sodom (Bolloximian and Cuntigratia) as they and their courtiers engage in, or are confronted by: sodomy, a recession in female prostitution, masturbation, bestiality, incest, and the contraction of venereal diseases – the latter of which leads to the queen’s death.89 Klinger’s images accordingly reflect the erotic nature of the play’s humorous absurdities, yet his drawings never truly materialize as illustrations of any one particular character or scene within the play, though ‘pure’ illustration was arguably never his goal. Three images in particular illustrate Klinger’s desire to reinterpret Beardsley’s aesthetic, perhaps in an effort to exert his voice as the ‘Austrian’ Beardsley. The first of these drawings (plate 12) shows an elongated, ill-proportioned nude woman, save for her scalloped robe, the edges of which mirror the tight curls of her hair. The overall shape and ‘whiteness’ of the woman’s body, as well as the manner in which her body fills the picture plane, invariably calls to mind Beardsley’s Ali Baba (see plate 7), though Klinger’s figure is contrastingly set before an intricate Jugendstil backdrop, rather than a white void. Klinger’s subject is moreover a woman, not a man, and not nearly as bejewelled as the Arab in Beardsley’s illustration. The most conspicuous difference is the fact that Klinger’s figure displays female genitalia, whereas Beardsley’s character dons a black loincloth, or perhaps white pants with a black waistband, which effectively conceal his © Association of Art Historians 2017

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male genitalia from the viewer. Klinger specifically draws attention to the woman’s genitalia by highlighting the dark hair that surrounds her vulva. Since the woman is blonde, the use of black pubic hair gives the impression that the figure is wearing a merkin, or pubic wig, which was primarily worn by prostitutes or courtesans as early as the seventeenth century to help maintain cleanliness or, conversely, to hide the telltale signs of sexually transmitted infections, particularly syphilis.90 Given that one of the characters in Sodom is Virtuoso, the maker of dildos and merkins for the court, this reading seems particularly apt. Alternatively, if the young woman is not wearing a pubic wig, then her white/blonde tresses may nevertheless allude to her identity as a prostitute, since female sex workers – as far back as ancient Greece – were required to dye their hair blonde or wear flaxen wigs as outward markers of their profession.91 Whether the figure exhibits a merkin, dyed hair, or a blonde wig, the symbolism of Klinger’s image presents the viewer with a ‘modern’ female prostitute à la Beardsley’s Ali Baba. A second illustration from Klinger’s Sodom series depicts a hermaphroditic satyr with large drooping breasts and an enormous erect phallus (plate 13). The satyr – a common trope throughout the history of erotic art, and a character that repeatedly

12 Julius Klinger, Untitled, 1909. Black-and-white lithograph, 39 × 29 cm. Published in Sodom: Ein Spiel, 1909. Photo: Author, courtesy of the Widener Library, Harvard University.


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13 Julius Klinger, Untitled, 1909. Black-and-white lithograph, 39 × 29 cm. Published in Sodom: Ein Spiel, 1909. Photo: Author, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University.

appears throughout Beardsley’s printed suites, including Salome and Lysistrata – is typically read as a symbol of male virility, sexual prowess, and licentiousness. This is particularly true of additional ithyphallic satyrs included in Klinger’s Sodom suite, who explicitly engage in pornographic sodomy, but who are not represented as male/ female hybrids. In thinking of visual sources for Klinger’s hermaphrodite, the portly figures in Beardsley’s Ali Baba or Klimt’s The Hostile Forces certainly come to mind, and the satyr’s giant phallus similarly draws a strong allusion to the comically large erections in Beardsley’s The Lacedaemonian Ambassadors (see plate 4). The greatest connection between Klinger’s satyr and Beardsley’s art materializes in the latter’s title page for Wilde’s Salome, in which a devilish, grimacing satyr exhibits prominent male genitalia and female breasts (plate 14). Beardsley’s exploration of hermaphrodites was not confined, however, to the pages of the Salome suite. According to Snodgrass, the hermaphrodite became © Association of Art Historians 2017

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14 Aubrey Beardsley, Design for Title Page, from Salome, 1894. Line block print on Japanese vellum, 34.4 × 27.1 cm. London: Victoria and Albert Museum (given by Michael Harari, in memory of his father, Ralph A. Harari). Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

one of Beardsley’s ‘favourite figures’ since it could serve as a Victorian ‘emblem of solipsistic, unfulfilled desire’.92 But in order to convey sexual wantonness, Beardsley’s hermaphrodites were often depicted as lithe, comely beings. Klinger’s Sodom illustration conversely demonstrates, through the body of a humorously grotesque satyr, his ability to incorporate the general nature of Beardsley’s artistic grotesquery without outright copying the Englishman’s figures. The result is a ‘new’ hermaphroditic creature, and one arguably more grotesquely erotic than any Beardsleyan prototype. A third and final drawing from the Sodom series (plate 15) cleverly highlights Klinger’s interest in the erotic and grotesque body expressed by both Beardsley and Klimt. In this image of a female nude, Klinger draws clear allusions to the neo-Rococo, pompadourinspired hairstyles worn by characters in Beardsley’s Lysistrata suite, including the central figure in The Lacedaemonian Ambassadors. Klinger’s ultimate point of reference, however, is the pregnant nude in Klimt’s Hope I (see plate 8). Like the red-headed woman in Klimt’s painting – which Klinger likely saw in 1905 at the Deutsche Künstlerbund in Berlin – Klinger’s © Association of Art Historians 2017

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15 Julius Klinger, Untitled, 1909. Black-and-white lithograph, 39 × 29 cm. Published in Sodom: Ein Spiel, 1909. Photo: Author, courtesy of the Widener Library, Harvard University.


Sodom figure is drawn in profile and clutches her swollen stomach below her breasts. Even the differing hues of grey ‘rain’ that surround Klinger’s woman visually recall the blue and yellow haze, rain, or water that surrounds Klimt’s vixen. There are, nevertheless, obvious deviations from Klimt’s painting. Klinger’s woman wears a stocking on only one leg, a sign that she is likely a woman of ill repute and, when coupled with her pregnant abdomen, a reminder that she is no longer a virgin. Since her eyes are closed, the woman does not directly engage the viewer’s gaze, as in Klimt’s Hope I. Of course Klinger’s image is a print, and Klimt’s work a painting; but Klinger’s Sodom illustration equally lacks the additional grotesque figures that are numerous in the background of Klimt’s canvas. The most conspicuous variance, however, is the inclusion of the large, disembodied erect phallus that has been inserted between the woman’s legs in Klinger’s print, making it appear as though she is riding a hobbyhorse. The giant male organ presumably replaces the ‘sea creature’ in Klimt’s Hope I, and thus conveys a visual pun to the viewer: the phallus is the grotesque monster. As such, Klinger’s Sodom suite might be regarded as the culmination of his exploration of grotesque erotica, and an important counterpart to Beardsley’s decadence or Klimt’s depictions of ‘immoral’ sexuality. Scrutiny of Beardsley’s sentiments in the epigraph of this essay may offer some final insights into the fascination Viennese artists and critics held for the Englishman’s depiction of erotic and grotesque bodies. In an interview with Arthur Lawrence of The Idler magazine in 1897, Beardsley cleverly (and not altogether earnestly) asserted that his primary artistic aim was to embody the grotesque. For over a century now, scholars have proposed that this statement – which Beardsley undoubtedly uttered as a marketing strategy to promote his unique aesthetic – was principally bound to his oeuvre: that is to say, to his body of artistic works alone. The present study, by contrast, has argued that Beardsley’s words might equally be applied to the manner in which Viennese critics were discussing the artist’s physical body as a grotesque ‘vessel’ in which his devilish, devious, and deformed illustrations dwelled. Beardsley’s drawings of erotic and grotesque figures subsequently found a receptive and critical audience in fin-de-siècle Vienna, when the city was immersed in the controversy of the Faculty Paintings and a discourse centred on ‘diseased’ or pathological bodies. Artists such as Klimt and Klinger, who were simultaneously developing their own articulations of symbolism or Jugendstil, readily looked to incorporate elements from Beardsley’s oeuvre in order to connect their avant-garde agendas with his, or more broadly still, with the foreign cosmopolitanism espoused by the Vienna Secession and its allies. Beardsley’s ‘wretched hand’ was thus capable of exciting the critic’s pen and the artist’s mind in a city where the grotesque body had become a sign of modernism at the fin de siècle.

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Notes I wish to thank Adam Jolles and Petra ten-Doesschate Chu for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. I am equally grateful to the editors of Art History and the three anonymous readers for their expert suggestions. Research for this article was made possible through grants from the US Fulbright Program in Austria, and the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine.

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Aubrey Beardsley quoted in Arthur H. Lawrence, ‘Mr Aubrey Beardsley and his Work’, The Idler, 11, March 1897, 198. ‘Ein anderes Bild Photographie, läßt Beardsley im Profil sehen, verwüstet, zerstört, aufgerieben von inneren Gesichten und Erlebnissen, und eine entseßlich hagere, jammervolle Hand, unheimlich lang und schmal, feingliedrig, Knochenhand, nur Bein, Nerv und Sehne, stellt sich als das einzig mögliche Instrument dar, die Beardsley-Empfindungskurve zärtlich-kapriziös zu ziehen oder zu pünkteln.’ Armin Friedmann, ‘Feuilleton: Bildende Kunst. Salon Miethke: Beardsley’, Wiener Abendpost: Beilage zur Wiener Zeitung, 1, 2 Jänner 1905, 1. Jane Haville Desmarais, The Beardsley Industry: The Critical Reception in England and France, 1893–1914, Aldershot, 1998; Chris Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley, Dandy of the Grotesque, New York and Oxford, 1995; and Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics, Oxford, 1990. Desmarais, The Beardsley Industry, 14, 25. See, for example, Margaret Armour, ‘Aubrey Beardsley and the Decadents’, Magazine of Art, 20, 1896, 12; and W. L., ‘Aubrey Beardsley, Who Died March the Sixteenth, 1898’, London Year Book, 1898, 46–51. Arthur Symons, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, Fortnightly Review, 63, May 1898, 752–61; Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, London, 1898; and Roger Fry, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’s Drawings’, Athenaeum, 5, 5 November 1904, 627–8. Matthew Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography, Woodstock, 1999, 1–2. See also Robert Ross, Aubrey Beardsley, London, 1909, 19; and Desmarais, The Beardsley Industry, 13–5. For literature on Beardsley published in fi n-de-siècle Germany, see Otto Eckmann, ‘Aubrey Vincent Beardsley’, Die Zukunft, 7: 40, July 1899, 42–4; Emil Hannover, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, Kunst und Künstler, 1: 11, August 1903, 418–25; Rudolf Klein, Aubrey Beardsley, vol. 5, Die Kunst, ed. Richard Muther, Berlin, n.d. [1902]; Julius MeierGraefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst. Vergleichende Betrachtung der Bildenden Künste als Beitrag zu einer neuen Aesthetik, 3 vols, vol. 2, Stuttgart, 1904, 606–22; and Hermann Esswein, Aubrey Beardsley, 2nd ed. München, 1912. See Roger Billcliffe and Peter Vergo, ‘Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Austrian art revival’, The Burlington Magazine, 119: 896, November 1977, 739–46; Alan Crawford, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, London, 1995, 77–81; Thomas Howarth, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Modern Movement, London, 1977, xxxi–xli; Kirk Varnedoe, Vienna 1900: Art, Architecture & Design, New York, 1986, 79–91; and Peter Vergo, ‘Fritz Waerndorfer and Josef Hoffmann’, The Burlington Magazine, 125: 964, July 1983, 402–10. Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History, London, 1992, 28. Gemma Blackshaw, ‘The pathological body: Modernist strategising in Egon Schiele’s self-portraiture’, Oxford Art Journal, 30: 3, 2007, 377–401; Gemma Blackshaw and Leslie Topp, eds, Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900, Farnham, 2009; and Patrick Werkner, ‘The child-woman and hysteria: Images of the female body in the art of Schiele, in Viennese modernism, and today’, in Patrick Werkner, ed., Egon Schiele: Art, Sexuality, and Viennese Modernism, Palo Alto, CA, 1994, 51–78. For contemporary reviews of Klimt’s Faculty Paintings, see Hermann Bahr, ed., Gegen Klimt: Historisches, Philosophie, Medizin, Goldfische, Fries, Wien, 1903, 15–37. For contemporary writings on the Secession’s formation and exhibition history, see Hermann Bahr, Secession, Wien, 1900; and Ludwig Hevesi, Acht Jahre Sezession: (März 1897–Juni 1905) Kritik, Polemik, Chronik, Wien, 1906. For historical analyses offered in the secondary literature, see Marian Bisanz-Prakken, Heiliger Frühling: Gustav Klimt und die Anfänge der Wiener Secession 1895−1905, München, 1999; Marion BisanzPrakken, Secession, Wien, 1997; Wolfgang Hilger, Die Wiener Secession: Die Vereinigung bildender Künstler 1897−1985, Wien, 1986; Christian Michael


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Nebehay, ed., Gustav Klimt: Dokumentation, Wien, 1969, 125–90; Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, New York, 1981, 213–20; and Peter Vergo, Art in Vienna, 1898−1918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele and Their Contemporaries, London, 1975, 17–44. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 214; and Leslie Topp, Architecture and Truth in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, Cambridge, 2004, 28–32. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 214. A survey of exhibition catalogues produced by the Vienna Secession between 1898 and 1902 reveals that the following British artists (as well as others) were shown in Vienna: Charles Ashbee, Frank Brangwyn, Robert Brough, Walter Crane, William Nicholson, Margaret Macdonald-Mackintosh, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Frances MacNair, James MacNair, George Sauter, Charles H. Shannon, John M. Swan, and Eduard Arthur Walton. See V. Ausstellung der Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs Secession, Wien, 1899, 43. Regarding the popularity of The Studio in fi n-de-siècle Vienna, see Peter Vergo, ‘Between modernism and tradition: The importance of Klimt’s murals and figure paintings’, in Colin B. Bailey, ed., Gustav Klimt: Modernism in the Making, New York, 2001, 23. For these reviews, see Arthur Symons, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, Ver Sacrum: Organ der Vereinigung bildender Kuenstler Österreichs, trans. Anna Muthesius, 6: 6, 15 März 1903, 117–38; Hugo Haberfeld, Aubrey Beardsley: Galerie Miethke Ausstellung von Werken alter und moderner Kunst, Wien, 1905, 2; and Friedmann, ‘Feuilleton’, 1. See note 19. Symons, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, 117–38. For the original English text, see Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, 13–32. Symons, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, 117; or Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, 13. Symons, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, 122–4; or Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, 18–21. Meier-Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, 607, 618; and Klein, Aubrey Beardsley, 19, 30. Meier-Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, 613. See Françoise Forster-Hahn, ‘Text and display: Julius Meier-Graefe, the 1906 White Centennial in Berlin, and the canon of modern art’, Art History, 38: 1, February 2015, 142–6. Eckmann, ‘Aubrey Vincent Beardsley’, 44; and Klein, Aubrey Beardsley, 51. Symons, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, 130; or, Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, 25. Symons, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, 134; or, Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, 28. Symons, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, 132; or, Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, 27. Symons, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, 118; or, Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, 15. ‘Nichts in seinem Äußern, seinem Benehmen sollte auf einen Künstler deuten und so sehr stellte er die kühle Sachlichkeit über leidenschaftliche Empfänglichkeit, daß er auf die harmlose Frage, ob er jemals Visionen gehabt, scharf antwortete: “Nein, ich gestate mir nicht Visionen zu haben, ausgenommen auf dem Papier”.’ Haberfeld, Aubrey Beardsley, 2. He most likely read this quote, in German, from the translation of Symons’ article in Ver Sacrum. ‘Beardsleys rein dekorative Formen sind auch nicht Stilisierungen natürlicher Eindrücke, sondern Gebilde, die von der Außenwelt unabhängig seine unerschöpfliche Phantasie als suggestivsten Ausdruck der beabsichtigten Wirkungen instinktiv hervorbrachte. Seine Frauenkörper sind oft behandelt, als hätte er keinen je gesehen, haben Konturen, wie sie im Fiebertraum eine lüsterne Hand streichelnd zieht.’ Haberfeld, Aubrey Beardsley, 5. ‘… schuf er in der kurzen Frist weniger Jahre, von jubelnden Zurufen und gehässigen Schmähungen umbraust, oft durch nervösen Verstimmungen und wochenlange Krankheit gehemmt, über tausend Zeichnungen.’ Haberfeld, Aubrey Beardsley, 2–3. ‘Es mag merkwürdig scheinen, daß er Künstler, der die krankhafte Verderbtheit des modernen Geschlechtslebens am mächtigsten gestaltete.’ Haberfeld, Aubrey Beardsley, 3. ‘Im weißen, schwarz eingeränderten Kunstsaale des Herrn Miethke hängen jetzt wunderseltsame Zeichnungen, arg befremdliche Schwarzweißblätter rings an den vier Wändern, verzweifelte “Diablerien”, wild abenteuerliche Grotesken einer ins Höllische abschweifenden furchtbaren Phantasie, die aber von einer eisernen Hand fest in Zucht und Zaum gehalten wird.’ Friedmann, ‘Feuilleton’, 1. ‘Diese Geisterhand, das Greif- oder Klammerorgan eines Dämons! Ihr Druck tötet, ihre Geste bannt, ihre Berührung versteinert!’ Friedmann, ‘Feuilleton’, 2.

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38 See Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 226–54. 39 See Bahr, Gegen Klimt, 35. 40 Bahr, Gegen Klimt, 15–37. See also Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 226–67; and Peter Vergo, ‘Gustav Klimts “Philosophie” und das Programm der Universitätsgemälde’, Mitteilungen der Österreichischen Galerie, 22–23: 66–67, 1978–79, 69–100. 41 Hevesi, Acht Jahre Sezession, 24–34, 316–18, 443–51. 42 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, Lincoln, NE and London, 1964, 74, 76. 43 ‘Dies junge Wien erschien wie ein zu schnell gewachsener Mensch, unheimlich lang, aber erschreckend dünn, von schwachem Knochenbau und weit über sein Alter mit Lastern gesegnet.’ MeierGraefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, 695. 44 Julius Meier-Graefe, Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics, trans. Florence Simmonds and George W. Chrystal, vol. 2, London, 1908, 307. 45 ‘Wer über mich – als Künstler, der allein betrachtenswert ist – etwas wissen will, der soll meine Bilder aufmerksam betrachten und daraus zu erkennen suchen, was ich bin und was ich will.’ Gustav Klimt quoted in Nebehay, Gustav Klimt, 32. The original German text can be found on a typescript in the Bibliothek der Stadt Wien, Inv. Nr. 152980. 46 See Bisanz-Prakken, Gustav Klimt, 50; Varnedoe, Vienna 1900, 157; Vergo, ‘Between modernism and tradition’, 22–4. 47 See Marian Bisanz-Prakken, Gustav Klimt: Der Beethovenfries: Geschichte, Funktion und Bedeutung, Salzburg, 1977, 50; Johannes Dobai, ‘Gustav Klimt’s “Hope I”’, National Gallery of Canada Bulletin, no. 17, trans. Gwenda Lambton, 1971, 12; Eva di Stefano, Gustav Klimt: Art Nouveau Visionary, trans. Stephen Jackson, New York, 2008, 179; Stephan Koja, ‘Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze: Evolution and Programme’, in Stephan Koja, ed., Gustav Klimt: The Beethoven Frieze and the Controversy over the Freedom of Art, Munich, 2006, 97; and Vergo, ‘Between modernism and tradition’, 22–4. 48 Fritz Novotny and Johannes Dobai, Gustav Klimt, Salzburg, 1967, 328; and Johannes Dobai, ‘Zur Gustav Klimt’s Gemälde “Der Kuss”’, Mitteilungen der Österreichischen Galerie, 12: 56, 1968, 109. 49 Vergo, ‘Between modernism and tradition’, 23. 50 Robert Hirschfeld’s critique was published in Bahr, Gegen Klimt, 68. An English translation is provided in Koja, Gustav Klimt, 197. 51 ‘Der Eros spielt eine überragende Rolle in seiner Kunst.’ Anton Faistauer, Neue Malerei in Österreich. Betrachtungen eines Malers, Wien, 1923, 11. 52 For Klimt’s original German titles for figures in The Hostile Forces, see Wiener Secession, Max Klinger: Beethoven. X1V. Kunstausstellung der Vereinigung bildender Künstler Österreichs Secession, Wien, 1902, 25–6. Clare Willsdon refers to the figure of Excess as ‘a grossly obese evil woman’, in Clare A. P. Willsdon, ‘Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze: Goethe, Tempelkunst and the fulfilment of wishes’, Art History, 19: 1, March 1996, 64. 53 Dobai, ‘Gustav Klimt’s “Hope I”’, 2–15, 33. 54 The original interview appeared in the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung on 12 April 1905 and is reprinted in Alice Strobl, ‘Zu den Fakultätsbildern von Gustav Klimt’, Albertina Studien, 2: 4, 1964, 161–3. 55 Dobai, ‘Gustav Klimt’s “Hope I”’, 12. 56 Emily Braun, ‘Ornament as evolution: Gustav Klimt and Berta Zuckerkandl’, in Renée Price, ed., Gustav Klimt, New York, 2007, 150. 57 Braun, ‘Ornament as evolution’, 150–1. 58 The Savoy, 2: 2, April 1896, 193. 59 These artists include Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Peter von Cornelius, Johann Heinrich Füssli (Henry Fuseli), and Hans Makart. 60 Vergo, ‘Gustav Klimts “Philosophie” und das Programm der Universitätsgemälde’, 94–7. 61 See Emma Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s, Oxford and New York, 2002, 179–84. 62 Ludwig Hevesi, ‘Das Haus Waerndorfer (1905)’, in Altkunst-Neukunst, Wien 1894-1908, Vienna, 1909, 223. 63 See Dobai, ‘Gustav Klimt’s “Hope I”’, 2. 64 See Elana Shapira, ‘Modernism and Jewish identity in early twentiethcentury Vienna: Fritz Waerndorfer and His House for an Art Lover’, Studies in the Decorative Arts, 13: 2, Spring-Summer 2006, 52–92; and Peter Vergo, ‘Fritz Waerndorfer as Collector’, Alte und moderne Kunst, 26: 177, 1981, 34.


65 See Shapira, ‘Modernism and Jewish identity in early twentiethcentury Vienna’, 78, 82; and Vergo, ‘Fritz Waerndorfer as Collector’, 34, 36. 66 Martin Birnbaum, Aubrey Vincent Beardsley, Chicago, IL, 1911, 14. 67 Christie’s auction records (Sale 5513, Lot 0126, 28 April 2008, Paris) show that Waerndorfer owned a copy of Beardsley’s A Book of Fifty Drawings, published in London by Leonard Smithers in 1897. Jessica Makwinski, e-mail message to author, 1 February 2016. See also Robert Ross, Aubrey Beardsley, London, 1921, 105. 68 Peter Vergo notes that Waerndorfer held a lavish dinner in Klimt’s honour during May 1901, at which point the two men were already ‘intimate friends’. Vergo, ‘Fritz Waerndorfer as Collector’, 33. 69 Linda Zatlin, in conversation with Elana Shapira, has offered that Waerndorfer acquired works by Beardsley from Smithers before 1900. See Shapira, ‘Modernism and Jewish identity in early twentiethcentury Vienna’, 91 n.106. 70 Shapira, ‘Modernism and Jewish identity in early twentieth-century Vienna’, 76–82, 91 n.106. 71 See Anita Kühnel, Julius Klinger: Plakatkünstler und Zeichner, Berlin, 1997, 6. 72 See Kühnel, Julius Klinger, 6–7; and Bernhard Denscher, ‘Die Linie unserer Zeit: Julius Klinger als Buchgestalter und Buchillustrator’, in Gerhard Renner, Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, and Christian Gastgeber, eds, Buch und Provenienzforschung, Wien, 2009, 63–76. 73 See Kühnel, Julius Klinger, 6–7. 74 See Horst Uhr, Lovis Corinth, Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA and Oxford, 1990, 129. 75 See note 8. 76 See Ulrich Bach, ‘“Das Formierte der Erotik”: Franz Blei und der erotische Buchhandel’, in Christine Haug, Johannes Frimmel and Anke Vogel, eds, Erotisch-pornografische Lesestoffe: Das Geschäft mit Erotik und Pornografie im deutschen Sprachraum vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 88, Buchwissenschaftliche Beiträge, Wiesbaden, 2015, 143–58. 77 ‘… närrisch-exquisiten Zeichnungen’ …. ‘mit listigen, scharfen, verschmitzten Augen’. Max Osborn, ‘Julius Klinger: Schwarz-Weiss’, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, 21, Oktober 1907–März 1908, 272. 78 Osborn, ‘Julius Klinger’, 272, 277. 79 Kühnel, Julius Klinger, 6, 30, 95; and Denscher, ‘Die Linie unserer Zeit’, 64–5. 80 Kühnel, Julius Klinger, 13, 93–4. 81 Iconographic analyses of The Climax are numerous. For a sampling, see Calloway, Aubrey Beardsley, 70–83; Elliot L. Gilbert, ‘“Tumult of images”: Wilde, Beardsley, and “Salome”’, Victorian Studies, 26: 2, Winter 1983, 133–59; and Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley, 52–66, 86–92, 145–8, 225–7, 275–83. 82 Theodore Wratislaw, ‘The Salome of Aubrey Beardsley’, The Artist, 2, April 1894, 101. 83 Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley, 145–7. 84 ‘Seinen reichen dekorativen Geschmack … zeigt Klimt noch in … einer “Judith”, die eigentlich besser in “Salome” umgetauft würde.’ Fritz von Ostini, ‘Die VIII. Internationale Kunstausstellung im KGL Glaspalast zu München’, Die Kunst, 3, 1900–01, 542. 85 Nadine Sine, ‘Cases of mistaken identity: Salome and Judith at the turn of the century’, German Studies Review, 11: 1, February 1988, 9–29. 86 Jane Kallir, Gustav Klimt: 25 Masterworks, New York, 1995, 16; and Susanne Kelley, ‘Perceptions of Jewish female bodies through Gustav Klimt and Peter Altenberg’, Imaginations, 3: 1, May 2012, 109–22. 87 See Bahr, Gegen Klimt, 35. 88 Earl of Rochester, Sodom: Ein Spiel, Leipzig, 1909. 89 For an analysis of Sodom’s political underpinnings, see Richard Elias, ‘Political satire in Sodom’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 18: 3, Summer 1978, 423–38. 90 See James A. H. Murray et al., eds, A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, 6: 2, Oxford, 1908, 360. 91 See William W. Sanger, History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes, and Effects throughout the World, New York, 1859, 46–7. 92 Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley, 60.

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