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PARTISAN REVIEW
authority to what he has defined as Freud's "counterpolitical spirit,"
which dealt with political conflict and defeat by psychologizing it and
placing the locus of conflict in the mind rather than in the social
world.
The ceiling paintings initiated a political struggle in Vienna over
the function of modern art. The issue of
Ver Sacrum
containing
Klimt's drawings of "Medicine" was ordered confiscated as an " offense
against public morals." The painter was inaccurately identified as a
Jew. The Ministry refused to confirm his election to a Professorship in
the Academy of Fine Arts and refused to allow "Jurisprudence" to be
the central work of the Austrian exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis Exposi–
tion. Says Schorske: "When political issues become cultural, cultural
issues become political. "
It
is in examining what he terms "the
cultural-political convergence" that Schorske is most skilled as a
historical craftsman. He delineates the conflict by analyzing the
positions of the four protagonists: Klimt himself; Professor Friedrich
JodI, a liberal philosopher who led the fight against Klimt; the art
historian Franz Wickoff, who championed modern art; and the Minis–
ter of Culture, Wilhelm von Hartel, who administered the university;
against the changing work of the artist as the controversy over the
paintings raged. After Klimt did his third and final painting, "Juris–
prudence," in 1901, he developed a separation of politics from art.
Klimt retreated from public forums of artistic expression to paint the
portraits of elegant women in the private sphere of the wealthy Jewish
families of Vienna. His art moved from organic dynamism to static
ornamentalism. Abstraction and transcendence now replaced external
reality and engagement. Thus Schorske demonstrates with the case of
Klimt his thesis of aesthetic retreat by the
avant-garde
in turn of the
century Vienna.
Schorske's sensitive evocation of mutual socio-aesthetic interac–
tion is demonstrated in the discussion of the changing role of art in
Austrian society from 1860 to 1890. Using the writers Adalbert Stifter
and Hugo von Hofmannsthal as his case studies, Schorske shows how
the function of art moved from expressing ideals for society and serving
as a personal adornment, to becoming an integral way of life. The
fathers who achieved economic success in the mid-century reared their
children to absorb high culture as a good in itself and as a style of life.
In Vienna last week's performances at the opera, the philharmonic, or
the Burgtheater provided the topics of polite conversation . The chil–
dren of the
haute bourgeoisie
of Vienna were reared in the concert
