The Painted Kiss (28 page)

Alone in the studio, Gustav stands before his new painting. He arrived at the studio breathless after his long morning walk, full of anticipation. Today is the day he really begins. He has the design, his canvas is prepared, he has blocked in the figures, he is ready to begin. Yet he cannot. For over an hour he has been looking at it, but he is no closer to putting brush to canvas than when he first arrived.

He paces the room, he opens and then closes the window. He picks up one of the cats and rubs its belly until it growls and scratches his face. He makes himself a pot of coffee and drinks it in front of the canvas, trying to understand why he is having so much trouble. A painting is like a game of chess; you have to plan your moves. When he left the studio the night before he thought he knew how to attack it, but sometime in the night it had changed on him.

It’s not so different from other paintings I have done, he thinks. Although making an allegorical painting about love is about the most arrogant thing one can do. What the hell do I know about love? Compared to this, an allegorical painting about medicine or philosophy is a modest undertaking.

There they are, gray and shadowy, his penciled-in figures, waiting to be brought to life by paint. On the left, a man. Not himself. He never seriously considered making the man a self-portrait, of course. He just said that to appease Emilie, who was being strange and unreasonable about it. She should know that he will never do a self-portrait, not for anyone, not even for her.

And on the right, this girl. Who is she?

Well, it’s Emilie, of course. A little bit attenuated, a little bit stylized, but recognizably Emilie. She has Emilie’s mouth and Emilie’s hair and Emilie’s hands. And that is the problem, he realizes. He has always said, if you want to know about me and what I want, look at my paintings.
He knows that if he paints a likeness of Emilie Flöge in an embrace with a robed man, even if the man is indistinct, everyone will know. There will be gossip about it, and speculation. And he had asked her to model for the painting with exactly that outcome in mind. He wants to do something, make some declaration. He has felt her slipping away lately, so busy with her own work, her traveling. He wants to pull her back toward him. But now that he is here with the painting he realizes that he can’t do it. It can’t be Emilie, not, at least, in any obvious way.

It takes a few hours to alter her outline. The shape of her face has changed. Her hands belong to a different woman. Emilie will be disappointed, he thinks. She’s been waiting for me to do a decent portrait of her for how long? He chuckles a little ruefully. Most of her life. He’s never really understood why she didn’t like the portrait of her. What was all that nonsense about him not knowing who she really is? He knows her better than anyone does, better than Helene, better than Pauline, better than her mother. He decides not to tell her yet. When she asks how the painting is going he can just say that he had to make some changes to the figures. That will be all she will need to hear to understand. It’s the reason she is the only person he feels entirely comfortable with: he doesn’t have to talk a lot, doesn’t have to go to elaborate lengths to explain himself. He tries not to think about the look on her face when she sees the finished painting.

Is it artistic considerations or personal ones that are pressing him to change the painting into something less specific, more universal? It’s hard to be that self-conscious. It’s hard to look that closely at one’s own psyche. All he really knows is that when he thinks about the girl as a portrait of Emilie he can’t pick up a brush. He is paralyzed. When he thinks, she is just a girl, any girl, he can mix his paint and he can lay down an undercoat of burnt umber and he can start to build up the painting with ocher and raw sienna. And it is the difference between going out of his mind and being, at least for the hours he is working, at peace.

G
ustav made fifty drawings of dress designs. Some were too fanciful to actually be made, and others had to be modified in the interest of cost or durability or practicality. We had long discussions about fabric and embellishment, and he described to me exactly how he wanted each one to look, what kind of impression he wanted each one to give, how he wanted it to hang on the body. Eventually we narrowed the group down to thirty-two looks. I translated his drawings into patterns, and took the patterns to the salon to make them up to my own measurements. First we made prototypes out of muslin, to make sure I had transposed the ideas correctly and that they fit the way they were intended to. Then, when they had been draped and pinned to satisfaction, we brought out the rich materials that Gustav had spent a small fortune on. It was odd and a little embarrassing to have so many clothes for myself in production; I felt like the Empress Elisabeth.

When the dresses were ready Gustav and I met for a photography session at the studio. I hung them all in the hall, which made it look odd, like the prop room at the Opera, with all of these clothes crowding out the woodcuts and sculpture. We took the photographs in the garden, and in between I would go inside and change into the next one.

First I modeled a straight, narrow column of a tea gown, in a carnival print, with three-tiered, cascading bell sleeves.

“Turn and look toward the door,” he said. “Think of marzipan torte.”

“Don’t talk about food,” I said, “I want to be able to fit into these dresses when we are done photographing them. Tell me how the painting of the embrace is going.”

“Frustratingly,” he said as I stood still for the lengthy exposure.

“Is that even a word?” I said.

“You moved your mouth,” he said. “Now it will be blurry.”

“It might be a nice effect,” I said.

“You just want to keep talking,” he accused. “Be quiet and let me complain about how badly my painting is going.” He told me that the figures were still not right but he had decided just to paint them as they were. He told me about laying the background too thick, and of having to wipe it clean, and how many hours of labor he had lost. He told me that the price of gold leaf was ridiculously high. I listened as I modeled a pale pink wool jersey party dress with white chiffon sleeves. I modeled a black evening dress with a black-and-white checkerboard collar and yoke while he told me about a new artist the Wiener Werkstätte had discovered, a young man named Oskar Kokoschka.

“He’s well-grounded in drawing, a student at the School of Arts and Crafts. Not that you’d know it to look at his work. He’s a wild man, but very promising.”

“Wilder than Schiele? More promising?”

“Hard to say,” Gustav said. “At least as crazy, but in a different way.”

“When do I meet this newest prodigy?” I said.

“Soon,” he said. “Turn your head a little more to the left. We should have a dinner party for him.” What he meant was that there should be a dinner at my place, with him as nominal host. But I was used to that.

“All right,” I said. “Just give me a few days’ notice.” I went inside and changed into a summer dress with a black-and-white pattern of triangles on the yoke that were straight out of the Stoclet frieze.

The photographs appeared in the
Journal of Arts and Crafts
. In the photographs I am laughing, my hair up in most of them so that the necklines are visible. Gustav usually shot me in profile, which was always my best angle. I wore the necklace Gustav had given me. Gustav is outside the frame but he is everywhere in the photographs, in the clothes, and in my smile. If you blew the photographs up you would see him reflected in the iris of my eye.

The Kiss
was exhibited at the Art Show, Vienna, in 1908. All of the former members of the Secession, who had not had a show since they left that group three years before, took part in the exhibition. The city lent them an empty lot where a concert hall was to be built, and Hoffmann created a fifty-four-room exhibition complex with terraces, gardens, courtyards, an outdoor theater, and a tearoom. The show was timed to coincide with the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of Emperor Franz Josef’s accession. All of the art was Austrian. Gustav had a room to himself, and exhibited sixteen paintings.

I was too busy to help with the preparations, and Gustav would not let me see
The Kiss
until opening night, so I saw the painting for the first time when I arrived at the reception. It was very crowded and of course the thickest throng was in Gustav’s room, and around his new painting. As I mingled in the crowd people kept coming up to me and telling me how much they loved it, and didn’t I love it, too? Yes, I said, it was wonderful, and I stationed myself against the wall opposite the painting so that when the crowd cleared I could get a good view.

I was standing there looking at the backs of people’s heads when Gustav brought over a tall, thin man with round, owlish, heavy-lidded eyes. He had a worried, drawn forehead and a long face, most of which was chin. He looked like the kind of man who might become more handsome as he got older, but now, at twenty-two, he was quite plain.

“Emilie Flöge, Oskar Kokoschka.”

“Delighted,” I said. I told him how much I admired the poster he had done for the show, the one with the young girl. “It reminds me of folk art,” I said.

“It came to me in a dream,” he said. “All of my best ideas come to me in dreams. But I like the other poster I did a little better.”

“I hope that one did not come out of a dream,” I said.

“No, I modeled that one after Goya,
Saturn Devouring His Children,
do you know it?”

I said I did, though I had never been to Spain to see it. He explained to me the title of the poster was
Tragedy of Man,
and that death of course was the first tragedy of man, and that was how it connected to Goya, though the pose of his figure was not really the same, nor was the painting method. Goya, he said, understood death better than any artist who ever lived. He spoke hurriedly, as if he might be carted away before he was finished. He turned often to Gustav to make sure he understood. I thought that the boy might have been suffering from insomnia, or malnutrition, or both, and invited him to dinner right away. Then Gustav led him away and I stood waiting. It was close to the end of the evening when I finally got to see
The Kiss
.

I realized immediately that he had cheated me. Gustav was not in the painting anymore. He had thrown out the drawings of himself and painted in a cartoon man. His face was almost completely obscured, and the little bit of cheekbone and brow that did show looked nothing like Gustav. The man’s swarthy complexion was nothing like Gustav’s. His hair was too plentiful, too dark. Something was odd about his neck, something wasn’t right anatomically, which, considering how many figures Gustav had drawn with ease, didn’t make any sense. The man’s body was swathed in a caftan of the kind Gustav wore when he painted, but this robe was a disguise, it hid everything, it made him just a shape, a block of gold.

He had painted me out, too. The girl in the painting had a sweet, generic face. In vain I looked for my cheekbones, my strong jaw, my thin, wide mouth. But they were altered, smoothed, rounded. I noted with dismay that the girl had Adele Bloch-Bauer’s hands.

This girl, whoever she was, was balanced on a precipice. Her toes gripped the edge—was that sexual ecstasy or desperation? Her feet were wrapped or tied with golden vines. The man, whoever he was, seemed better off. He was on the safe side of the cliff. Somewhere under that robe he had feet, unbound feet that could carry him away. He was guarding his expression, his feelings, by turning his face away. In a moment he might tire of the girl and push her off of the cliff. He might leave her in despair, with no choice in her agonized mind but to fling herself over. Her blissful face betrayed her ignorance of the darkness all around her. Her face was the center, the heart of the painting. Suddenly I was furious with her, with her open face and heart, her innocence and youth. Didn’t she know the danger she was in? How was she going to get out of this? I wanted to smack her, to wake her from her trance. But she smiled on and on.

Of course the painting was an icon. It was an allegory, not a portrait, and was never meant to be anything but that. Did I hate it for what it was or for what it wasn’t?

If he knew what I thought it would break his heart, and as many times as my own heart had been broken I wanted to spare him that, so I searched for something, anything about the painting that I could honestly say I loved. I said the wildflowers reminded me of those at Attersee. I said I loved her dress. I wondered aloud if the dress could be reproduced, how expensive that much golden thread would be, and how heavy. I praised the use of gold, the texture of the background. Gustav didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. And when he dropped me off at home I went into my room and thrashed at my pillow until I was exhausted and able to sleep.

The painting sold to the Austrian Gallery for a ridiculous amount of money. It was a sensation, but Gustav was most excited about Kokoschka and his children’s fairy tale,
The Dreaming Youths,
which he had dedicated to Gustav. Gustav thought it was the best thing in the show, though the reviewers, predictably, were outraged at his bold, primitive designs and bright, flat colors. Gustav told Kokoschka that he should measure his success by the amount of vitriol he incited, and that he should be very pleased with the outcome of the Kunstschau.

In 1911 I was the one hosting an event, for a change. Poiret came to Vienna with his mannequins on his tour of the European capitals. With the help of the Wiener Werkstätte I organized a reception for him, in the gardens of the Prater, an amusement park on the edge of town.

It was late summer, the air hot and still. We covered the tables in white linen and arranged white ceramic pots of delicate cyclamen in the center of each one. The tables flanked a long runway where the mannequins would walk when they modeled Poiret’s newest collection. The gazebo where they would change costume was screened with white cotton shades. The invitation specified that the guests should wear only white. The women, of course, wore their best white Poirets, in honor of him.

Adele wore a gold necklace set with enormous opals that would not have been out of place on Cleopatra. She waylaid me to tell me all of the details of Friedericke Beer’s latest affair. Schiele brought his girlfriend, a beautiful coltish girl in a cheap cotton dress. Hoffmann carried an alabaster cane and went around to all of the tables and recentered the centerpieces. Alma came, but she could not wear white. Mahler had died three months before, and she was still in mourning. She stood out dramatically among the other, pale figures in her conservatively cut black crepe dress. I thought she must be fainting in the heat, and when I saw her sitting alone, fanning herself ineffectually with a napkin, I felt sorry for her. I sent Kokoschka over to her with a glass of ice water, so perhaps I should be blamed for all that happened afterward.

After I had greeted everyone I stood a little apart, watching to make sure everyone seemed happy and that no detail had been forgotten. I wore my own dress, a simple shape but embroidered in pale ecru with fanciful flowers and birds. Around my neck I had draped a magenta Wiener Werkstätte scarf. It was cheating, but I wanted people to be able to find me in the crowd.

Gustav appeared at my side, looking very tan in his pale suit. “Is our guest enjoying himself?” he asked.

“He’s talking to Moll,” I said. “What do you think?”

“I think he is being bored to death with the minute details of running a gallery,” Gustav said. “Do you think Moll would try to get money from the poor man?”

“I think we should rescue him before there is an international incident,” I said. I took Gustav to Poiret and introduced them. They spent the first few minutes politely praising each other’s work. Then Gustav asked him how he liked Vienna.

He loved the charming people, he said. He loved the garden at the Prater, despite the bees. He loved the way the women walked, so different from Parisian women, more natural, less studied. He loved the kirsch he drank, and the pork-filled turnovers dusted with powdered sugar that he ate.

“Ah, Vienna!” said Gustav, as if that said it all.

“Your scarf,” Poiret said. “I love your scarf.” He pulled at one end until it came free. He held it in both hands and examined it as if it were an ancient artifact.