Diary: Eric Kandel on the Beholder‘s Share

Gustav Klimt, Judith (1901). Photo: Johannes Stoll ©Belvedere, Vienna

One of the interesting features of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century is that Freud was not the only person developing insights into unconscious mental processes. There were writers like Arthur Schnitzler, on the one hand, as well as artists like Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. All of them were exploring the human mind at the same time, living in the same Zeitgeist, and they brought to bear upon the examination of human psychology a number of new insights that Freud lacked. Austrian modernist art penetrated the Victorian veneer of middle-class Viennese life—particularly society’s restrictive and hypocritical attitudes toward mental life, sex and aggression, and women and their sexuality—to reveal the reality that lies beneath the surface. At the same time contemporary scholars of art history began focusing on psychology as a scientific discipline to cast light on the artist’ and the viewer’s inner experience as reflecting dimensions of the work of art.

Gustav Klimt, for instance, focused on becoming a psychological painter of women. Over the course of his life, he replaced the angelic feminine types of his earlier pictures and the traditional idealized or mythologized nude with portraits of women as sensual creatures, developing their full potential for pleasure and pain, life and death. In a long series of drawings, Klimt tried to capture the feeling of female sexuality. In his exploration of the erotic, he banished the sense of sin surrounding sex that had plagued his father’s generation and portrayed the variety of sexual pleasures women can achieve, alone or with a male or female partner. In capturing the fullness of female sexuality that had eluded Freud and many of his contemporaries, Klimt became a great liberator of women’s sexuality. Klimt introduced a new dimension to eroticism in Western art—he portrayed real women with no regard for the viewer.