Klimt's Seduction: Part I

I recenlty wrote about a The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs, a book I had just purchased, whereas in fact, I had bought two books.

For some reason, I didn't feel up to commenting on this second one.

It is Anne-Marie O'Connor's The Lady in Gold, the Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.

I started to write about the (beginning) of the book, and here is what I wrote about three days ago. I started by writing the very first line of the book:
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It was 1898, and the devil himself seemed to dance in Vienna.

This is the first line of the first chapter of: The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.

I stopped reading the book after the first chapter, to do more research on the painting. As I looked closer at what I found online, I realized that the "designs" on Adele Bloch-Bauer's dress (the Woman in Gold) looked like some Egyptian heiroglyphic eyes.

Here is more, just from the first two pages:

For hundreds of years, the great Habsburg dynasty had reigned over this crossroad of East and West. Behind immense battlements, its frilly court united German, Italian, Polish Czech, Hungarian, and Croatian aristocracies into a single royal house whose multicultural capital was as ornate as a Faberge egg.

[...]

Now Vieanna's ancient ramparts had come tumbling down, and a wave of newcomers was crowding in from Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, and Transylvania.

[...]

This new Vienna was a city of contradictions. It was one of Europe's richest cities, yet its immigrants were among the poorest. The construction of opulent new palaces did little to hide a severe housing shortage. Vienna doctors were creating modern medicine - pioneering surgeries; discovering germs, the polio virus, and blood types - yet incurable syphilis spread unchecked. Sigmund Freud was illuminating hidden drives of sex and aggression at a time of xenophobia and anti-Semitism so crude that some believed Jews murdered children to leaven their matzoh with blood.

[...]

The dynasty that had united Europe and the Americas had become the empire's premier dysfunctional family.

[...]

...wrote the appalled director of the Burghtheater. "The devil is loose here...in one single night, the Viennese went with him."

[...]

Yet even in this "Gay Apocalypse" Vienna maintained a deeply old-fashioned charm, with its snow-covered palaces and strolling parks, its aromatic cafes and seductive pastry carts piled with petit fours and chocolate bonbons filled with sweet liqueur. Possessed of a childlike love of adornment, Vienna was a city where gilded iron roses climbed balconies and stone goddesses framed doorways; where gargoyles glared from cornices and Herculean men bared their immense chests from facades.

[...]

In 1989, Vienna was a place where illusions could still be preserved by well-to-do families like the Bauers, who gathered at their elegant apartment above the Ringstrasse on a March afternoon, when the musky sweetness of lilacs filled the damp air.

Adele Bauer was standing before the family in a white Grecian robe, revealing a slender frame as long and delicate as a vase. Her thick hair fell to her waist. At sixteen, Adele was crossing that mysterious line between girl and woman. Dressed as the spirit of Spring, she held a wicker cornucopia filled with Spring blossoms and sheaves. with her poise and regal bearing and her dark, heavily lidded eyes, Adele might have been an actress, like Katharina Schratt, who ruled a few steps down the Ringstrasse, at the Burgtheater.

So begins a book which through the guise of telling us about a painting is also a story about how a country got seduced by beauty, and used it as an idolatory replacement.

It is no surprise that Hitler, the dancing devil, was so easily able to seduce the German people, who marched with him singing their beautiful Germanic songs, as he led the way to his Gottesdammerung.

I returned the book. I couldn't read it. It celebrated Klimt, who with his golden paintings, glorified this devil and left God on the wayside, or so he thought. The devil may dance around God, but God is permanent.

I returned the book, and the nice lady who helped me purchase it patiently listened to why I returned it.

"I got spooked by the "evil eyes" I started to explain.

St. Joseph and the Infant Christ

[Cross-posted at Camera Lucida].

As we near Christmas, and we hear the lovely stories of Jesus's birth and his young mother Mary, I always feel that we keep his earthly father, Joseph, a little on the side-lines.

I am re-posting a segment I did on St. Joseph, and on the artists who painted him. These are purely subjective choices. I don't know if the paintings are masterpieces, or if some of the painters are even recognized in the roster of the Western canon. But, in many of the paintings, I found the gentleness with which Joseph interacted with his young infant touching.

Here is the website where I found most of these images.

[I've removed some works where Christ is already a young man in my original blog post. To view the complete post, you can go here.]

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Jesus's Earthly Father
Saturday, November 27, 2010

Left: St. Joseph. By Rudolph Blattler, Switzerland, 1899
Right: St. Joseph with the Christ Child.
By Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, Italy, 1600s

Left: St. Joseph and Child. By Enrico Reffo, Italy, 1800s
Right: Saint Joseph and Jesus. By Enrico Manfrini, Italy, 2000

Left: St. Joseph, The Holy Child.
By Bartolome Esteban Murillo, Spain, 1600s
Right: Holding Heaven. By Ron DiCianni, USA, 2004

Left: Saint Joseph with Child. By Brother Simeon, USA, 1900s
Right:Joseph with Infant Christ. By Bartolome Esteban Murillo,
Spain, 1655-56

Caravaggio's Gentleness

The Taking of Christ, Caravaggio, 1602

I wrote on Sunday about the painting the The Thinking Housewife posted in an entry titled "Fathers and Angels," showing Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac to God. Caravaggio has not been a favorite of mine. But recently, I realize how delicately he paints expressions. In fact, of all the possible paintings, his was the one I chose to depict the terrible moment when Jesus is betrayed by one of his own disciples. The humility on Jesus's face as he is grabbed by Judas is so moving.

Caravaggio's style is still too harsh for me, and with too much contrast. But, I think his method is a way that allows him to focus on faces and expressions. The open and innocent expression of the young angel while he is giving the faithful Abraham a ram to sacrifice instead of his beloved son, shows Abraham that this is indeed a messenger from God. Again, the focused light on the young angel's face shows us that this is a psychological interaction, between God and man, and not one of will or power. Yes, our God is powerful, but how differently he shows us His ways compared to the relentlessly harsh and remorseless methods that the Allah of the Muslims prefers.

Hirsi Ali's Polite Disdain for Christianity

Ayaan Hirsi Ali pops up periodically to comment on the prevailing Muslim incident. This time she is reacting to the South Park censorship. As far as I can tell, she has been interviewed by Fox News and has had an article published by the Wall Street Journal on this topic. And here is a link to her interview with Anderson Cooper from CNN. That is more attention than the astute Diana West, whose analysis of the incident is far more valuable than Ali’s.

Near the very end of the interview on CNN, Hirsi Ali says:

We have to take them [Muslims] on. And that means, I think, scrutinizing Islam, criticizing it in the same way that we criticizing Christianity, Judaism and other ideologies, and other religions.

Equal opportunity scrutiny, equal opportunity offense.

It never occurs to Ali firstly, that Islam has no business being alongside Judaism and Christianity to merit "equal opportunity scrutiny, equal opportunity offense."

Second, it is interesting that she puts "offense" as part of her egalitarian treatment of religions, and that she puts "ideologies" and "religions" in the same sentence.

Ali has come forward as an atheist, and has declared her dislike for Christianity (to put it mildly). In the slips that she performed, it is clear that she politely disdains religion, and that offending Christianity might be just as commendable as offending Islam.

This is the kind person that the American Enterprise Institute has hired to protect American (and Western) interests.