Intellimmersion No. 2 · Vienna, 1902

Gustav Klimt, the city that called him mad, and the wall he painted for Beethoven

Gustav Klimt left almost no words about himself. This essay lends him some. The voice is invented. The dates, the materials, the insults, and every word quoted from another mouth are documented. What he could not have known is told at the end, in ours.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, November 13, 2026

“Wir kämpfen nicht gegen die nackte und nicht gegen die freie Kunst, sondern gegen die häßliche Kunst.”“We are not fighting naked art, or free art, but ugly art.” Professor Friedrich Jodl, on Klimt’s Philosophy, 1900

I Since This Morning

Josefstädter Straße 21, March 8, 1902

Since this morning I am in the madhouse. Vienna has it for certain. It was known in the cafés by noon, and tonight it was known in the cloakroom of the theatre up the street, where Bahr had it from the newspapermen: Er ist schon im Irrenhause, seit heute früh. He is already in the asylum, since this morning. Not one of them could say who had told him. One heard it over coffee. Another had it by telephone, through his servant.

I was here. I worked until about six, as I do, in the smock, with the door shut. Then the madman cleaned his brushes.

Bahr says it is no accident. The Academy has proposed me for a professorship, unanimously, and the paper is not yet signed. A painter in an asylum cannot be confirmed. He says they also hope to frighten me until something in me breaks. Bahr keeps every clipping they print against me. I think he means to make a book of them.

I do not need the book. I have it by heart, two years of it.

It began with the Philosophy, in the spring of 1900. Schreder, in the Deutsches Volksblatt, described my ceiling picture as a fish tank: “A green-lit aquarium. Billions of drops glitter.” The Montags-Zeitung found me an ancestor, Herostratus, who set fire to the temple of Diana at Ephesus so that people would remember his name. Seligmann, who paints, wrote that a painter should illustrate the riddle and not pose one himself. Friedmann, who is known for his tact, called my manner hysterical. Pötzl gave us all a new name. We are no longer the Secession. We are the Excession.

Then came the professors. They sent a petition to the Minister to keep my picture off their ceiling, and in the end there were eighty-seven of them. Kraus counted them in his paper, with approval. Professor Jodl explained the matter to the newspaper: “We are not fighting naked art, or free art, but ugly art.” Professor Exner added that the protest was in no way directed against the Secession. I was glad to learn it.

Kraus also reported that Paris had laughed at our Viennese art as goût juif. The Volksblatt went lower, as it does. When Wickhoff stood up for me before the Philosophical Society, it wrote that the Society printed its membership cards on yellow card, and that they lacked only the marks “by which in earlier, better times Jews were told from Christians.” I am an engraver’s son from Baumgarten. It makes no difference to them whom they mean.

Then Medicine, last spring. On the twenty-first of March deputies rose in parliament to ask the Minister whether he truly intended to buy the picture for the University. The public prosecutor had the number of Ver Sacrum with my sketches confiscated, as an offence against public morality. The Vienna court, on that same twenty-first of March, could not agree with him, and the paper was released.

The doctors had their say as well. Their weekly paper complained that I had painted medicine without its two achievements, prevention and cure. That is true. I painted what I had seen of it. My father and my brother Ernst died within one year, and nobody prevented or cured anything.

So I am, by ruling of the Landesgericht, not indecent. I am only ugly, and since this morning, insane.

There is a canvas in the corner with goldfish in it, and a red-haired woman who turns her backside to whoever is looking. That one is for them. But it is a small answer, and I have a larger one. It is not written down, because I am no hand at words. A letter costs me more than a ceiling. It is on a wall in the Friedrichstraße, thirty-four metres of it, and in five weeks they will be let in to see it.

They will find Madness there. I painted her in the autumn, on the end wall, between Sickness and Death. She was up there for months before the cafés thought of her.

II Casein

The Secession, the left-hand room, March 1902

They call the dome a cabbage. It is laurel, in gilded iron, and underneath it Olbrich built us a white box with a glass roof and walls that can be moved. The city gave permission for ten years. Over the door Hevesi’s sentence is set in gold: to every age its art, to art its freedom. Professor Jodl has now told us which art is not meant. Over the same door Olbrich set three Gorgon heads, one each for architecture, sculpture and painting. I have put three more inside.

The room on the left is the one people will enter first. It is long and bare, and everything I have done is overhead, a band a little higher than a man, along the top of three walls. I told Mizzi in November that tomorrow was my last day of work, and that I was glad. There is always another last day.

The wall is plaster over reed matting. I drew on it dry, in graphite, and painted over the drawing in casein, which is cheap and goes on thin as milk. Then the gold. And then what the catalogue will not list: cut glass, mirror, mother-of-pearl buttons, hollow brass rings. The knight’s sword is aluminium foil.

My father engraved gold for a living and never had any. I knew the leaf before I could draw: how it lifts on a breath, how it must be laid down and then left alone. For years I used it the way a jeweller does, a little, at the edge of things. Here I have let it take whole figures. The knight is gold, and the choir stands in it. Up close this is a cheap wall with buttons on it. From the door it burns.

None of it is meant to last. Hoffmann has built the rooms, twenty-one of us have painted and carved straight onto his walls, and when the exhibition closes the labourers will come and knock it all down. I have known this since the first line. I find I like it. For two years I have painted for a ministry and a faculty. A wall with a date to die has no committee, and nobody petitions a minister over something that will be rubble by July.

There are three walls, and they read in order.

On the first long wall, high up, the floating ones go by: thin women with their eyes shut and their arms stretched forward. The catalogue calls them the longing for happiness. Below them the weak are on their knees, a couple and a girl, begging a man in gold armour to go and fight for them. Behind him stand Ambition and Compassion, the two things that might make him go.

The short wall at the end belongs to what he must fight. I will come back to it.

On the last wall the floating ones return, and find a woman with a lyre. She is Poetry. After her there is nothing, a long stretch of bare plaster. Then come the Arts, women rising one above another and pointing the way. Then a choir in rows, and two people holding each other.

Half of what I have done here is plaster I left alone. People will ask whether I ran out of time. But nobody asks a composer why the orchestra has stopped playing. The floating figure is one figure, repeated, the way a tune is repeated. The white is where it rests.

III The Deaf Man

The same room

The exhibition is for Beethoven. Klinger is bringing him from Leipzig in marble. I have not put him in. There is not a face on my walls that is his, and not a note of music. Every parlour in Vienna has the scowl on the piano already.

What I have painted stands at four removes from him. Schiller wrote a poem. Beethoven set it. Wagner explained the setting for a concert in Dresden in 1846, with a line of Faust for each movement, beginning with Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren: you shall go without. He heard in the symphony a soul fighting for joy against a hostile power. I have painted Wagner’s explanation. Four men have had their hands on it, and I am the only one of them who has never set a word down about anything.

Wagner says the last movement opens with a harsh outcry and ends in the discovery that joy is what the world was made for. I do not know whether that is true of the world. It is a good shape for a room.

He is more a Viennese matter than they remember. The Ninth was first played here, on the seventh of May 1824, in the old theatre by the Kärntnertor. The Hotel Sacher stands on the spot now, a short walk from my wall. He was stone deaf. He stood among the players giving the tempo and turning the pages of his score, and the real conductor had told the orchestra to pay him no attention. When it was over he was still beating time. The story is that one of the singers, Unger, turned him round by hand, so that he could see the applause he could not hear.

I think about that more than I think about the music. A man facing the wrong way while the city shouts.

He distrusted my trade, too. On the Pastoral he wrote that it was more the expression of feeling than painting. He did not want the birds and the brook counted. I have returned the courtesy. There is no orchestra on my wall and no page of notes, only one lyre. It is more the expression of feeling than music.

It will be a hundred years this autumn since he sat in Heiligenstadt, out past the vineyards, and wrote to his brothers that he had come close to ending his life. He never sent it. One line of it has done more work on my wall than all of Wagner. Nur sie, die Kunst, sie hielt mich zurück. Only art held me back.

That is the programme of the room, in seven words. The catalogue will say it more grandly, that the arts lead us into an ideal realm. I would not put it so. I would say that a man can be in a bad way, and work, and be less so.

I have painted a musician once before. Three years ago I did Schubert at the piano for Dumba’s music room, with candlelight and girls in their good dresses. The papers loved it. Bahr wrote that it was the most beautiful picture an Austrian had ever painted. The painter is the same and the hand is the same. Only the city has changed its mind, and it took one year to do it.

His symphony runs for three movements without a word. Then a man stands up and sings that these are not the sounds we want. I have three walls, and the first two have no joy in them. I have understood that much of it.

IV The End Wall

The same room

They will hate the end wall most. That is why it is the best painted.

In the middle is Typhoeus, a giant ape with a serpent’s tail that runs the width of the wall. The catalogue says that even gods fought against him in vain. Beside him stand his daughters, the three Gorgons. Above them are Sickness, Madness and Death. On his other side are three women, and the catalogue gives their names as Lasciviousness, Wantonness and Intemperance. The last of them is fat and jewelled, and I have set real glass stones into her. Off to the side is a thin woman bent over herself. Her name is Gnawing Grief.

I did not paint the professors. A professor is not a force. I painted what stands behind them, and behind the deputies, and behind whoever it was that telephoned a servant this morning. Nobody up there has a face that you could take to court.

The floating ones pass over all of it. They do not fight. They go by above the ape’s head with their eyes shut and come out on the far side. I am told that this is not how a struggle is won. It is how I have got through two years.

They will ask about the knight. He stands on the first wall in his gold, with his sword of kitchen foil, and he has not moved yet. Armour is heavy. The weak are asking, and he is still deciding. They will want to know whose face he has, because in this town every face must be somebody’s, so that the somebody can be told at dinner. A face has to come from somewhere. I am not going to say where.

V Monday

The Secession, April 14, 1902, afternoon

The god has arrived. Klinger unveiled him on Saturday, and that night Wittgenstein gave a banquet at the Grand Hotel. The Minister of Education was among the guests. My professorship is somewhere in his ministry, unsigned.

Klinger gave more than fifteen years to this. Beethoven sits on a bronze throne, naked to the waist, leaning forward, with both fists shut. There is an eagle at his feet and there are angels’ heads in ivory on the throne. The marble is of several colours. He is very large and he is not happy. I like him better than Vienna will.

The others are making him a saint. Roller has painted the wall behind the throne, and the whole house has been arranged so that a visitor arrives before him as before an altar. I do not pray easily. What I can believe in is a man who was in a bad way and went on working. That is not a saint. It is nearer to a plasterer.

Hoffmann has cut an opening in my last wall, at the place where I left the plaster bare. Whoever stands in my room and looks through sees him for the first time from there, framed by nothing I painted. I did that deliberately. The best thing I could give him was a space.

Tonight is for the invited. Moll has asked his new son-in-law, and so the Director of the Court Opera will stand on the vestibule stairs with players from his orchestra and give us a piece of the Ninth without singers. Six trombones, I am told. The passage is Seid umschlungen, Millionen.

That is the stanza with my line in it. Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt. This kiss for the whole world. It is printed in the catalogue under my last panel. Nobody arranged this, as far as I know. Mahler chose his bars and I chose mine, months apart, and they are the same bars.

Mahler will know why Beethoven saved the trombones for this stanza. I only know that it is the one where the poem looks up. Brüder, überm Sternenzelt muss ein lieber Vater wohnen. Brothers, above the tent of stars a loving father must live. Klinger has put that father on a throne in the next room, with his fists shut. Tonight the brass will tell him so from the stairs.

He was called a forger two years ago, for adding horns to this same symphony. Now he will take the voices out of it and see what they call him for that. The two Gustavs have the newspapers in common.

He married in March. I knew the bride when she was nineteen. Her stepfather and I very nearly fell out over it in Italy, and I wrote Moll a long letter, which for me is a serious thing. That is all there is to tell, and it is more than I like to say.

So I am standing under the last panel, waiting for the brass. Two people, naked, inside a bell of gold. His back is to the room, and you see nothing of her but her arms. The choir is behind them. I would defend the choir to any musician. It is rows of women who are all one woman, standing in flowers. A choir is many people agreeing to be one thing for four minutes, so I have painted them as a pattern. After the ape and the Gorgons and everything on the end wall, this is all I have to set against it. It does not look like much of an argument. It is the one Beethoven chose too.

I am not finished with those two.

VI June

Vienna, June 1902

The notices are in, and Bahr has more for his book.

One was printed the day before we opened, signed only with an o. It finds my Lust and my Unchastity painted with such realism that the result is artistic self-defilement in the boldest sense of the word. Another, signed Sch-r., reports that nudities predominate, and in a manner not permitted until now.

Dr. Hirschfeld, writing for Frankfurt on the twentieth of April, says my frescoes would suit a temple to Krafft-Ebing, and that they are among the most extreme things ever achieved in the field of obscene art. Berlin’s Vossische Zeitung calls them painted fixed ideas. Hirschfeld sees an orang-utan on my end wall. A gentleman who signs himself S. G. sees a gorilla there, and asks whether there are no men left in Vienna to protest against such assaults. I painted one ape, and they cannot agree which. The Salonblatt would like to meet the father, brother or husband who does not walk out with his daughter, his sister or his wife. And in May, in the upper house, Count Montecuccoli spoke against the secessionist excrescences in the fine arts, and said the Ministry ought not to support such art in any way.

They come regardless, in their tens of thousands, and they bring their daughters. I go in sometimes and stand at the back. They look longest at the end wall. A man will stand before the three vices with his hat in his hand for a good while, and then go home and write to the papers that he was assaulted. The exhibition was to close on the fifteenth. It will run to the twenty-seventh.

On the fifth Frau Zuckerkandl brought Rodin. He had been in Prague and was on his way home. He stood under the walls for some time without speaking, and then he took me by both hands. She will tell what he said better than I can, and she will improve it. What I kept is that he told me I know my craft. From him I will take that over a chair at the Academy. I think he was looking at the drawing more than at the idea.

Hevesi has written that to destroy this room would be a severe loss for Austrian art. I have said since October that I am content for it to go. I notice that I no longer say it.

And this week, in the night, at a quarter to three, Mizzi had a boy. He came unexpectedly. She had moved too briskly, probably. The birth was hard, but the doctor we had sent for as a precaution did not need to touch her. I wrote to her mother the way I write everything, short: “Mother and son – and father are well.” We are calling him Otto.

VII September

Vienna, September 1902

Otto died on the eleventh. He was not three months old. It was a catarrh of the stomach and bowels, the kind that takes them in summer.

I have drawn him. It is the only thing I know how to do with a face.

The exhibition closed at the end of June. Klinger’s Beethoven has gone back to Germany. The others’ walls have been cleared. Mine are still up. The Secession wants to show my work next year, and so they have left the room as it is.

I went in this week. The glass roof needs washing and the light was brown. Nobody else was there. The deaf man wrote that art held him back. I do not know that it holds anybody. I know where I went.

So Madness is still on the end wall, where I put her before the city thought of her. The knight has still not moved. The two in the gold bell are still holding on. The labourers were to come in June.

Whoever wants to know something about me should go and look. It is still there.

Afterward

Klimt could not see past that September, so the rest is ours to tell.

The professorship was never ratified, and he was never offered a teaching post again. Hermann Bahr published his clippings in 1903 as Gegen Klimt, “Against Klimt.” It is the reason the attacks can be quoted to the day. It is also, as the historian Ilona Sármány-Parsons points out, a polemic by Klimt’s own side. Its excerpts are often quoted out of context, she notes, and Bahr left out Kraus and the most measured review.

The wall outlived its sentence. After the 1903 show a collector had the frieze sawn into eight pieces and taken down. It passed to the Lederer family, was seized from them in 1938, and was sold to the Republic in 1973. Since 1986 it has hung in the Secession’s basement. Philosophy, the picture the professors fought to keep off a permanent ceiling, burned at Immendorf Castle in 1945. Of the two, it was the wall with a date to die that survived.

He was not finished with the couple. The Klimt Foundation calls The Kiss, finished in 1909, a further development of “this very motif,” and he used it once more in the Stoclet Frieze. The Foundation also names the Beethoven wall as the place where his flatness, gold leaf and line reached “a first climax.”

We do not know whether Klimt heard Mahler’s trombones that evening. We do know why the passage suited them. In Beethoven’s score the trombones are silent in the finale until bar 594, where Seid umschlungen begins.

In 1872 Nietzsche had dared his readers to “change Beethoven’s ‘jubilee-song’ into a painting,” and promised that whoever managed it would “approach the Dionysian.” Whether Klimt ever read the line is not recorded. He painted it anyway, on plaster, with buttons, expecting it to be gone by July.

In 2019, seven years before this essay, its editor took up the same dare.

to frieze beethoven to capture
the anguish of the eternal longing
for imagined joy    art conjures
the blank canvas of youth
imprinting the inexpressible
as dionysian truth

Poem and image by Michael Cummins, 2019, from humofthoughts.com.

⁂

How This Was Made

Invented: Klimt’s voice and everything he thinks. That includes his knowing the Heiligenstadt letter and the story of the 1824 premiere, his reading of the bare plaster as musical rests, his liking for the doomed wall, his view of the end wall as an answer to his critics, and his refusal to say whose face the knight has. Goldfish is dated 1901/02; placing it in the studio on March 8 is a guess. So is placing Klimt in the room on the afternoon of April 14.

Documented: every date, every material, and every quotation from someone else. No one but Klimt is given a word they are not recorded as saying or writing.

What	Rests on
The asylum rumour of March 8, 1902, and the unsigned professorship	Hermann Bahr, preface to Gegen Klimt (1903)
The attacks on Philosophy and Medicine, the petition, the court ruling of March 21, 1901	Gegen Klimt; Sármány-Parsons, Index Journal (2022)
The 1902 reviews: Hirschfeld, the Vossische Zeitung, S. G., the Salonblatt, Montecuccoli	Gegen Klimt, pp. 93–102
The frieze: size, materials, catalogue titles, Beethoven not depicted	Klimt Foundation; the Secession
Wagner’s 1846 programme	Klimt Foundation; the Secession on Google Arts & Culture
The 1824 premiere and its site	Beethoven-Haus Bonn; Interlude
“Only art held me back,” October 1802, never sent	The Heiligenstadt Testament
Schubert at the Piano and Bahr’s praise	Klimt Foundation
“More the expression of feeling than painting”	Beethoven’s note on the Pastoral, as given by the Berliner Philharmoniker
Mahler, six trombones, the vestibule stairs, April 14	Mahler Foundation concert register
Trombones silent until bar 594	David Levy, Historic Brass Society Journal (2017)
Rodin’s words to Klimt	Berta Zuckerkandl’s memoirs, published 1970; one person’s later account
Otto Zimmermann, and Klimt’s letter	Klimt Foundation
The knight as the painter himself: “no (historical) proof”	Klimt Foundation

Sources: Hermann Bahr, Rede über Klimt / Gegen Klimt, ed. Claus Pias (VDG Weimar, 2009; first published 1901 and 1903); Ilona Sármány-Parsons, “1900—Pyrrhic Victory: The Press Campaigns Surrounding the Faculty Paintings”, Index Journal 4 (2022); M. Bitsori and E. Galanakis, “Doctors versus artists: Gustav Klimt’s Medicine”, BMJ 325 (2002); Klimt Foundation, Klimt Database: Klimt’s work of 1901 to 1903, 1898 to 1900, 1907 to 1909, the Zimmermanns, Max Klinger, Auguste Rodin and Klimt in Italy; The Secession: the Beethoven Frieze, the building, and the frieze on Google Arts & Culture; Albertina Museum, Klimt’s studies for “Fulfillment” and The Kiss; Beethoven-Haus Bonn, the Kärntnertor theatre; the Heiligenstadt Testament, October 6 and 10, 1802; “200th Anniversary of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony”, Interlude; Berliner Philharmoniker, programme note on the Pastoral Symphony; Mahler Foundation, 1902 concert register; David B. Levy, “Vox dei: Referential Meaning in Beethoven’s Use of the Trombone in His Symphonies”, Historic Brass Society Journal (2017); Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), trans. Wm. A. Haussmann (1910). Drafted with Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.2. Images generated for this essay by Gemini Argon.