Carl Moll’s “At the Lunch Table”, 1901, oil on canvas, 107 x 136 cm. Purchased 2018
Even I can see now that he was more than that. Still, on the day I made the acquaintance of his “Elisabeth Lederer,” I found my attention straying. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glint of sunlight on glassware, silver and china. So I left Elisabeth to her steady stream of admirers and slipped over to “At the Lunch Table,” which turned out to be a dining-room scene painted in 1901. It depicts the stolid lady of a prosperous Viennese household about to dish out the midday meal.
About a year after putting “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” on display, the gallery published an article on its website pulling some of these threads together under the headline, “Tragedy beyond the canvas: Gustav Klimt’s Elisabeth Lederer.” It sketches how the Lederers were among Vienna’s very richest families, and gave Klimt a string of important commissions. He vacationed with them in the countryside. By the time he died in 1918, they owned many of his paintings.
This is no small mark of distinction for Klimt. Morowitz frames his career in a Vienna where lofty cultural achievements coexisted with a countervailing undercurrent of anti-Semitism. The young Adolf Hitler was among the aspiring artists drawn there—only to leave a failure, nursing what Morowitz says would prove to be a “life-long grudge.
Von Schirach even commissioned an art historian to write an essay that sought to soften, or even erase, Klimt’s modernist edge, recasting him as steeped in Austrian folk tradition and German philosophical roots. In other words, the sort of painter an SS officer could be proud to loot. “The turbulent, challenging, multi-cultural, and questioning nature of turn-of-the-century Vienna was being refashioned here to fit the Nazi image of the past,” Morowitz says.
Mahler had to be used to it. Born into a Jewish family of very modest means in 1860, his musical gifts were recognized early. As a young talent, he rose steadily. By 1897, he was in line to be appointed director of the Vienna State Opera, but first had to convert to Catholicism—a necessary step even though Emperor Franz Joseph had publicly declared his trust in “the fidelity and loyalty of the Israelites.” Alma embodied troubling contradictions in the Viennese mindset.
RobertEdsel It makes me ill that this is being displayed in my country’s National Gallery.
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