Tea at Trianon: How the Art of Gustav Klimt Was Appropriated by the Nazis

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, September 4, 2023

How the Art of Gustav Klimt Was Appropriated by the Nazis

From Open Culture:

On paper, the Nazis shouldn’t have liked Gustav Klimt. As gallerist and Youtuber James Payne says in his new Great Art Explained video above, their denunciatory “Degenerate Art Exhibition” of 1937 included the work of “Paul Klee, Otto Dix, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Piet Mondrian, as well as Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka” — but somehow not Klimt, “who, at one time or another, had been described as morally questionable, obscene, or even pornographic, and was friends with Jewish patrons, intellectuals, and artists.” And it isn’t as if the Nazis just ignored his work; in fact, they actively pressed a few of his paintings into the service of their ideology.

The search for those paintings, and thus an answer to the question of how they could have been given a pro-Nazi spin, takes Payne to Vienna (this video being part of his Great Art Cities sub-series). It was there that the 22-year-old Klimt — along with his brother Ernst and their friend Franz Mach — received the career-making commission, straight from the emperor himself, to paint a series of ten historical murals on the ceilings and walls of the city’s storied Burgtheater. This made possible Klimt and Mach’s next major mural project for the University of Vienna, though the former’s contributions were rejected by the officials, and later deliberately destroyed by German forces retreating at the war’s end. (Read more.)