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exhibit-of-the-century · 9 months ago

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Exhibition Catalogue: Reflecting Upon Nude Veritas

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Work written for University Assignment based on Catalogue Essays/Writings. Examples: A Painting - Manet's The Railway - A Painting - Mantegna's Adoration of the Magi - A Drawing - Hepworth Fenstration of the Ear - A Manuscript - The Chronicles of England

Painted during the end of the 19th century, by Viennese painter Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), the oil painting, Nude Veritas (Fig.1), comes from the era of the Vienna Secession, an art period closely related to Art Nouveau, roughly between the years of 1890-1914. Through mixed media this movement focused on combining the natural world with the man-made, using the fine arts, sculpture, and architecture for decorative motifs. Nude Veritas was created far before either world war and the artist died before the WWII.

Nude Veritas clearly has art nouveau links, with the displayed female nude, gold leaf decorative frame that’s bold and striking, and text that’s reminiscent of posters from the era. Drawing more on Art Nouveau, the painting is hung like a portrait, with a nonrepresentational background, presenting an idealised female nude. The body is flanked by decorative patterns of gold leaf and flowers which was another common motif of Art Nouveau.

While this work draws heavily on Art Nouveau, it lacks the finish that is most associated with the movement, like clean and bold contour lines, flat colours, and exaggerated curving patterns, which do feature in this work but only as a background decoration. Nude Veritas also features a “fuzzy” textural quality, thanks to Klimt’s use of oil on canvas achieving brushed out and light paint, allowing him to create this finish which draws on the Impressionist movement and contains traces of early Expressionism. Impressionism, approximately 1860 onwards, draws on saturated naturalistic colour to exaggerate emotion, with visible brushwork and painterly qualities. Paintings like these emphasised accurate depictions of light to form atmosphere, focusing on ordinary subject matter. Expressionism used distorted imagery of naturalistic scenes for a radically greater emotional effect, and to evoke moods and ideas. Whilst Nude Veritas conforms to some aspects of this movement, it largely draws on Art Nouveau and Impressionism.

Fig 1. Gustav Klimt, Nude Veritas, 1899, Oil on canvas painting, 240 x 64.5 cm, Austrian Theatre Museum, Vienna, Austria

The text featured on this oil painting reads as follows: “KANNST DU NICHT ALLEN GEFALLEN DUCH DEINE THAT UND DEIN KUNSTWERK – MACH ES WENIGEN RECHT: VIELEN GEFALLEN IST SCHLIMM” (“if you cannot please everyone with your actions and your artwork – please only a few: to please many is bad”). “NUDE VERITAS” (“nude truth”)

Holding what appears to be a mirror or looking glass, the subject faces the viewer, challenging them head on, despite a blank and indecipherable stare. With full frontal nudity, and addition of pubic hair, the form becomes less idealised and far more confrontational. As our eyes travel lower, following her body down, we find a snake tangled at her ankles. Once again being confronted by “Nude Truth”, we find the snake obscuring the words possibly representative of an obstruction of truth. Perhaps the woman is the embodiment of truth, her nakedness linked to the word “nude” before truth and being on display for all to see. Or perhaps she is telling us to see a naked truth, once more linked to her bareness on display.

With this in mind, we must understand Klimt’s work and background to understand how this piece is recontextualised in WWII by the Nazis. There is a forgotten history here, as Nude Veritas and many others feature in an exhibit held by the Third Reich Party in 1943. Klimt’s work predominantly features women, due to the nature of the movements he was a part of. “Whenever he was free to choose his sitter, Klimt preferred the dark-haired, Mediterranean type of woman to the blonde, Nordic type so pre- dominant in the German lands.”[1]

Although The Kiss is highly regarded and known today, his other work falls into relative obscurity. Around the time Nude Veritas (1899) was finished, Klimt was commissioned to paint ceilings (1900). Philosophy, one of these paintings “was attacked as "painted lunacy," "pathological," and "immoral."”[2] While this highlights that his work was ridiculed during his life and was seen as controversial, it raises interesting questions about what the Viennese public of the 1940’s thought, under Hitler’s rule, as this work and many others of Klimt’s were displayed. However, his works were not in a degrading exhibition that the Nazis had been known to make, where they displayed artworks to humiliate and condemn certain artists and styles.

“The majority came only to jeer, but a counter-protest was staged by a small minority.”[3] These provocative pieces Klimt painted emphasize a set of conservative sensibilities, yet “writing of the Klimt era, the German Meier- Graefe said: "Woman influenced all this art, good and bad alike […] the worship of women is an integral part of the national culture."[4] How can Klimt works be considered part of a sexual revolution when the Nazi party advocated for a specific archetype of woman. The hypocrisy of the Nazis is laid bare by this contradiction, reinforced by Nude Veritas herself, inviting us to see a naked truth.

It has been well documented that “close to 16,000 works [that were] deemed degenerate were sold, burned, or ridiculed in exhibits set up precisely for that purpose.”[5] The amount of art destroyed under the Nazis, as well as the art that was condemned as degenerate, in some respects overshadows the work they did endorsed. Furthermore, there’s an estimated “100,000 artworks stolen by the Nazis [that] have still not been located”.[6] It is perhaps this we should be focusing our attention on as well, in addition to trying to understand what they were endorsing, and what they wanted the public to take away from their encounters with endorsed works, like Nude Veritas.

It's safe to say that there were a lot of factors against Nude Veritas and Klimt in general, for his work to be endorsed by the Third Reich. Just by looking at Klimt’s work, it’s clear that he does not paint archetypal Aryan women, in fact he seems to avoid them. Moreover, he had a well-documented history of Jewish patronage in Fritz Waerndorfer and his wife Lili. So, despite Klimt being dead by the time his painting was hung on display in the exhibit in 1943, it’s impossible to erase the history he left behind, and the documentation of his life. Yet despite these reasons and the fact that “Adolf Hitler had a tight grasp on the art that was promoted by the Third Reich Party, not one to delegate the task.”[7] it’s a surprise to see Klimt, an artist who succeeded in Vienna where Hitler had failed, being so readily endorsed.

It is precisely all these reasons that make Klimt’s work so interesting to observe from the lens of the Third Reich and their propaganda. Nude Veritas becomes such an intriguing piece to witness as she demands a reflection of the truth, and a self-reflection from the viewer.

Nude Veritas stand upright (240 x 64.5 cm), at just over two and half meters tall; the painting is incredibly large and imposing with a presence demanding to be looked at. This demand for attention is reinforced by Klimt’s use of goldleaf all around the frame, which exudes luxury and material wealth, something the Nazis were fond of: “The U.S. government has estimated that German forces and other Nazi agents before and during World War II seized or coerced the sale of approximately one-fifth of all Western art then in existence.”[8]

While most nudes of women are painted with sensuality highlighting a show of vulnerability, and for the pleasure of the viewer, this painting she stands tall and domineers, despite being a woman in the nude, the space she is presented in and the canvas she is painted on. Her nudity can be read as a primal exposure. This motif of primality is strengthened by her wild unkempt hair, as it bunches all around her head in a voluminous mass, intertwined with what appears to be wild daisies, giving her an untamed appearance. This nudity becomes a far more provocative work because of the fierce undertones it presents for a woman at the time. Moreover, this wildness she carries in her physical appearance, linked with the possible interpretation that she is a physical representation of truth, she reflects the true nature of a human, or women, which is unexpected for contemporary viewers.

Her mirror or looking glass only serves to reinforce the narrative of truth. The favoured interpretation is that of the looking glass, perhaps she is implying we inspect what we are shown, or told as truth, more closely and with greater scrutiny. That there is more than meets the eye, to study and dissect the painting and to carry that scrutiny and translate it into the world around us. Although her face is indecipherable, her eyes look glassy and distant, perhaps blind to truth, but desperate to see it and seek it out as she clutches her looking glass close and almost protectively.

More on the snake, toward the bottom of the painting; snakes are seen representative of duplicity and cunningness. A sign of danger and deception even from a Christian perspective with the garden of Eden, the woman here could possibly be interpreted as Eve. The snake literally is covering the truth up, it also travels towards and around the woman, encircling her legs. Possibly to physically stop her from seeing the truth or deciphering it, and potentially restraining her.

While it is hard to gauge what a contemporary audience would have taken away from this piece, as a modern audience we have a retrospective of the work. We know historically that the Nazis hid concentration camps from the wider world, and destroyed a great many more prized artworks, books, manuscripts etc. Nude Veritas gains another layer of meaning to us, if we were to place ourselves in the contemporary context, the hidden truth of the Nazis, relating their presence to the snake deceiving truth, and a physical showing of wealth and material power by possessing this, and other artworks.

Bibliography:

Morowitz, Laura, 'Heil the Hero Klimt!': Nazi Aesthetics in Vienna and the 1943 Gustav Klimt Retrospective, (Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1, 2016) pp. 107-129 [accessed 12 February 2024]

Kaye, M. Lawrence, Avoidance and Resolution of Cultural Heritage Disputes: Recovery of Art Looted During the Holocaust, (Willamette Journal of International Law and Dispute Resolution, Vol.14, No. 2, 2006) pp. 243-268 [accessed 9 February 2024]

Werner, Alfred, Two Austrian Expressionists, (The Kenyon Review, Vol. 26, No. 4, 1964) pp. 599-616 [accessed 10 February 2024]

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