Masterpieces of Vienna

Today I watched the BBC’s three-part documentary series on The Masterpieces of Vienna, which explores the intriguing stories behind well-known works of art and moments of interest in Vienna’s vibrant history during the turn of the century.


Part I. The first documentary deals with one of the world’s expressionist masterpieces, the painting 'The Tempest' or 'Bride of the Wind' (1914) by Oskar Kokoschka, inspired by the young artist’s intense love affair with high bourgeois socialite and compulsive flirt Alma Mahler. Alma’s first marriage was to renowned composer Gustav Mahler—during which time she had an affair with architect Walter Gropius, which, upon discovering, drove Mahler to seek the counsel of…Sigmund Freud. She later married Gropius, and had an affair with novelist Franz Werfel. And so on. What I found most interesting is that Kokoschka started his painting in response to a challenge by Alma, but the work quickly gained a life of its own. Paint me a masterpiece, she said, and I’ll marry you. He painted the walls of his studio black and isolated himself to produce The Tempest, based on a real experience they’d both shared . Kokoschka started the composition in reds but throughout the rendering it was transformed into blues. The body language and distance between the lovers changes. In early sketches they’re together, in the final painting they are apart. It has been suggested that Kokoschka intuitively knew that his affair with Alma was doomed, and that even while he strove to produce the very painting that was to secure the prize of her lifelong betrothal to him, the work itself revealed the futility of the endeavor.


This is another historically documented case of an affair that starts exceedingly fast (the attraction was immediate, and they were lovers within days) and dissolves, unable to sustain itself, generating enough anguish and longing along the way to create, say, a masterpiece.


Famous expressionist poet Georg Trakl (a friend of mine during University was particularly fond of his work) was so inspired by Kokoschka’s painting that he composed a poem about it on the spot when he first saw it.

Here is the poem, which appeared in 1914, the same year Trakl committed suicide:

The Night

I sing you wild fissure,
In the night-storm
Piled-up mountains;
You grey towers
Overflowing with hellish grimaces,
Fiery beasts,
Rough ferns, spruces,
Crystal flowers.
Infinite agony,
Which makes you hunt down God
Soft spirit,
Sighing in the waterfall,
In billowing pines.

The fires of the people
All around blaze golden.
Over blackish cliffs
Drunk with death,
The glowing wind-bride plummets,
The blue wave
Of the glacier,
And the bell in the valley
Peals mightily:
Flames, curses
And the dark
Games of lust,
A petrified head
Storms heaven.

Part II. The second documentary deals with the most iconic image from Freud’s psychoanalytic revolution and is titled, aptly enough, Freud’s Couch. It appears the couch was actually donated to him by an early patient, Madame Benvenisti, in about 1890. Interestingly, we learn that the rug covering the couch is a colourful shekarlu rug made by one of the nomadic tribes of the Qashqa'i confederacy in Persia in the nineteenth century.

I found this next passage interesting. Freud writes here about the specific arrangement of furniture and therapist for the sessions (from his 1913 essay ‘On beginning the treatment’):

‘I hold to the plan of getting the patient to lie on a sofa while I sit behind him out of his sight. This arrangement has a historical basis; it is the remnant of the hypnotic method out of which psychoanalysis was evolved. But it deserves to be maintained for many reasons. The first is a personal motive, but one which others may share with me. I cannot put up with being stared at by other people for eight hours a day (or more).’

No kidding! This documentary lead me to the article “The week the couch arrived” by Robert F. Tyminski, which appeared in the Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2006, 51, 643–659 and contains some great stuff on the couch as a signifier of the analytic process and the ‘three most common patient responses that occurred: rejecting, ambivalent, and embracing.’

Part III. The third and last installment is on Egon Schiele’s expressionist masterpiece ‘Death and the Maiden’ (1915). Great segue from the previous episode on Freud, what with the whole sex-death theme. Memorable comment on Schiele’s narcissism (he painted hundreds of self-portraits, and was obsessed with sex in equal measure, resulting in depictions of naked young women and even himself masturbating): the word Ego is the start of Ego-n! Schiele was eventually arrested (one of his paintings was burned at the trial!) and spent twenty-one days in jail. The theme of the death and the maiden goes back a long way in classical art, but Schiele transposes it into an allegorical wasteland of contemporary sensibility. Again, this piece is based on the artist’s real relationship, in this case with a long-time lover he was planning to leave so he could marry a wealthier broad. Nice.


Schiele wrote in 1910 that everything was “living dead”—which, I think, provides an apt description of his painting.