Gustav Klimt - Jurisprudence. (1902, destroyed by fire in 1945). The third and final panel for Klimt’s commission for the new University of Vienna’s ceremonial hall. As I’ve detailed in an earlier post, Klimt’s paintings faced a firestorm of conservative criticism. In an atmosphere of increasing German nationalism and anti-semitism, the paintings were seen as avatars of liberal shibboleths.

Klimt’s popularity in many ways has to do with his psychological treatment of women. As Schorske has pointed out, Klimt’s subjective treatments of Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence correspond with Freud’s subjective interpretation of dreams and mythology. Just as human behavior can be explained by oedipal impulses, so too can human ideals be explained through recourse to Greek myth. This is naturally opposed to science, which only values truth. Thus Klimt’s decision to symbolize medicine with his thoroughly ambivalent treatment of Hygiea, the daughter of medicine, is both an attack on the rational grounding of Western medicine as well as a suggestion that well-being is no more than a specific form of subjective experience.

In Jurisprudence, formal prominence is given to the prisoner and the punishing furies. The distant and confused figures of Truth, Justice and Law in the back of the painting is Klimt’s direct response to the Viennese bureaucrats who promised to protect his radical new brand of modern art but ended up deserting him.

Klimt would abandon his ambitious modernism in favor of quaint, ornamental portraiture of Vienna’s high society. One imagines Klimt to be stormy and despairing at the downward turn his life—and, by proxy, modernism—had taken.

But at the same time, one imagines Klimt’s critics as equally alarmed: his martyrdom only reinforced their belief that the amoral, subjective, and narcissistic forces of modernism had triumphed; Europe had nothing to do but reap what had already been sown.

As Wittgenstein said, “hate between men comes from our cutting ourselves off from each other.”