Medicine by Gustav Klimt.
Published in 2003, Storkovich’s prose on Gustav Klimt’s Medicine delivers a thorough, celestial explanation on the artists’ inspiration behind the painting. Stokovich invites the reader to contemplate the life of Klimt and his devices, as he alludes to the seeming truths of birth; death. Her introduction provides context of 1894, when the Austrian Ministry of Culture and Education sought out Gustav Klimt and Franz Matsch for a commissioned piece of monumental paintings. In a fictional sense, Storkovich visually narrates this period which denotes to the vision of the University of Vienna – “(the painting) should include a large central canvas allegorizing the Enlightenment theme of the Triumph of Light over Darkness”[1] This commission would be an updated version of the frescoes executed by Gregorio Guglielmi, who epitomised a Baroque world order. However, Klimt’s paintings evince a “radical restructuring of vision”[2], executed based off human demise. It is noteworthy that other authors like Barbara C. Finn pointed out that “Klimt had witnessed the death of his father and brother, and saw his younger sister die at the age of 5”[3], at a time where Vienna was world renowned for its medical practices.
Storkovich’s explains the ‘musical thinking’ in Klimt’s creative process, and reflects the values of sonic production is her prose, where each figure is separation in the piece alike a note in a symphony. In this process, she clarifies their importance individually, and when combined, the symphony illustrates innate suffering in life and the finality of death. This is accounted for in the contents within the article, elaborating on how controversial Klimt’s themes were, as hitherto, the Faculty in the School of Medicine were only concerned with truths through optimism, and the plentiful medical resources of Vienna. As such, Storkovich’s style of writing runs parallel to the message that Medicine portrays. She constantly reflects Klimt’s tendency to paint a realist’s sense of the world, using a recognizable factual tone through providing reference, such as Klimt’s catalysts that were appropriated in the making of the painting. Her words hold a sense of truth to them, allowing readers to follow a chronological order that briefs us of the social and political climate around artists at the time, “breaking away from mainstream art organizations and governments control to explore the modernists ideas that were emerging”[4]. Although the social climate of the Viennese societal values is hinted at in this piece, other journals provide more contextual detail of the impact that Klimt’s work had, expressing how “an editorial in the Medizinisch Wochenschrift complained that the painter wanted to emphasize the powerlessness of the healing arts and made no attempts to represent the triumph of medicine in the way that doctors would expect”[5]. Expressing the conservative values of the Viennese society in more depth to allows us to understand how Medicine was conceived.
However, readers are compelled through captivating references that Klimt was influenced by, “Japanese wood block prints”, “archaic Greek vases” and “Dionysus in Music I, c. 1895 and Music II, c. 1898” to name a few. Furthermore, the language used to elucidate the process of Klimt’s naturalistic and schematic, mixed aesthetic designs broadens the reader’s perspective in understanding the devices available to Klimt. A noteworthy catalyst for this production is Eadweard Muybridge’s serial photographs, in which Klimt uses in his preparatory drawings and finally, his finished pieces that are latterly renamed “the thinker”
In the investigation of Medicine, the painting is confined to what we can refer to as “The Wheel of Fortune”. In other words, she insinuates the chronological birth to death, and everything that we experience in between, represented by the figures shown within. She distinctly suggests, however, that the Wheel of ‘fortune’ is not one of providence, revitalizing Klimt’s idea that we are born to die, and even Hygieia, as prosperous and life giving as she may seem, “cannot alter our fate”[6]. Intuitively, Storkovich confesses the limitations of reviewing the painting critically, as the original copies were destroyed following its change of ownership until finally, they were burned. Another limitation is Klimt’s style of painting, as the figures are submerged around a within each other. To make sense of the work, Storkovich proceeds to “split the form into upper and lower halves”. Starting with the daughter and wife of Asclepius, god of medicine, Storkovich allows readers to take in the craftsmanship of Hygieia. Her placid expression, her dark, curly hair, and the ornamental figure on her head that is Klimt’s “own invention” allows us to envision the dexterity involved that conceived her. Hygieia represents symbols of rejuvenation: “the mistletoe, serpents, and vine depicted in gold – brings the message of fertility and holy regeneration”. As representing the goddess of health, Hygieia is symbolically surrounded by scenes of catastrophe, signaling the viewers that the piece “conveyed an ambiguous unity of life and death, with nothing to celebrate the role of medicine or the science of healing”[7].
Starting with the figure on the upper left, the article elaborates on the female nude who is frontally shown. Strokovich is concerned with the history behind the figures. The corporeal nude woman who is estranged from the rest of the painting, based on a water nymph theme, and a wet nurse carrying an infant child, “caricature” from the Beethoven Frieze. The author distinguishes another female nude with only the left side of her body showing, and a disgruntled figure of an old woman, the physical embodiment of disease. Now we can understand the “wheel” when viewing the women as a narrative. The author recognizes the arrangement of these bodies and the form each figure takes denotes to the feminine generation of life: “birth, maturity, sickness and demise”[8]. However, where Storkovich isolates these figures and their meaning to then bring them together to understand their merit, a thesis by Aleksandra Diana Globig suggests that the figures exist as “isolated clusters, pasted upon and beneath one another, no longer communicating movement, but entrapment”[9]. While the latter provides some truth, that each figure is a moment of time and is otherwise isolated to themselves, it does not convey the anterior, that each figure in some way exists due to or because of the one before or after them. This is where Storkovich’s prose is satisfying, as she understands the figures as individuals to come together and tell a story of demise.
Moving through the thinker motif, Storkovich reads this area as an expression of inner conflict, wherein one thinker covers the mouth of the other. The author categorizes the thinkers as heroic. Some assume positions of battle with their thinker counterparts and others rest in fetal positions. The author bids merit to previously mentioned Eadweard Muybridge and his serial photographs of men’s athleticism, as it is uncovered that Klimt drew from these photographs and not from life.
We are encouraged to return to the start of the painting when analyzing the thinker on the middle left after unpacking the figures between the start and the end of the wheel. Now, we can walk through her understanding of this thinker, whose struggle to break free of the contusive circle of life is noticeable, as he appears to “tear away from the mass of humanity, turning towards the female occupying the left background”[10]. This thinker is in relation to the nude figure on the left, Nuda Veritas. She is an embodiment of wisdom, truth, Eros and Life, or how Bitsori and Galanakis put it, “the only links between the drifting bodies and Life (Nude Veritas) were provided by Life’s extended arm and the arm of a male nude shown from the back”[11], thereby elaborating on the thinker’s desire to reach out and escape the inexorability of life itself. The accumulation of the caricatures then illuminates the metaphor that is the Wheel of Fortune. It is simply a “compressed vision of the profane side of the human predicament and of one figure’s struggle to break away from it”[12]. The figures in the painting represent each stage what life has in store, and supported regarding Schopenhauer’s World of Will, where Storkovich begs essential philosophical questions about man’s bondage to “The Will”, a foundation of instinctive human behavior. The authors analysis of Medicine is a lyrical and fulfilling experience, one that provides contextual information on Klimt’s many muses. Although Storkovich does not shed much light to the social conflict of art and medicine that permeated the 18th and 19th century, her piece is impactful when reviewing the actual meaning of the surface, or as Hofmannsthal describes it: “The deep must be hidden. Where? On the surface”[13]. By unpacking the figures, she allows us to explore each as having individual narratives that come together
[1] Tina Marlowe-Storkovich, Medicine by Gustav Klimt. Vol. 24, No. 47 (2003) Published by: IRSA s.c. P. 231
[2] Storkovich, Medicine. p. 231
[3] Barbara C. Finn, Julio E. Bruetman, Pablo Young. Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) and his painting on medicine. The portrait of medicine and Gustave Klimt (1862-1918), Medicine: analysis of the picture.
[4] Pereda, Alberto E. Science, art, society and Klimt’s University of Vienna paintings. Published online 2019 Aug 1. p. 1.
[5] Bitsori, Maria and Galanakis, Emmanouil. Doctors Versus Artists: Gustav Klimt’s “Medicine” Published 2002. p. 1507.
[6] Alberto E Pereda, Science, art, society and Klimt’s University of Vienna paintings, p. 2
[7] Barbara C. Finn, Julio E. Bruetman, Pablo Young. Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) and his painting on medicine. The portrait of medicine and Gustave Klimt 1862-1918).
[8] Storkovich, Medicine. p. 237
[9] Globig, Aleksandra Diana. A new method of surface ornamentation: Ludwig Hevesi’s “Malmosaik” in Gustav Klimt’s faculty paintings, “Beethoven Frieze” and “Stoclet Frieze”
[10] Storkovich, Medicine. Published 2013. p. 242
[11] Bistori, Maria and Galanakis, Emmanouil. Doctors Versus Artists: Gustav Klimt’s “Medicine”. 1507.
[12] Storkovich, Medicine. p. 241
[13] Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Book of Friends, 1984, p. 110
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