Vienna in 1886 was a city of elegant cafés, grand opera houses, and a thriving and adventurous artistic community. It is here where the twelve-year-old Emilie meets the controversial libertine and painter. Hired by her bourgeois father for basic drawing lessons, Klimt introduces Emilie to a subculture of dissolute artists, wanton models, and decadent patrons that both terrifies and inspires her. The Painted Kiss follows Emilie as she blossoms from a naïve young girl to one of Europe's most exclusive couturiers—and Klimt's most beloved model and mistress. A provocative love story that brings to life Vienna's cultural milieu, The Painted Kiss is as compelling as a work by Klimt himself.
Vienna in 1886 was a city of elegant cafés, grand opera houses, and a thriving and adventurous artistic community. It is here where the twelve-year-old Emilie meets the controversial libertine and painter. Hired by her bourgeois father for basic drawing lessons, Klimt introduces Emilie to a subculture of dissolute artists, wanton models, and decadent patrons that both terrifies and inspires her. The Painted Kiss follows Emilie as she blossoms from a naïve young girl to one of Europe's most exclusive couturiers—and Klimt's most beloved model and mistress. A provocative love story that brings to life Vienna's cultural milieu, The Painted Kiss is as compelling as a work by Klimt himself.
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Overview
Vienna in 1886 was a city of elegant cafés, grand opera houses, and a thriving and adventurous artistic community. It is here where the twelve-year-old Emilie meets the controversial libertine and painter. Hired by her bourgeois father for basic drawing lessons, Klimt introduces Emilie to a subculture of dissolute artists, wanton models, and decadent patrons that both terrifies and inspires her. The Painted Kiss follows Emilie as she blossoms from a naïve young girl to one of Europe's most exclusive couturiers—and Klimt's most beloved model and mistress. A provocative love story that brings to life Vienna's cultural milieu, The Painted Kiss is as compelling as a work by Klimt himself.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780743492614 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Atria Books |
| Publication date: | 03/07/2006 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 652,479 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Hometown:
Portland, OregonDate of Birth:
April 2, 1971Place of Birth:
Louisville, KentuckyEducation:
B.A., Williams College, 1993; M.F.A., Columbia University, 1999Website:
http://www.elizabethhickey.comRead an Excerpt
Chapter One
Kammer am Attersee
October 21, 1944
When I left Vienna, I took one thing: a thick leather portfolio with a silver buckle. I departed quickly and had to leave many things behind. A rosewood cabinet Koloman Moser made for me. Twelve place settings of Wiener Werkstätte silver, designed by Hoffmann. My costume collection. One of Fortuny's famous Delphos gowns. A pale yellow bias-cut satin gown by Madame Vionnet. Paul Poiret's sapphire blue harem pants and jeweled slippers. And the paintings. The most precious of all, they were too large and unwieldy to be taken on the train. And once I realized that the paintings could not travel, bringing yards of fabric, or a hatpin, or newspaper clippings and fashion magazines seemed ridiculous. What was I going to do, make a shrine of the remnants of my old life while the bolts of it sat in the closet of an abandoned apartment?
My niece Helene made the lists of things we'd need and packed up suitcases and went shopping for twine and woolen stockings and camphor liniment. I told myself that she needed to keep busy, that I was doing her a favor by letting her get everything ready, but that was just a lie I invented, an excuse for my empty-eyed catatonia. I couldn't have helped her because if I did I would have had to admit that we were actually going.
I stepped on the train as if I were going across town to deliver the portfolio to a gallery, and this second lie was the only thing that kept me from throwing myself onto the tracks. I was afraid I would die without seeing the city again.
"Since when are you so histrionic?" my niece said. She's my sister Helene's child, and her namesake, but sometimes she reminds me more of my other sister, the practical one, Pauline. "You're getting to be like Grandmama," she said. "We're not going far, and for all we know the war will be over in six months." She handed me a hard roll with a thick slab of butter in the middle.
The train was packed with sweaty children wearing coats on top of jackets on top of sweaters and women carrying lumpy bundles of teakettles and soup pots and knives wrapped in linens. The women were thin and grim, their faces gray. Though their outer layer of clothing was presumably their best, nearly all of the skirts were stained and frayed, and the children's jackets were patched with scraps that did not match and coarse dark thread that only accentuated their pitiable condition.
We rolled slowly through the city, past the suburbs and the outlying towns, stopping frequently to load more and more of these families onto the train. Each time I thought the train could hold no more, but then at each station I saw the crowd and knew that we would make room for them. They piled onto the luggage racks; they stacked like bowls on each other's laps.
We passed barren hills where grapes once grew. We passed muddy fields where hundreds of people camped, cobbling together whatever shelter they could from pieces of tin and newspaper. We passed the Army barracks. Trucks full of soldiers crowded the roads.
I gave my roll to a chap-cheeked child on the floor next to me. She put the whole thing in her mouth and seemed to swallow it without chewing. Her mother's fervent gratitude shamed me.
Five hours later our train arrived at our station, two stops east of Salzburg, and deposited us in our exile. I can't pretend that we are here for the summer: the clouds are gunmetal gray and the lake is icy cold. The birches are naked and shivering. Up in the mountains it is snowing.
I have been lonely for my things. I have so much time on my hands.
I keep the leather case inside a Biedermeier cabinet in my bedroom. My father loved Biedermeier the way he loved a well-made pipe. It stands there, so crafted and finished and correct, a reproach for all that I'm not.
Sometimes in the afternoons, when the path to the lake is too muddy even for me and the thunder rolls through the valley like mortar shells, or perhaps it's the mortar shells rolling through the valley like thunder, I can't really tell them apart, I take the portfolio out of the cabinet and lay it on the bed. The thick hide is scuffed and scraped and smells of the fiacres that used to line up beside St. Stephen's. It looks out of place on the lacy eiderdown that's been mine since I was a little girl. I look at it for a minute, run my hand over it as if it were a doe I've killed, then I undo the buckle and upend the case so that all of the drawings inside fall onto the bed. One hundred and twelve of them, to be precise. I sit there on the bed next to the pile and pick them up sheet by sheet. I make smaller piles, subsets, arranging them according to pose, model, date. I grade them on how much I like them and put my favorites on top.
All of them are different: some of them are drawn with charcoal and some with graphite pencil and some with colorful oil crayons. Some are the size of my palm and others are folded many times to fit inside the leather case. Some are on thick heavy paper with a nubby finish, while others are on thin slick paper that slides through my fingers and onto the floor. Some of the drawings are already dull and brittle and break in my hands like rotted lace.
Yet they are all the same, too, because they are all of women in various stages of undress. They are quick, casual, a few lines, without contour or shading, tossed off in a minute or two. Weightless women, empty, like figures in a child's coloring book. Here is a woman astride the arm of a divan, twisting her torso in a languorous stretch. Here is a woman wearing a high-collared dress and boots, reaching underneath layers of petticoats to touch herself through a gaping hole in her knickers. Here is another, a woman with a direct gaze wearing garters and stockings and a blouse. Here is a drawing of a woman lying on her back with her legs thrown to the side, her buttocks dominating the page as her foreshortened shoulders and head barely register as a mark.
I know all of their names, these women. There is Alma, and Maria, and Mizzi, and Adele. Some of them I knew well and some of them I passed coming in and out of the studio and some of them I never saw, but I have thought of them and heard of them so much through the years that I feel intimate with each one of them. I know their lives.
When I said the drawings were all the same, I wasn't being strictly accurate. One is different. This one is of a man embracing a woman, who turns her face toward the viewer with an expression of simple bliss. I keep that one at the bottom because it hurts too much to look at it.
This was all I could bring from Vienna, Gustav's drawings. He never thought much of them or took them seriously as art, they were preparatory, exploratory, they were plans, blueprints, mistakes. But now they may be the only things of his to survive, and I must curate them for lack of something more important or finished. I must scrutinize them and draw parallels between them and place them in a historical context for someone, someone in the future who might be interested. In the meantime they are mine, and I am alone with them, and I look at them to keep them alive.
I find my way to the bureau by touch and I light the oil lamp. I walk over to the dressing table and sit before the mirror. My hair is white but still thick and wavy. My features are not as sharp as they once were. An artist would overlook some folds in my chin and neck so as not to hurt my feelings. But my eyes are as piercing as they were when I was twelve. I pull the combs out of my hair, ivory combs that were once my mother's, that my father bought her in Venice, and let it fall to my shoulders. Crone hair, Helene calls it. She thinks that women of a certain age should crop their hair very close, like Gertrude Stein. She tells me this as she plays with her dark fat braid, touched with the faintest frost. I think when she is seventy she will feel differently, but I just tell her that when I am dead she can do with me what she likes.
The bristles of my silver-backed brush are yellowed and soft with age and their shallow nudging has no effect whatsoever on my hair and its tangles. I reach into the drawer and pull out a pair of scissors.
I could gouge my thigh cutting a hole in my modest underthings. The skin of my thigh is tissue-thin. It wouldn't take much to finish me off, a little puncture wound that gets infected, a little blood poisoning. Or I could slice the cotton fabric like I was opening a box. The cutout would fall to the floor like a paper snowflake. I could move back to the bed and open my legs, pulling the skirt of my dress over my hips. I could put my hand in the hole I've cut and rub my fingers up and down. I could arrange myself into the poses in the portfolio. If I did, perhaps Gustav would appear, in the red caftan I made for him, looking like John the Baptist. I would model for him in a way I never did in life, and he would draw me the way he drew the others.
But I don't do any of those things and Gustav doesn't appear. Instead I put the scissors back in the drawer, blow out the lamp, and crawl into bed. Perhaps in sleep I can return to Vienna, to the studio. Perhaps in dreams the drawings next to the bed will become more than dull scraps of paper.
Reclining Nude, 1888
It is a very cold afternoon in the studio, but the transoms must be cranked open to keep the turpentine and other chemicals from poisoning the air. Gerta, with bones as light as straw and pale flesh like paraffin, stands with her wrists crossed in front of her breasts, waiting for instructions.
Gustav doesn't see her nakedness. She hardly registers as a woman to him. He sees a taxing problem of light and dark, of geometry, of volume.
"Could you cup your breast? The left, not the right. Good. Now could you lie down on the pallet? Open your legs. Turn that knee inward. All right."
Gerta does these things without comment, with the patient boredom of women who make money from their bodies. He draws her over and over, knuckles and knees, elbows and stomach. She does two-minute poses and thirty-minute poses. Gustav turns the pages on his drawing pad again and again.
It is early afternoon but it is already twilight and he works feverishly to beat the encroaching darkness. When he can work no more he tells her enough. Her flesh is goose-pimpled and sickly pale, he notices. The flesh under her toenails is purple. She has become a woman again, more than a visual exercise and also somehow less. He climbs the ladder and closes the transoms. She pulls on her chemise, her stockings. She buttons her dress and ties her boots. It all seems like such a wasted effort to him.
Would you like to stay? he asks. She nods.
There is a bed in the corner and he leads her over to it. While he undresses she waits, her head propped on one narrow hand. He sits on the bed next to her and unbuttons and unfastens and unties until she is naked again. Then he draws his palm across her skin as if his hand were a brush.
Copyright © 2005 by Elizabeth Hickey
Reading Group Guide
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1) Discuss the experience of reading a novel that explores the lives of historical persons. In what way is it different from reading a wholly fictional story? What, if anything, did you know of the artist Gustav Klimt before reading this book? Did the story contradict or expand on anything you knew? Did the character you grew to know in this story surprise you?
2) This story is told during two different periods of time in Emilie Fl_ge's life: the late 1800's the mid 1900's. Why do you think the author choose to tell it in this way? What kind of perspective do we gain from the older, wiser Emilie, who is portrayed against the backdrop of WWII? How might this novel have been different had it unfolded in a more linear fashion?
3) Emilie has been raised in a world where outward appearance means everything. Taught from an early age that women, especially, should be more concerned with how they present themselves than with how they feel or what they think, her relationship with Gustav is iconoclastic for her. Not only is he interested by her innermost thoughts and feelings, but he shows little interest in the world of polite society. Talk about what Gustav symbolizes for the young girl. In what ways does he challenge the reigning views of this particular time in history? How does his role as artist allow him to do so?
4) Gustav and Emilie share similar artistic temperaments. While Emilie's salon, even very early on, is a raging success, she struggles to maintain artistic integrity, despite the fact that her customers, more often than not, are less interested in art. As she points out, "That was the drawback of trying to make money. Sometimes you had to sacrifice taste altogether" (229). We see this over and over again with Gustav's art as well — artistic vision often clashes with the bottom line. Discuss the way that this concept is explored in this novel. Is there any solution for artists, a way for them to remain true to their ideals without starving? Talk about the ways that this debate continues in today's world.
5) At one point, Gustav paints a picture of Emilie in a dress that she has made. Emilie is somewhat frightened by the outcome, asking, "Is this really what you see when you look at me?" Klimt's response is more about the nature of art than the particular painting, as he explains: "It would be easy to repress it as rational and orderly, like the School of Athens, but that would be dishonest. It's completely terrifying to make visible the chaos of human existence, to admit the darkness of the human mind, but once you've done it you can see there is light there" (198). What significance does this idea have in terms of the larger story? How do artists like Klimt show the dark side of life, while also giving hope? Is there hope to be found in this story?
6) Late in the novel, Emilie explains how Gustav keeps their relationship private: "I am not a subject he [Gustav] ever discusses, not with Hoffman, not with his mother, not with anyone. I am in his life and he does not want to know why, or in what way" (208). Does this quotation illuminate the nature of their relationship? Why is it so important to Gustav that Emilie not be discussed by other women?
7) Along the same lines, why does Gustav feel the need to compartmentalize the women in his life? While he treats Emilie as a companion and a kindred spirit of sorts, one who (except for rare occasions) is not to be sullied by physical passion, he has seemingly little trouble bedding and carrying on with other women. As long as these two worlds do not meet, he seems somewhat satisfied. What might this say about his personality? Why does he place Emilie on a pedestal, while every other woman is fair game? Is it hypocritical, or does it betray the counter culture ideals that he espouses, that he wishes to keep Emilie pure?
8) What about Emilie's part in this relationship? Why, at the sake of her own happiness, does she spend her youth in a perpetual state of limbo with a man that she knows will never marry her? Does Emilie have a self-destructive side, which allows her to fritter away her time (as some might describe it) with Gustav, or do you think she really believed that one day he would be hers? Is it possible that Emilie is drawn to Gustav precisely because she cannot have him? What do you think the author would say?
9) Adele, perhaps one of Gustav's most interesting mistresses and one of his most well-known subjects, is a difficult character to unpack, both for our protagonist, and for the reader. Pampered though she is, she exudes melancholy to the point of being tragic. At one point, as she talks with Emilie about what kind of new dress she would like, she states, "I have no needsŠonly unfulfilled desires" (224). Discuss the nature of desire as it is presented by Adele in the novel. What distinction is there between a need and a desire and why does Adele feel the need to call attention to it? In what ways might Adele be representative of women in her social class? Why is she so unhappy, so filled with ennui, despite the advantages that she has as a woman of wealth?
10) Ruminating on Gustav and his relationship to his work, Emilie thinks, "Some critics said that he didn't care about his sitters, he was only interested in the thickets of design he built up around them, but that was not true. The portrait said what was important to say about Adele. It said plenty about him too; he was in love with her when he painted it, of that I am sure" (240). Klimt is a somewhat elusive character in this story, as he is only presented through the eyes of Emilie. Her viewpoint is not only subjective in the way that all viewpoints are, but also because she's in love with the man and perhaps sees a side of him that others may not. To what extent should we trust our protagonist? Is her view a wholly reliable one? Do you agree with her assessment of Klimt, or do you think that she might be blinded by her feelings?
11) Late in the novel, as Emilie observes some paintings of Adele, famous paintings that she has been "charged with protecting," she fantasizes about destroying them. What makes her want to do damage to Klimt's work and why does she ultimately refrain? How does this moment represent the complicated relationship between Emilie and Gustav?
12) To the Gustav Klimt of this novel, "The Kiss" seems to be one of his crowing achievements. Although he begs Emilie to model for the painting, he feels compelled to change her figure later on, so that it looks less like Emilie and "more universal." In your opinion, is it Klimt the artist, or Klimt the man that decides to change the painting in such a way? Although he wants this painting to "make some declaration" about himself and Emilie, in the end he can't quite bring himself to do it. Why is this?
13) Why do you think "The Kiss," an allegorical painting about love, is so meaningful for Gustav? What is love to a man like Klimt, a man who refused to support any of the illegitimate children that he fathered, yet who genuinely seemed to care for the people in his life?