1899: The Year of Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud & Edvard Munch Kate Chopin

[00:00:00]I want to take a brief look at the single year 1899 and the [music] way that artists and painters and poets were moving away from the external world or the world of social interaction as their subject and started [music] giving more sustained voice to the inward world of psyche, soul, of dreams, of the unconscious, of the collective unconscious. You have some striking events that year. Sigmund Freud publishes his Interpretation of Dreams, which for the first time took dream analysis out of the realm of a dream about a horse running at morning means this or that. No, instead he looked at the mechanisms through which people dream, looked at the agencies of condensation where multiple events become fused into one or displacement [music] where one event or person stands in for another person and says that through the agencies of condensation and displacement, the events of the previous day, [music] that what he called the day residue, become scrambled up into a new narrative that is expressing unconscious [music] fears and unconscious desires.

[00:00:57]Therefore, in the process of dreaming there's tremendous alleviation of [music] internal unconscious pressures.

[00:01:03]And fear and desire both sort of have a period where they can [music] be fully expressed without the normal censorship or mediation of daily life and daily responsibilities. Same year, Joseph Conrad publishes his Heart of Darkness, which for the first time takes a travel narrative, a journey into the darkest [music] heart of the jungle, and conflates that at every point with a journey inward where the journey outward and the journey inward become a simultaneous act of discovery and exploration. Same year, painters and poets were absorbed in the sense of fin de siècle [music] or end of cycle. And the artistic movement of symbolism, which was fascinated by dreams and fascinated by desire and mythology and imagination [music] and gave free rein to the inner psyche and imagination was conflated for a while with um fin de siècle decadence and that took the sort of censorship screws off of visual and poetic discourse and in works like Swinburne and writing by Oscar Wilde, you could express human sexuality in a less constricted way and there's sort of an explosion of finding [music] new ways to discover a larger sense of the erotic which corresponds not to conventional ideas but corresponds to the [music] depth of the erotic as something experienced and perhaps giving voice to the unconscious as much as the conscious mind. From Ibsen's Hedda Gabler in 1890 to Kate Chopin's The Awakening in 1899, there's a growing insistence that femininity is a powerful force that must be freed from the stifling constrictions of social conventions.

[00:02:47]Though others had tried in vain to teach The Awakening's Edna to swim for years, in an awakening moment she teaches herself in an act of relinquishing fear and claiming her own inner forces and quote shouting for joy as with a sweeping stroke or two she lifted her body to the surface of the water. A feeling of exaltation overtook her as if some power of significant import had been giving her to control the workings of her body and her soul. She grew daring wanting to swim far out where no >> [music] >> woman had ever swum before. Edna's awakening in Kate Chopin's 1899 book is mirrored everywhere in the art and literature of the period in an [music] expanded sense of consciousness and the claiming of dreams and the unconscious mind and the art of that year and even in the way we conceive of truth with the subjective reality of the individual given ever [music] increasing attention.

[00:03:47]Let's examine that somewhat obsessive topic of the 1890s naked truth or nuda veritas, in some of the incarnations before examining Gustav Klimt's 1899 masterpiece.

[00:04:10]In the 1890s, toward the end of his life, the immensely popular French academic artist Jean-Léon Gérôme created an extraordinary series of paintings involving the figure of truth personified as a naked woman. At first, stuck in a well, and then emerging from the well with a fierce sense of determination, indignation, and retributive fury.

[00:04:35]And truth, in the final version, isn't [music] messing around. It's clearly payback time, and the whip naked truth brandishes isn't any casual flogger.

[00:04:44]It's a cat o' nine tails with lead weights on the ends, designed to cut into flesh, leave rivulets of blood, and then later scars.

[00:04:54]And there's something universal about her howl of indignation. It's not just personal. It's a general cry. Edvard Munch's The Scream, Ginsberg's Howl, there's something terribly amiss in our world [music] that needs redressing.

[00:05:08]Truth has been stuck in the well far, [music] far too long, and the world has been complacent in its web of deceit, evasion, pretense, and posturing.

[00:05:19]But now truth has emerged from her well, and she's coming on strong. What a wild, haunting, and evocative painting.

[00:05:28]By Gérôme's final 1898 naked truth painting, truth itself is perhaps so elusive and problematic and vexing that naked truth trades in the mirror for a whip.

[00:05:43]But in Gustav Klimt's painting from the following year, our year of 1899, the mirror is back. And yet the whole painting is complicated by a dreamy [music] beauty with truth looking like she has emerged from a dream.

[00:06:01]And it's further complicated by the lines of Schiller, "If you cannot please everyone with your actions and with your art, you should satisfy a few. To please many is dangerous."

[00:06:15]Suggesting the encounter with art is indeed [music] an involved and deeply private thing, a mirroring through which the whole being of the viewer is challenged to be more fully alive.

[00:06:29]One of my favorite photographers, Anita Pravits, beautifully captures this moment of inward encounter and intersubjective dissolving between viewer and painting, so essential to experiencing the art and the writing of that fin de siècle symbolist moment of 1899.

[00:06:54]So, I think I will wrap up this plunge into the wonders of 1899 with two poems. One of them, "He bids his beloved be at peace" by William Butler Yeats, and the other 1899 poem, "I live my life in growing orbits" by Rainer Maria Rilke.

[00:07:19]I hear the shadowy horses, their long [music] manes of shaken throats heavy with tumult, their eyes glimmering white.

[00:07:28]The north unfolds above them, clinging, creeping night.

[00:07:33]The west weeps [music] in pale dew and sighs passing away. The south is pouring down roses of crimson fire.

[00:07:41]The east, her hidden joy before the morning break.

[00:07:47]Beloved, let your eyes [music] half close and your heart beat over my heart and your hair [music] fall over my breast, drowning love's lonely hour in deep twilight of rest and hiding their tossing manes and their tumultuous feet.

[00:08:04]And what you have is him drawing from >> [music] >> a kind of geography of imagination, the north unfolds above us, clinging creeping night, [music] the east her hidden joy before the morning break.

[00:08:14]This is reaching out even to geography [music] for a kind of symbolism of the internal psyche and I find it absolutely [music] fascinating. It's more an inclusive weaving of dreams and desire than we had had formally. Um, >> [music] >> the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, I live my life in growing orbits [music] which move out over the things of this world. Perhaps it will never achieve the last, but that will be my attempt. I am circling around God, around [music] the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon or a storm [music] or a great song.

[00:08:54]And again, he's reaching so wide for a sense of identity, past and future and space in this vast sense of of inclusiveness. I'm [music] circling around the ancient tower as if that's some mythical structure, some core of human meaning. I am circling around God.

[00:09:13]It's a vast kind of question. Who am I?

[00:09:17]What am I when completely [music] unconstrained with limitations? Who am I at core? Wonderful, wonderful poem. So, 1899, a period of decadence, a period of incorporating the unconscious into the human mind, a period of making some of the artistic traditions of symbolism that had been played out in the decade [music] previously come to full fruition. Fabulous time. Whether it's Freud, whether it's um it's Rilke, whether it's Yeats.