1900—Pyrrhic Victory

Abstract

In 1894, Gustav Klimt was commissioned to create a series of allegorical paintings for the University of Vienna. When the paintings were revealed in 1900, professors and the general public voiced strong resistance to their permanent installation. Art historical literature on the Vienna Secession and the Faculty Painting affair has tended to take the position of advocating for modern art, casting the entire debate as a fight for artistic freedom wherein Klimt was a victim of conservative philistines. Other literature on the Faculty Paintings focusses on the erotic message of the pictures; the works are viewed as documents of a sexual identity crisis that burst to the surface in fin de siècle Vienna. This article is a newly translated English version of a chapter titled “1900—Pyrrhic Victory: The Press Campaigns Surrounding the Faculty Paintings,” from Secession expert Ilona Sármány-Parsons’ book Die Macht der Kunstkritik: Ludwig Hevesi und die Wiener Moderne (The Power of Art Criticism: Ludwig Hevesi and Viennese Modernism) (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2022; translated from Hungarian edition, Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2019). Contrary to the two aforementioned framings of Klimt’s Faculty Paintings, the article examines the role of art critics in the affair and argues that the discourse around the event actually reveals reasonable criticisms of philosophical, rhetorical and artistic stagnation in the Secession movement. While a broad spectrum of contemporaneous critical voices are invoked, the influential critic Ludvig Hevesi’s contributions to the debate come under particular scrutiny.