March 25, 2024 Issue

Jackson Arn, in his “All That Glitters,” in this week’s New Yorker, calls T. J. Clark “the most eloquent Klimt hater.” What’s that based on? I had to dig to find out. It turns out that, in 2010, Clark wrote a letter to the London Review of Books, responding to correspondence generated by Michael Hofmann’s “Vermicular Dither” (London Review of Books, January 28, 2010), a review of Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, in which he (Hofmann) refers to Klimt as “the Kitschmeister.” Clark writes,

I have no dog in the ring as regards Stefan Zweig; but as Gustav Klimt has come up in your correspondence, and even been claimed as ‘one of the greatest painters ever’, I do want to say that when I read Michael Hofmann’s verdict on the artist I found myself breathing a sigh of relief (Letters, 11 February). At last someone had dared state the obvious. As for ‘greatest painters ever’, there is a special place in the hell of reputations for those who tried hardest for the title in the first years of the 20th century: the Frank Brangwyns, the Eugène Carrières, the Anders Zorns, the John Singer Sargents, the Giovanni Segantinis. Not that these artists are uninteresting. Someone with a strong stomach and a taste for tragic irony should write a book about large-scale and mural painting in the two decades leading to Mons and Passchendaele. But taken at all seriously – compared with their contemporary Akseli Gallen-Kallela, for example, let alone the last achievements of Puvis de Chavannes – the greats of Edwardian Euro-America strike me as Kitschmeisters through and through: early specialists in the new century’s pretend difficulty and ‘opacity’, pretend mystery and profundity, pretend eroticism and excess. Klimt has a place of honour in their ranks.

Arn is right. There's no love there. By the way, I wasn't doubting Arn's word. I just couldn't recall ever reading anything by Clark about Klimt. And I've read a lot of Clark. I devour him.

Postscript: Just as an off-set to Clark’s acid verdict, consider what Peter Schjeldahl said about Klimt’s “Adele”:

With the best of will—and I have tried—“Adele” makes no formal sense. The parts—including the silky brushwork of the young lady’s face and hands, which poke through the bumpy ground as through a carnival prop—drift, generating no mutual tensions. The size feels arbitrary, without integral scale in relation to the viewer: bigger or smaller would make no difference. The content of the gorgeous whatsit seems a rhyming of conspicuously consumed wealth with show-off eroticism. She’s a vamp, is Adele; and for whom would she be simpering but the randy master, Herr Klimt? The effect is a closed loop of his and her narcissisms. They’re them, and we aren’t. I think we are supposed to be impressed. And let’s be. Why not? Our age will be bookmarked in history by the self-adoring gestures of the incredibly rich. Aesthetics ride coach. ["Changing My Mind About Gustav Klimt's 'Adele' "]

I love that “gorgeous whatsit.” Can kitsch be beautiful? Schjeldahl said yes.