Rabbi Janet Marder

February 29, 2008

Golden Girl

Note: see these links for images related to this sermon:

http://www.paintingmania.com/Paintings/Detail.aspx?cat=8&id=67&pcat=8

http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/philolog/2006/01/byzantine_art_as_propaganda_ju.html  

            I like to call her “the golden girl,” though that is not the name of the painting. This enlarged image doesn’t do justice to the original, which shines and gleams with fiery splendor. I invite you after the service  to come up and take a look at the reproduction I have with me, if you’d like a closer look.

            This is a famous work, painted in 1907 by the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt. Vienna in the years before the First World War was a vibrant cosmopolitan city in the vanguard of all forms of culture, with exciting developments in music, theater, literature, art and architecture.

            Once the city of Haydn , Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Strauss, Vienna in the early 20^th century was home to another cluster of brilliant minds: Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sigmund Freud. In 1907, the year this painting was created, Adolf Hitler arrived in Vienna from a small provincial town. He lived there for six years, trying to make it as an artist.

            Gustav Klimt, the man who painted this picture, was born in Vienna in 1862, the son of a gold engraver. Klimt is known today for his exquisite landscapes and especially for his paintings of women, including portraits of the privileged wives and daughters of the wealthiest men in the city. Jews were prominent in the cultural and social life of Vienna ; many of Klimt’s elite nouveau riche patrons were Jewish.

            Among them was Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. An avid art collector and industrialist who had made his fortune in sugar, he commissioned this portrait of his 25 year old wife, Adele. She was a modern woman of the kind Klimt liked to paint. No generous Rubenesque curves here; she is dark and slender, sensitive and refined. Adele Bloch-Bauer is remembered by contemporaries as exceedingly bright, restless, unconventional, arrogant, rather melancholy. She smoked. She was interested in ideas. Had she been born later she would have gone to the university and pursued a career; instead she made a suitable marriage and established a salon, bringing artists and intellectuals together in her elegant mansion for stimulating conversation.

            This portrait is considered a spectacular example of Klimt’s “Golden Style.”  These are a handful of paintings to which he devoted hundreds of hours of work, taking a full year to complete each one.  Real gold and silver leaf create a dazzling metallic surface, out of which Adele’s pale face, neck and arms arise with almost photographic realism. The outlines of her body and her cascading dress dissolve into masses of shining, elaborate geometric ornamentation. Her gaze is dark, intense, haunting; her hands are gracefully twisted – according to those who knew her, to hide a deformed finger.

            Look closely, and you have the disconcerting illusion of a disembodied head floating in a shimmering gilded sea; Klimt gives us a woman who is, quite literally, made of money. This is both a portrait of a real human being, and an expensive and beautiful decorative object displayed for the pleasure of others.

            The painting created an immediate sensation. Many critics associated it, surprisingly, with religious imagery. Some likened its metallic gold surface to Greek Orthodox icons. One newspaper called Adele Bloch-Bauer "an idol in a golden shrine.” Several critics dubbed the style “Byzantine,” and the painting was, in part, inspired by Klimt’s visit to the magnificent 6^th century Byzantine church of San Vitale in Ravenna , Italy  – a church famous for its gorgeously colored mosaics with flat, stylized figures made of thousands of pieces of glittering glass and precious metals.

            Being in that church would have helped Gustav Klimt appreciate the religious significance of gold. For Byzantine art was all about gold. The worshiper gazed at sacred objects made of beautiful, precious materials, their richness evoking a higher, mysterious realm. Holy figures adorned in gold, haloed in gold, filled the church with radiance, their brilliant glow suggesting the light of heaven, their tranquil expressions conveying a sense of eternity and peace.

            Gustav Klimt brought to his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer the stillness and tranquility, the radiant golden light he had seen in the church at Ravenna , creating a work that is both luxuriously material and intensely spiritual.

            Adele herself died of meningitis in 1925, at age 43. Her husband preserved her portrait, and five other Klimt paintings, in a special room he dedicated to his beloved wife.

            In 1938 the Nazis invaded Austria , where they were greeted by cheering crowds throwing flowers as the church bells rang in celebration. Some 220,000 Jews then lived in Austria , almost all of them in Vienna . About 150,000 fled the country; the remaining 65,000 were murdered.

            Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer fled to Switzerland , forced to leave all his possessions behind. The Nazis seized his sugar company and his Vienna mansion, along with his valuable porcelain, furniture and art collection. He died in Zurich seven years later, almost penniless, willing his property to his nephews and niece. 

            That niece, Maria Altmann, left Austria with her husband, who escaped from a concentration camp. Eventually they managed to get to the United States and settled where many refugees from the Nazis ended up, in Los Angeles . For most of the next 60 years the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer hung in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna near "The Kiss," another Klimt masterpiece in the “Golden Style.”

            Until the late 1990s Adele’s heirs believed there was little they could do to recover their family’s lost property. But in 1998 Austria passed a law that opened archives and made it easier to file restitution claims for Jewish property looted by the Nazis. Maria Altmann engaged an attorney -- he happened to be the grandson of Arnold Schoenberg -- and they fought a protracted legal battle.

            Finally, in 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Maria Altmann, then 89 years old, could sue the country of Austria in a U.S. court. Two years later the Arbitration Court awarded Maria and the other heirs the portrait of her aunt Adele, along with four other Klimt paintings owned by their family. Ronald Lauder, a former U.S. Ambassador to Austria , then purchased the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer for a record-setting price of some $135 million and installed it in the Neue Galerie, a New York museum devoted to 20^th century German and Austrian art.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

            Robert Frost’s words, written in 1923, convey the sadness of beauty and perfection that cannot last: the golden girl, so slender and elegant, who died too young; the fragile, exquisite world of the Austrian Jewish elite, wiped out with shocking ease and speed by Hitler’s troops.

            Gold is the traditional symbol of strength and endurance. Lovers exchange gold rings as a pledge of undying commitment and dream someday of celebrating their golden wedding anniversary. But Robert Frost turns the image upside down, speaking of gold not as a hard, shiny, durable metal but as a poignant symbol of the fleeting instant: the first flowers of spring; the delicate blush on our baby’s cheek; the innocence in a child’s eyes, the first excitement of being in love.

            Life progresses, he says, and all that is mortal decays with each passing moment. Radiant youth and innocence evaporate like dew; happiness must pass away as inevitably as leaves and buds drop from the tree. That is the human condition, he says: nothing gold can stay.

            This week in the Torah the Israelites build themselves a sanctuary of all the precious metals and fine fabrics they can amass: gold and copper and silver and gemstones; yarns of purple and blue and crimson, linen and leather and wood, sweet-smelling spices and aromatic oils. The artist Betzalel, a man wise in heart and skillful of hand, designs the sacred structure; the people build it together, under his instruction. They bring their golden jewelry and melt it down to make the furnishings of a holy place – the wooden ark encased in gold, the golden altar for the sacred offerings, the golden bowls and jugs and libation jars.

             I can understand why the people, lost and afraid in the wilderness, want so much to build a sanctuary – a word rooted in the idea of safety and protection. Within their holy place, surrounded by objects of solid metal and polished stone, they create for themselves the illusion of permanence and strength. They fix their eyes on the profusion of beautiful articles before them: the lamp stand, the table, the altar, the ark; all the shining vessels of copper and silver. These objects seem to speak of human power, the strength to hammer gold and sculpt in stone and endure forever and forever.

            The people look at the beautiful, solid shapes they have fashioned for themselves, and they take comfort. The wilderness, with all its terrors, recedes from view.

            I imagine the worshipers at San Vitale, in Ravenna , felt the same. They built their golden icons and mosaics because their lives were uncertain, subject to pain, and over far too soon. It gave them comfort to sit in a quiet place of beauty, to be bathed in golden light from a thousand shimmering stones, to gaze on tranquil images of eternity and peace.

            And so it was, I think, with Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer and his lovely but restless lady, the elegant, melancholy Adele. A man has a portrait painted of his wife in a brave and fragile effort to freeze time, to keep his beloved always young and always present. In later years, when she is gone, he comforts himself, gazing, transfixed, at the undimmed luster of her image. Even at the end, when he dies alone and in poverty, the portrait of his golden girl continues to glow in his memory.

            Later still, the man will also pass into history, along with all the doomed Jews of Vienna, trapped in a wilderness whose terrors they could never have imagined. Hitler, too, is gone now, and all the ugliness his name evokes. The painting remains, and gives us comfort, a shining reminder of a brilliant moment in time.

            Because we are human, and we die, we create things of beauty, and yearn to possess them. Strong things that will outlast us. Objects that have a shape and symmetry, a rounded perfection and coherence our own lives lack. Because time is relentless, because nothing gold can stay, we look for what will endure.

            Devotional objects will always comfort the faithful, as works of art are precious to those who love them. But we Jews learned a long time ago to put our deepest trust in what is stronger than all of these. Our temple is gone, destroyed by Babylon and Rome . Its vessels and altars were lost, as all material treasures are lost in the end, no matter how hard we try to hold on to them.  “Yidishe ashires,” says the old Yiddish proverb, “iz vi shney in merts. Jewish wealth is like snow in March” – here today, tomorrow gone. And so we were taught to invest ourselves, instead, in treasures of mind and heart and spirit.

            Says the Talmud: “At the moment of our departure from this world, neither silver nor gold nor precious stones accompany us – only learning and good deeds” [Pirke Avot 6].

            For many years my husband, Shelly, had a five dollar gold coin, a little larger and thicker than a quarter, but much heavier, with a solid and satisfying feel in the hand. It was given to him years ago by his mother, Frances, who had received it from her grandmother, Regina . The coin was special to Regina because it was minted the year her daughter Helen was born. She treasured it all her life, then passed it on to that daughter. After Helen’s death it made its way to Frances , and finally to my husband.

            Nine years ago this spring, when we were packing up to move to Palo Alto , the golden coin got lost, as things do in the chaos of a move. Shelly felt terrible about it. I know he still grieves at having lost an object his great-grandmother once held in her hand, that bears the imprint of Helen and Frances, who gave their love to him, as only a mother and grandmother can.

            He told he recently that he is comforted because there is something he still does have. It’s an old prayerbook, delicate and fragile, inscribed  “From your Granny Regina.”

            Holding it in his hands reminds him of the things that endure, when silver and gold are lost and all things mortal crumble into dust. The woman who prayed faithfully from that book left him a legacy of learning and honesty and goodness and love. It came to Shelly through the touch of his mother’s and grandmother’s hands, and through him it will pass to our own two daughters.

            Material things may melt away like snow, but something gold can stay.