In April 1902, the fourteenth exhibition of the Vienna Secession opened. The exhibition was a single coordinated tribute to Beethoven, organised around a central installation: a polychromed sculpture of the composer by the German sculptor Max Klinger, surrounded by murals and friezes by other Secession members. Gustav Klimt's contribution was a 34-metre painted frieze running around three walls of the gallery's left-hand side room. The exhibition closed three months later.
The frieze had been painted on plaster directly attached to reed mats fixed to the gallery walls. It was always intended as a temporary installation, to be destroyed when the exhibition ended. By accident, it survived. A Viennese collector named Carl Reininghaus bought the panels before they could be demolished. It passed through several owners, was bought by the Austrian state in 1972, and is now installed in the basement of the Secession building, in approximately the position it occupied during the 1902 exhibition.
The Vienna Secession
The Vienna Secession was founded in 1897 by Klimt and a group of fellow artists who had broken away from the conservative Künstlerhaus, the city's main exhibition society. They wanted a venue for international avant-garde art, separate exhibitions for younger artists, and a journal (Ver Sacrum) to publish manifestos and design theory.
The Secession's exhibition building, designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich and opened in 1898, was a temple-like structure with a gilded laurel-leaf dome, a large open exhibition floor, and the inscription Der Zeit ihre Kunst, Der Kunst ihre Freiheit (To the age its art, to art its freedom) on the facade. The building still stands at the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Operngasse, behind the Karlsplatz.
The Beethoven Exhibition
The 1902 exhibition was conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk: a unified work of art combining painting, sculpture, music, and architecture. The centrepiece was Klinger's Beethoven sculpture, a chryselephantine figure of the seated composer carved from white marble, ivory, bronze, and semi-precious stones. The figure was nearly three metres tall and weighed six tonnes. It had taken Klinger seventeen years to complete.
The other Secession members designed the rooms surrounding the sculpture. Josef Hoffmann handled the architecture. Klimt's frieze ran around the antechamber visitors entered before reaching Klinger's piece. The frieze was meant to prepare the viewer emotionally for the encounter with the composer.
What the Frieze Shows
The frieze illustrates a programmatic interpretation of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, particularly the choral finale's setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy. The narrative runs along three walls: the long wall and two short walls.
The first wall shows the Yearning for Happiness: floating female figures with flowing hair drift across the wall, their bodies translucent against a pale ground. They are interrupted by an armoured knight (described by Klimt as "the well-armed strong one") who turns to face the viewer, a sword in his hand, two figures (Compassion and Ambition) standing behind him. The figures lead the eye toward the second wall.
The Hostile Forces
The short second wall is the most striking section: the Hostile Forces. A vast giant figure (Typhoeus, the monster of Greek myth) crouches across the wall, his body stretched in an enormous arc. To his left stand the three Gorgons, gaunt women with long hair and visible ribs. To his right are personifications of vices: Lasciviousness (a heavy-bodied woman in green hair), Wantonness (in flame-red hair), Intemperance (a corpulent figure), and Gnawing Grief (an old woman bowed and clutching herself).
The combined image is genuinely disturbing in person. Klimt has used a flattened, decorative idiom to depict figures that ought to be repulsive, and the contrast between the gold-leafed flat patterning and the human ugliness is the source of the power. The colours are darker than in his other major works of the period: dull browns, sickly greens, the red of dried blood.
This Kiss to the Whole World
The third wall returns to lyrical mode. Female figures float across the wall toward a central scene: a man and a woman embracing inside a stylised mandorla, surrounded by a chorus of singing angels with flowing hair. The embracing pair is the visual statement of Schiller's line Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt (This kiss to the whole world), the climactic phrase of Beethoven's Ninth.
The figures are gilded, the background is white, the bodies are strongly stylised. The composition reads like a religious icon: the central pair functions like a Madonna and Child, the chorus like attendant angels. The frieze ends with the kiss because that is the Ninth's resolution: the dissonance of the Hostile Forces giving way to the unison of the choral finale.
The Reception
The 1902 exhibition was attacked critically. Conservative critics found Klimt's frieze obscene: the female figures were too thin, too undraped, too sexual. The Hostile Forces were considered grotesque. The kiss-finale was considered blasphemous. Liberal critics defended the work as a legitimate visual response to Beethoven's music. The argument over Klimt's allegory of joy continued for the entire run of the show.
The exhibition closed in summer 1902. Klinger's Beethoven sculpture was removed and is now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig. Klimt's frieze was supposed to be destroyed, but Reininghaus bought it. The plaster panels were sawn off the gallery walls in seven pieces and stored.
The Restoration
The frieze passed through a German collector, then to a Jewish family (the Lederers) who fled Vienna in 1938 and lost most of their collection to the Nazis. The frieze panels were seized by the Austrian state in 1944 and sat in storage for nearly thirty years. In 1972 the Austrian state bought the work formally from the Lederer heirs and began a restoration that took ten years.
The restored frieze was installed in a purpose-built basement gallery beneath the Secession building in 1986. The room reproduces the dimensions of the 1902 antechamber. The frieze hangs at the same height. Visitors enter through a doorway approximately where the original visitor would have entered. The rest of the 1902 exhibition (Klinger's sculpture, the other artists' contributions) is gone, but the frieze can be seen in approximately the architectural setting it was made for.
What the Frieze Is
The Beethoven Frieze is the most extended demonstration of Klimt's mature style. The Kiss (1907-08), now in the Belvedere, is the better-known single image. But the frieze contains the Kiss imagery in larger form, the gold-leaf flat patterning, the female figures with flowing hair, the contrast between decorative surface and disturbing content. The frieze is the laboratory; the Kiss is the showpiece.
The painting was made for an exhibition that lasted three months. It survived by accident, by the goodwill of a private collector, by the post-war acquisition policies of the Austrian state. It is now permanently installed in the building it was made for. The temporary work outlived the exhibition by 124 years and counting.
