Gustav Klimt and the University of Vienna panels

In 1894 the Austrian ministry of education commissioned Gustav Klimt and Franz Matsch to paint ceiling panels for the great hall of the University of Vienna. Klimt took three of the faculties: Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence. He was in his early thirties, established, and known for decorative work that pleased official Vienna. The commission was the safest thing in his career and it turned into the loudest fight of it.

Philosophy went on view in 1900 and was then sent to the Paris world exhibition, where it took a gold medal. In Vienna it was attacked. Eighty seven members of the university teaching staff signed a protest asking the ministry not to install it, and the argument ran in the newspapers for months. Medicine followed in 1901 and Jurisprudence in 1903, and each one made the position worse.

What the objection actually was

The complaint was not really about obscenity, though the nudity gave the campaign its fuel. Philosophy was meant to show reason lighting the way, and Klimt painted a drifting column of bodies in a void with no argument in it. Medicine set a figure of death inside the same drifting column and put Hygieia at the front, holding her snake and looking straight out at the viewer. The faculty had ordered an allegory of progress and received a picture that declined to believe in one.

Klimt held the line for five years and then walked away. In 1905 he repaid the state advance with money raised through the Vienna industrialist August Lederer, took the three paintings back, and never accepted a public commission again. His work after that turns inward: portraits of Viennese women, the gold ground pictures, landscapes painted on summer holidays. The break was permanent.

The Secession was only three years old when Philosophy appeared. Klimt and a group of younger artists had left the Kunstlerhaus in 1897 to run their own exhibitions and their own magazine, Ver Sacrum, and the University fight became the test of whether that independence would hold. It held for the artists and failed for the state commissions. Klimt resigned from the Secession himself in 1905, with the group that followed him out.

• Philosophy went on view in 1900, Medicine in 1901 and Jurisprudence in 1903
• Eighty seven university teachers signed the protest against the first panel
• Philosophy took a gold medal at the Paris world exhibition the same year
• Klimt repaid the state and bought the three paintings back in 1905
• August Lederer put up the money and kept Philosophy in his own collection
• All three burned in 1945 at Schloss Immendorf and survive only in photographs

That last line is why the panels are hard to write about. In May 1945 fire took Schloss Immendorf, where the Lederer collection had been stored after it was seized in 1938, and the three paintings went with the building. What remains is a set of black and white photographs and a single color plate. Every judgment anyone makes about these pictures now runs through a reproduction.

Why the fight still matters

Klimt is now among the most expensive painters in the world, and that market rests on the portraits and the gold ground work made after 1905. It is a direct consequence of the University argument. A painter who stops taking public commissions paints for private buyers, and private buyers in Vienna wanted their wives on the wall. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds his portrait of Serena Lederer, and the Belvedere in Vienna holds the best known results.

If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few. To please many is bad.

Lines by Friedrich Schiller that Klimt inscribed on Nuda Veritas in 1899

Read the University panels as a career decision rather than a scandal. Klimt lost the public argument, kept the paintings, and traded a stable state practice for a private one that paid better and answered to nobody. The pictures are gone, but the choice they forced on him is visible in everything he painted afterwards.