Philosophy: 1900

Left to right: "Philosophy," "Jurisprudence" and "Medicine"

No other painting represents Klimt’s emergence as the unlikely rebel as “Philosophy,” one in his three painting series commissioned for the ceiling of the University of Vienna in 1900. “Philosophy,” with its fellows “medicine” and “jurisprudence,” is an allegorical painting executed entirely without the accommodation of classical Greek or Latin themes. Critics of the series simply could not understand what the paintings could possibly have to do with their assigned themes. There are no “learned men of antiquity—Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, and others—[shown] in calm discourse on the nature of things.” According to one account, “one professor suggested a scene in which the philosophers of the ages would be shown assembled in a grove, talking, relaxing, tutoring students.” [Schorske, Carl E. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, Politics and Culture. New York: Random House, 1981. Page 233]. Reflecting in no way what we see now as a ridiculously conservative—and boring—suggestion, “Philosophy” is instead a mass of twining forms floating in an empty chasm of a world. There is absolutely no direct imagery in this deeply metaphorical work, and it is suggested that “for this reason, ironically, few grasped the one aspect of the paintings that was truly shocking: for, if there was a secret message hidden in Klimt’s tangle of bodies—the newborn infants, embracing lovers, despairing elderly, the ill and dying, the dead—it is that man is born to suffer and die, and human attempts to intervene—philosophy and medicine—are of no avail.” [Kallir, Jane. Gustav Klimt, 25 Masterworks. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995. Page 9].