Klimt and his women

Although Klimt never married, he had affairs with many women in both high and low classes of society. The name that is most often discussed is Emilie Floge, the fashion designer and Klimt’s sister-in-law. Art historians have often interpreted their lifelong companionship as Klimt’s ardent, albeit spiritual, need for Floge and her loyal and Platonic love for Klimt (Partsch 17). The postcards from Klimt to Floge, however, show a remarkably taciturn and inaffectionate correspondence (60). Likewise, Klimt painted only two portraits of Floge during their friendship of almost thirty years. Klimt liked to paint the women with whom he was attached, and the lack of such works inspired by Floge is worth noting. These might be evidence to the nature of their intimate friendship—that it was just that, and no more. On the other hand, Klimt acted with much more familiarity and tenderness toward Mizzi Zimmermann, his model, mistress, and mother of two of his children. Partsch writes,

Klimt’s biographers describe his letters to Mizzi Zimmermann as affectionate and tender, evidence of his great love for her […] With Mizzi he was eager to communicate, describing his worries as a painter and other things that were weighing on his mind. But the letters to Mizzi have a quality of condescension: he laboriously describes to her why he is sending money by the normal post and not by registered mail, and addresses her as “child” […] but he seems to have taken care of his children, writing, for example, to “Gusterl” on his birthday and often asking after him. (60)

Mizzi was the most important, but not the only, model with whom Klimt had an affair. His studio was like a fantasy harem where models, completely nude, “wandered up and down in his workshop, stretched, lazed and blossomed like flowers—always ready to stay obediently still at a gesture from the master, as soon as he perceived a movement or a pose that aroused his sense of beauty and was rapidly noted down in a quick drawing” (Natter 61). These models, ready for heterosexual and lesbian love scenes and even masturbation at Klimt’s word, satisfied more than Klimt’s artistic needs: they often aided with Klimt’s “relaxation” as well. As a result, no less than 14 claims were filed for the inheritance upon Klimt’s death in 1918. Four were recognized (Partsch 17). With still inexhaustible energy, Klimt did not limit himself to affairs with lower class women; he tried—unsuccessfully—to seduce “the most beautiful girl in Vienna,” Alma Mahler-Werfel (see left). He did succeed, however, in engaging in an affair with Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of a prominent banker and sugar manufacturer (below right). Naturally, she is the only society woman who Klimt painted more than once. The first is one of Klimt’s masterpieces from the gold period. The second incorporates an Asian backdrop, much like the portraits of Elizabeth Bachofen-Echt and Friederike Maria Beer.
These and more women “out of their love for them became enemies to one another,” according to the words of Alma Mahler-Werfel in her autobiography (Partsch 76). Klimt was not, however, a handsome man (see photo). “A refined man of nature, a mixture of satyr and ascetic,” was how Hans Tietze describes Klimt, who “cultivated that aura, combining sexual attraction with the image of the genius as libertine” (qtd Natter 61).
And women responded. They were inevitably drawn to him: Friederike Beer-Monti said that Klimt “had an extraordinary animal magnetism…he exuded a strange odour, a woman might well be afraid of him” (Qtd Natter 61). Affairs with his lovers became Klimt’s greatest inspirations, like that other “genius as libertine,” Pablo Piccasso.