Gustav Klimt in the Brain Lab: What is neuroscience doing to art?

Gustav Klimt in the Brain Lab: What is neuroscience doing to art?

Kevin Berger

As we recreated the Woman in Gold in our minds, Kandel said, there was another element at work. In the process of seeking visual and emotional resolution, our brains engaged our knowledge of the world and art. During his lifelong research into memory, Kandel had written extensively about the neurochemistry of learning, how learning “can significantly increase the number of synaptic contacts between the nerve cells,” potentially expanding our capacities to think and feel. “Our experience of a painting is not determined simply by the image that we see in front of us, but also by the history of the image and everything we know about it,” he said.

It was now my turn to share what moved me most about Woman in Gold—which indeed stemmed from everything I knew about the painting and Klimt. Adele, unlike her Victorian sister, Therese, fled the parlors of high society for Vienna’s demimonde of artists and intellectuals. At the time, Klimt’s talents were in full bloom, but he was working in a vale of resignation. A swaggering bear of a man, Klimt lived to upend Austria’s ruling class. His works spirited away mythical Greek goddesses to assail conventional morality and expose desire gone wild. In 1894 he was commissioned by Austria’s Ministry of Culture to create three ceiling paintings at the University of Vienna on the theme, “The triumph of light over darkness.” Klimt’s paintings, Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence, were phantasmagorias of naked bodies, a giant octopus, skeletons, and priestesses, floating in a cosmic firmament. Austrian authorities expected the murals to spread the light of human reason over the darkness of chaotic nature. When they saw the opposite, they refused to exhibit them.

Klimt was disgusted. “Enough of censorship,” he sniped to his friend Berta Zuckerkandl, a writer who hosted Vienna’s avant-garde literary salon.
“I want to get out.” Klimt’s remarks were noted by Carl Schorske in Fin-De-Siecle Vienna, a definitive history of the period. Schorske, director of European Cultural Studies at Princeton University for many years, who died in 2015, wrote the depth of Klimt’s dejection was expressed in his art. Klimt underwent a “reshuffling of the self,” Schorske wrote. In his previous public works, Klimt raged against repression. “Now he shrank bank to the private sphere to become painter and decorator for Vienna’s refined haut monde.”

The narrative of a political artist whose public defeat caused him to withdraw into a private utopia struck a deep emotional chord in me. I don’t know why exactly...