Exhibit Complements Art Core

Reproductions of Gustav Klimt’s “Pear Tree”—often referred to as the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s one great painting—flap on the banners outside of the Fogg, attempting to lure visitors into the Busch-Reisinger’s unique exhibit, “‘As though my body were naught but ciphers:’ Crises of Representation in Fin-de Siècle Vienna.” The exhibit’s forty pieces are on display in a single room in the museum, housed on the second floor of the Fogg.

“I think ‘Pear Tree’ might be familiar to people; it’s one of our great works of art. It’s published everywhere,” says Laura Muir, Cunningham Assistant Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum.

“And you don’t really think about them within the context of the ‘Pear Tree,’” Muir adds. In fact, the most salient characteristic of the exhibit may be the complex dialogue established among the various themes engaged.

Created to complement Professor of German Peter J. Burgard’s core course, Literature and Arts C-65, “Repression and Expression: Literature and Art in Fin-de-Siècle Germany and Austria,” the exposition masterfully interweaves visual art and texts read in the course.

“It was way more work than I thought it would be,” laughs Burgard, who worked on the exhibition for about a year prior to its opening.

“The art you see is literally under the sign of literature or contextualized, with an emphasis on the ‘text,’” he says. For instance, Hugh von Hofmannsthal, an author exemplary of the so-called “language crisis” studied in the course, is featured in several places in the exhibition. One Hofmannsthal quote, part of which lamentingly asks, “[W]hy seek again for words which I have foresworn!,” runs along the perimeter of the room above the works of visual art, elevated about eight-and-a-half feet off of the ground.

Another subtle but intriguing text-cum-visual art trick is the parallel placement of Klimt’s “Pear Tree” and a decorated, meter-long text box featuring another Hofmannsthal quote designed to emphasize the importance of images and words and how they interact with each other.

Then there are the visual art works themselves. The works by Klimt, almost certainly the most familiar pieces, are placed near the entrance. Among these, the “Jursiprudence” photo mural may be the most inventive and unusual.

The original, one of Klimt’s infamous “faculty paintings” scorned by the very faculty that commissioned them, was destroyed in 1945 by retreating Nazis to keep it from falling into enemy hands. A digitized photograph of the original mural from the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna is the source of the Busch-Reisinger’s photo mural. The reproduction, about the same size as Klimt’s original, is a unique approximation of Klimt’s vision of grandeur.

Tucked away behind Klimt, however, are the pieces that are less well-known, and as a result, even more powerful—their revolutionary quality even fresher. For instance, Oskar Kokoschka’s lithographs from hardbound children’s books are creepy even today.

The lithograph on the left, the first illustration in the book, is a somewhat innocuous, though certainly abstracted and solidly-colored painting in which a woman appears to be sleeping on an island in the middle of a river. The opposing lithograph, however, from the end of the children’s book, when the narrative has entirely descended into an unsettling stream-of-consciousness, eerily depicts an androgynous but clearly co-ed pair of scrawny, nude adolescents standing in what resembles dream-like Garden of Eden.

As a testament to the exhibition’s thorough contextualization, while the chat box indicates that this “traumatic experience of puberty” is a reaction to Freud, a first printing of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality sits in a glass case on the opposite side of the room.

Egon Schiele’s “Sleeping Figure with a Blanket,” with its watercolor browns and dreamsicle oranges, employs less inviting colors than the Kokoschka lithographs but is no less visually-stimulating. As is the case with several of the Klimt sketches, Schiele intentionally waffles on the orientation of the work, in part by signing the piece twice, once to indicate that the piece is meant to be viewed as a portrait and again, indicating a landscape.

“Peter Burgard was wondering if in the exhibition we could somehow put it on a swivel so that people could see it as vertical and as horizontal,” jokes Muir. “It’s a really cool idea, but it’s something that, within the constraints of a museum exhibition and a valuable work of art, you can’t do.”

This kind of innovative thought in presentation is exemplary of the exhibition’s attempt to recreate the challenges posed by turn-of-the-century Viennese art. “We hope that people will look at it differently and think of it in terms of the crisis that was happening,” says Muir. “I mean, it doesn’t look that radical to us today, but we’re hoping that it at least might make people think about it again.”

Perhaps because of enthusiasm for this recovered radical bent, turnout to the exhibition has been high. A recent gallery talk given by a graduate student at the School of Design attracted roughly twice the usual turnout for gallery talks, including Cantabrigians, graduate students, tourists, and faculty, but according to Muir, very few undergraduates.

Partly in order to increase student participation, the team putting on the exhibition allowed two students enrolled in the course to give gallery talks. “It turns out that we had to create two extra spots, because the interest in giving gallery talks was so good,” says Muir. Ultimately, even the two extra slots were insufficient; Muir et al. have decided to let students give their gallery talks in pairs, permitting eight students total the opportunity to give presentations.

Response to the exhibition among students enrolled in the course seems to be positive. The unique opportunity to see an exhibit associated with a course seems to be another source of motivation.

“I definitely think that it enhances the overall course experience,” says Samantha J. Parker ’08, one of the students chosen to give a gallery talk. “You can actually see the artwork and the connections between pieces of art first hand.”