A Portrait Bigger Than Its Frame

Today has been a lazy weekend for me. And frankly, I think I've earned it. For the past three months I've been working six days a week, and even though the past two weeks have been vastly less stressful, I still hadn't really had a chance to actually relax and give my body a chance to recuperate. Y'know kick back, watch something relaxing...something like Daredevil...

(WHAT? You say Daredevil isn't a relaxing thing to watch? You're...probably right. But for me, the very concept of sitting down and not doing running around and doing things is strange and vaguely alien, so...yes. It was relaxing.)

After my two days of chilling out, I felt like for Labor Day I should at least do something. So I poked around online and found that a certain painting was on display at the Neue Galerie. That painting was Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer - also known as Woman in Gold because Nazis didn't want to admit that such a beautiful picture could have been of a Jew.

A few months back, I watched a film of the same name, chronicling the portrait's history. I found it spectacular and moving, a brilliantly unsubtle treatment of how catastrophic damage the Holocaust inflicted on Jewish culture has rippled forward through generations, how our rage at that injustice is completely justified, and why the apathy of those whose grandparents had helped kill ours is so infuriating. And when I found that certain prominent film critics had misread its central message and in some cases conveniently forgotten it was about Jews, I wrote a rather irate counter-review. With that in mind, I practically couldn't not go.

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer is housed in with some other contemporary Austrian works, but it dominates the room in every way. Even before you see the painting itself, the attention of everyone else in the room fixes on it, making it hard to seriously examine anything else.

And when you turn to it - it's too much to take in. The sheer visual spectacle of it, the details winding in on details, the weight of history, of memory that radiates from it ... I couldn't look at something like that all at once, just stand and absorb it, and I got a nasty headache trying. Instead I forced myself to examine just one thing at a time.

Physical details: the shape of Adele's dress against the flowing corona of her background, the infinity of eyes making up her body, the texture of the rich gold paints literally rising from the canvas, the wash of shapes and colors sweeping upward to her face, her face, framed in a kaleidoscopic halo. But the painting's patterns - her patterns - seem to hold secrets, to draw you in and whisper them to you, telling you secrets and stories you can barely remember. Stories that speak to me as a Jew on a level I don't comprehend, and I'm not sure I'm ever will.

Portait of Adele Bloch-Bauer is ... vast. I can't think of another word for this little 4'x5' painting. It seems to exist more thoroughly than the world around it - bearing the weight of history, of memory, all else seems like memory and shadow. It's harrowing and it's exhausting, and I can't see how anyone could ever stand to put it up on their wall, to deal with something that much every day. Even hours later, writing this, I still have a headache from looking at it.

And I'm glad - so glad - that I did.