Review: The Getty in a Vienna mood with Klimt, Messerschmidt shows

The J. Paul Getty Museumis having a Vienna moment, with two historical exhibitions of work by two artists whose profiles have gone from relatively obscure to popular favorite only in recent decades. Partly that’s because of their eccentricity: It hasn’t always been easy to know quite how they fit into established art historical narratives.

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736-83) was an accomplished German Baroque sculptor who, when he moved from Bavaria to Austria, set aside expressive drama for the newly fashionable revival of sober classicism sweeping Europe. It didn’t work. Eventually he chucked it, producing instead a unique body of marvelously enigmatic male busts that have captivated — and puzzled — observers ever since.

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) was a pivot between centuries. His lush, elaborate paintings opened a door to sensual modern sensibilities long suppressed. Klimt was a late bloomer — so late that, to gain wide popularity, his highly decorative paintings had to wait for entrenched prohibitions against art as luxurious ornament to begin to wither. That’s only happened in the last generation or so.

“Messerschmidt and Modernity” is focused on eight so-called “character heads” carved in alabaster or cast in matte tin alloys. Roughly life-size, the heads shout, wince, weep, snooze, yawn and more.

In 2008 the Getty acquired “The Vexed Man,” an extreme, puckered face carved from warm, mottled brown alabaster. It’s one of 69 character heads Messerschmidt made in the last 13 years of his life. (Of the 69, 55 survive.) For all their diverse emotional agitation, the haunted faces seem withdrawn and internalized.

“Gustav Klimt: The Magic of Line” surveys the artist’s drawings in pencil, chalk and ink, persuasively making the case that they were essential to his aesthetic development as a painter. That includes his singular 1907 tour de force, “Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” a metaphorical portrait of his lover portrayed as a modern Danae, the mythic Greek princess ravished by Zeus in the guise of a shower of glittering gold.

The Getty acquired two Klimt drawings in 2009, one a pair of sketches of a kneeling nude that is unusual for the museum because, dated 1901-02, it slips into the 20th century. (Except for photographs, the Getty typically collects art from the 19th century or earlier.) Co-organized with Vienna’s great Albertina Museum, which has the largest collection of Klimt drawings, the show commemorates the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth.

The two exhibitions suffer a bit from opposite flaws. The Messerschmidt display is too small, the Klimt too large. The former has been beefed up with works by nine living American and European artists who are said to offer a contemporary response to Messerschmidt, while the nearly 120 Klimt drawings are more exhausting than exhaustive. (Drawings demand scrutiny, so prepare to be overwhelmed.) Both shows are certainly worth seeing, but neither is optimal.

Messerschmidt was on track to career security, patronized by the Austrian imperial court of Maria Theresa, when all of a sudden, he was denied a professorship at Vienna’s academy. Mental instability was blamed, although illness from casting sculptures with poisonous tin alloys may have been the culprit. The abject artist left the city, moved to several small towns and spent the remainder of his life working on the character heads.

Messerschmidt’s heads are mesmerizing — not because we know their meanings and are inexorably drawn to them, but because we don’t. Extreme facial contortions ought to be loaded with communicative feeling, yet these grimacing or grinning faces remain enigmatic and remote.

Physiognomy, the pseudo-science of assessing character from facial features, was likely a driving motive for making them. Their refusal to disclose is oddly confrontational.

The artist was an Enlightenment-era baby, his character heads a catalog of what he believed to be every possible emotional expression. There’s a coldness to the inventory that belies their emotional heat, the stark symmetry of many faces underscoring a sense of careful, unidealized design.

Some of the contemporary responses are direct. In the 1970s Arnulf Rainer aggressively scribbled oil-stick on photographs of Messerschmidt heads, performing a literal defacement. A 1998 Pierre Picot photograph abuts two heads, inventing a conspiratorial narrative of secret whispers between them.

Ken Gonzalez-Day, photographing the Getty’s “Vexed Man” from the side in bright light, dismantles one pernicious legacy of physiognomy. The side view’s central area is obscured in deep, dark shadow — a black hole smack in the middle of what amounts to a racial profile.

The connection in other works, however, is too loose. Some Messerschmidt heads have been likened to clowns, but that’s not enough to make a Cindy Sherman self-portrait in clown makeup resonate. Bruce Nauman makes faces at viewers in his 1970 “Hologram Studies,” but simply because the facial contortions in both artists’ work was arrived at by pinching skin isn’t much reason to put them together. These and other works feel like padding.

The coincidental Klimt exhibition makes for a more potent juxtaposition. Messerschmidt crafted a rigorous, orderly art that could inventory the range of human emotion; a century later, Klimt chafed against its repressive legacy of Victorian orderliness.

The show does a good job unfolding his rambunctious career — first as a lavish decorator of architectural spaces, then as an antagonist against establishment values and finally as an independent artistic voice. Habsburg Vienna was being rebuilt in the late 19th century, and Klimt’s historically precise architectural decorations required precise drawings of acute realism.

One surprise is the degree to which this grounding in architecture, figures represented in and anchored to real three-dimensional space, had a profound effect on the later work for which he is best known.

Klimt was a pioneer of modern Expressionism: The authenticity of inner emotions trumped outward fidelity to visible nature. (Erotic urges, not surprisingly, are a primary subject.) Those fluid, amorphous feelings were eventually represented in agitated line drawings, as if the graphite marks were electric currents jolting the page.

Always, though, the composition is visually anchored to the two-dimensional sheet of paper — attentive to edges, exploiting its textures, taking advantage of its size and rectangular shape. The paper could be described as a drawing’s planar equivalent for architectural space. Since lines only exist in the imagination, but not in nature, Klimt’s expressive lines grab onto the sheet and emphasize its physicality.

Save for a relative handful of exceptions, almost every drawing in the show is of a woman. Partly this stems from the academic tradition of drawing nudes. Partly it’s Klimt’s artistic evolution, which moved from realism through Symbolist metaphysics to Expressionist depth. But mostly it reflects his own inner life.

If you want to know me, Klimt said, look at my pictures. The expressive life that registers in his drawings is not the sitter’s. Instead, it’s an outward projection of his own internal desires.

Klimt had a wife, many mistresses and an active sex life (he’s said to have fathered more than a dozen children). Many Austrian women that he drew and painted in the seat of the old Holy Roman Empire were prominent patrons in the city’s flourishing Jewish community. Determined to be just as modern as the new Vienna, he handily surpassed that aim.

“Gustav Klimt: The Magic of Line” and “Messerschmidt and Modernity,” J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood, (310) 440-7300; Klimt to Sept. 23 and Messerschmidt to Oct. 14. Closed Monday. https://www.getty.eduhttps://www.getty.edu/

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christopher.knight@latimes.com