Cultural Ferment 815

(Left) Antonio Gaudi’s Casa Batllo in Barcelona. (Right) Gustav Klimt’s

Judith II (Salome) (1909).

tradition and, perhaps as well, seemed to affirm women’s traditional role in
household decoration at a time when more feminists were stepping for­
ward to demand equal rights for women.
Vienna became a vital center of avant-garde cultural experimentation at
the turn of the century. But after first enjoying state sponsorship of their
art, the painters and writers of the avant-garde faced rejection in a climate
of intolerance. Some intellectuals and painters then embraced aestheticism,
which emphasized form and beauty as a way of surviving in an increasingly
irrational, hostile world. The painter Gustav Klimt (1862—1918), among
other Viennese artists, retreated into subjectivism, attaching primary value
to individual experience. Yet in Vienna the aestheticism of the avant-garde
was not a reaction against the resilient cultural values of the middle class.
It was a reaction against political intolerance. Klimt and the “secession­
ists,” like their counterparts in Munich, rebelled against what Klimt