THE GOLD ROOMS OF WILDE AND KLIMT
—And the Vienna Inheritance of an Oscar Wilde Poem—
‘In the Gold Room’ is a poem that has attracted limited attention since it first appeared in Oscar Wilde’s self-published debut volume of Poems (1881).
Since then the poem has dimmed in the memory of even the seasoned scholar—and a visit to a museum of Germanic art hardly seemed likely to bring it back into the light.
The museum in question was the Neue Galerie—a relatively recent addition to New York City’s Museum Mile. Headed by the American businessman and former United States Ambassador to Austria, Ronald S. Lauder, the museum is dedicated to early twentieth-century German and Austrian art and design. Lauder’s European attachment also runs in the family as he is the son and heir of the cosmetics entrepreneur Estée Lauder.
In preparation for a visit to the gallery, and to place the culture into context, I decided read up on two leading characters of the relevant time and place.
Obligatory, of course, was Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) the founder of the art movement known as the Vienna Secession; and also Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), the Vienna-born writer whose magnum opus and memoir, The World of Yesterday (1942), is a leading chronicle of the literature and milieu of the period.
Although I had chosen these two characters randomly, I later discovered—as I had in the work of Whistler and Anselm Kiefer—that much can be determined when the detection of art incorporates the art of detection.
For what the gallery did not reveal was that each of these vibrant intellectuals and artists of early 20th century Vienna has a connection with that forgotten Wilde poem.
in the gold room
‘In the Gold Room’ is written in the ‘painterly’ style that Wilde adopted for several of his early Impressions lyrics—which he did probably to parallel a poetic response to contemporary artwork such as Whistler’s Nocturnes.
In the Gold Room.
A Harmony.
Her ivory hands on the ivory keys
Strayed in a fitful fantasy,
Like the silver gleam when the poplar trees
Rustle their pale leaves listlessly,
Or the drifting foam of a restless sea
When the waves show their teeth in the flying breeze.
Her gold hair fell on the wall of gold
Like the delicate gossamer tangles spun
On the burnished disk of the marigold,
Or the sun-flower turning to meet the sun
When the gloom of the jealous night is done,
And the spear of the lily is aureoled.
And her sweet red lips on these lips of mine
Burned like the ruby fire set
In the swinging lamp of a crimson shrine,
Or the bleeding wounds of the pomegranate,
Or the heart of the lotus drenched and wet
With the spilt-out blood of the rose-red wine.
A surface reading of the poem has been succinctly provided by Robert Mighall, Honorary Research Fellow in English Literature at University College, London, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, as follows:
“Each stanza is dominated by a colour – the white of the first moves to gold in the second, and red in the concluding stanza.
The poem attempts to ‘harmonise’ these colours, but also subtly suggests a colour-coded thermometer’ for the speaker’s passions: the colours reflect his increasing attraction for the woman, moving from the chaste detachment of the ‘white’ stanza, to the fire and blood imagery of the red stanza’s physical consummation.
This poem reflects Wilde in a transitional stage; it retains a Rossettian element with its ‘fleshly’ conclusion, and delight in rich colours and their mystical associations, but combines this with a more abstract approach to the arrangement and effect of tones and moods for their own sake.
The title anticipates the work of the Austrian Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), whose own palate would be dominated by the colours Wilde employs.”
Robert Mighall1
Gustav Klimt
We already know that Klimt had explored the theme of Salome in his paintings, notably in his series of “Judith and Salome”, which, like Wilde’s own Salome, is known for its symbolist aesthetic.
But the period that Mighall particularly invokes is Klimt’s ‘golden phase’ which culminated in his famous painting “dominated by the colours Wilde employs”: ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I’ (1907).
Klimt, himself the son of a goldsmith, layered the work with gold leaf and rendered it in oils of ivory and red.
The painting, also known as ‘The Lady in Gold’ or ‘The Woman in Gold’, has a storied provenance including its theft by the Nazis, its subsequent retention by the Austrian state for 50 years, and a seven-year legal claim that culminated in Ronald Lauder’s 2006 purchase from Maria Altmann (heir of the Bloch-Bauer family)2 for $135 million, the highest price ever paid for a painting at that time.
It now forms the centerpiece of its own golden room in the Neue Galerie.3
The thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot see.
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1905).
Stefan Zweig
The subject of Klimt’s painting, Adele Bloch-Bauer, was a wealthy Viennese socialite who regularly hosted artists and authors in her salon. Among her many guests were the composers Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, and the writers Jakob Wassermann and Stefan Zweig.
Zweig’s career was prolific: he was a friend to Arthur Schnitzler and Sigmund Freud; a librettist for Richard Strauss; one of the most widely translated and popular writers in the world of time; and, more latterly, several films have been made of his novels. He was also an avid collector of (mostly music) manuscripts.
And as a man of letters, like Wilde, Zweig has a literary and direct connection with the poem.
There is only one known manuscript of Oscar Wilde’s poem ‘In the Gold Room’, and, as you may have surmised, Stefan Zweig happened to own. it.
The British Library’s Stefan Zweig Collection was donated to the library by his heirs in May 1986, where Wilde’s manuscript now resides. A catalogue was published in 2017.4
© John Cooper, 2025.
Related:
In 2017, Wilde’s poem ‘In the Gold Room’ was implicated by Angela Kingston into an insightful and provocative reappraisal of the “passionate Victorian grief” that Wilde carried for his late sister Isola.5
There is also Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912)6
Footnotes:
- “Robert Mighall, Ed. Oscar Wilde Selected Poems (Everyman Poetry Library, 1996) 95-6 ↩︎
- For this part of the story see the Helen Mirren film Woman in Gold (2015) ↩︎
- Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907): for the storied provenance of the work see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Adele_Bloch-Bauer_I#1912%E2%80%931945. ↩︎ - ISBN 10: 0712356665 / ISBN 13: 9780712356664 ↩︎
- ‘The Mystery of the Poet’s Heart’ Philadelphia Discovery Casts New Light on Oscar and Isola Wilde. The Wildean, Oscar Wilde Society (January 2017), No. 50, pp. 3-40
https://www.jstor.org/stable/48570738 ↩︎ - Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912): was purchased by Oprah Winfrey in November 2006 at Christie’s for $87.9 million; and sold by her in 2016 for $150 million in a private sale to an unidentified buyer in China. ↩︎
This is a very interesting discovery, indeed, given that there is also the coincidence that a collector of basically music manuscripts, Stefan Zweig, that is, would also be the owner of one MS by Oscar Wilde. Zweig, who lived long enough to survive both World War One and the time between the wars, in his impersonal memoir wrote that contrary to his parents and grand-parents he had had unique experiences every day of his life – something that the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, Oscar Wilde, and Franz Kafka would only have been able to guess at based on their shorter or, indeed, very short life-span. Zweig’s forebears were even older than Wilde’s, but he lived on to be the apple of contention, sitting between all chairs, facing attacks of Socialists and Communists in Germany and Austria, while being ostracized by the Nazis everywhere for being a Jew, albeit assimilated to the Austro-German bourgeois culture. So it is no accident that his fate, like that of Oscar Wilde, is to have important links to his life surface after many decades and in improbable places. Thanks for discovering this, John!
Thank you.