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JON FERGUSON

Dear Gustav and Egon,

You have both been dead now for a hundred and one years. I have lived during the last seventy of those years. It is high time I apologize to both of you.

Until a week ago, I never appreciated you. I was an unseeing unthinking idiot. My opinion about you was totally false. I was unappreciative of your genius. I had a stupid prejudice against you for three reasons. First, I tended to dislike paintings with people in them. I saw enough people every day. I liked abstraction and color in painting. I liked painting that was different from what I saw in the world. The second reason is that almost every time I saw a reproduction of one of your paintings in a magazine, book, or newspaper, it was the famous “Kiss” painting, the one with the gold leafing and the couple embracing. I saw it a thousand times. I thought you, Gustav, were “commercial”. I thought you were shallow, sloppy romantic, and somehow just out to sell your stuff. And dumbly I put you Egon in the same basket. Thirdly, though I had lived in Switzerland for forty-six years and had been to Paris at least forty times, I had never been to Vienna. In my university years French culture had been number one on the intellectual hit parade, i.e. Sartre’s “No Exit”, Camus’s “The Stranger” and “The Plague”, Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary and “the Sentimental Education”, Levi-Strauss’s anthropology, Stendhal’s “The Red and the Black”, Van Gogh’s death in southern France was somehow cool, Delacroix was French, Andre Gide and Cocteau were French, Picasso had spent most of his life in France, the Boulevards St. Michel and St. Germaine were the place to be, Notre Dame was the church of churches, the Louvre had the Mona Lisa, and of course Montmartre, that little hill next to the Sacré Coeur, was home to so many “must” painters, i.e. people with names that sounded like prophets – Degas, Matisee, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Utrillo, Modigliani, Monet, Mondrian, and Steinlen. That was where I wanted to be. That was where the action was.

So for years and years I went to France whenever I could. I ate French food and drank French wine; I watched films by Godard, Truffaut, Renoir, and Resnais; I wandered the Bourgogne countryside, and drove down to the Riviera. I had been sucked into thinking that France was the cultural and intellectual capital of the world. Of course New York was cool, but for me, an American, it was never as cool as Paris.

I rarely went to Germany and I never went to Austria. The Germanic world was somehow second-rate. Klimt and Schiele couldn’t box in the same ring with Cezanne and Gauguin.  Only Nietzsche was the exception. But hadn’t he tossed German culture in the garbage bin? Of course I knew Freud was from Vienna. But at a rather early age I thought Freud was full of baloney (actually I still pretty much do). I never wanted to make love to my mother or kill my father. I had no idea what an “ego” was, much less a “subconscious”. For me “consciousness” has always been one of the greatest mysteries of all and I always thought the “subconscious” was so deep and went back so far, that it was ridiculous to even think we could begin to understand it. And yes, I had read Kafka. I never forgot the man who became a bug or the man never knowing why he was on trial, but it just wasn’t enough to get me to Vienna. As for Mozart, somehow I associated him more with Salzburg than Vienna and getting to Salzburg always seemed like a complicated affair.

Other than my forty trips to Paris, I did find time to go to London, Bathe, Edinburg, Rome, Venice (five times at least), Sorrento, Milan, Budapest, Brussels, Oostende, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Seville, Madrid, Palma, Antalya, Marrakesh, Hammamet, Bangkok, Phuket, Hong Kong, Copenhagen, Malmö, and Heidelberg.

But life seemed too short to go to Austria…

O what a fool I was! Last week I finally went to Vienna. I have my children to thank. A three-day trip was my 70^th birthday present. Probably the best present I’ve ever got in my life. I want you to know that today it might be my favorite city in the world for a hundred reasons. But two of those reasons are you, you Gustav Klimt and you Egon Schiele. Your paintings pierced my skin, set fire to my frazzled soul, played hopscotch with my battered brain, and brought tears to my weary eyes. I saw your works at the Belvedere, Leopold, and Albertina museums. Everything was beautifully presented. Beauty, life, guts, joy, mystery, suffering, infinity. It’s all there. I now consider you two of the greatest painters ever to live.

This is not the time or the place to analyze your work and your genius. What I want to say here is that I am sorry for being so small-minded for so many years with regard to who you were, what you lived, and how you painted. My stupid uninformed prejudices had kept me away from your glorious work and your beautiful city. It is that way for so many things in life.

Sincerely and humbly,

Jon Ferguson                          

Morges, Switzerland,   December 13, 2019