Gustav Klimt Nachlass

We are at Amy's parents' for a few days. As Amy said, I mostly slept on the flight to the States. I usually pass out on airplanes. (A membership in the five mile high club is still in our future.)

When we reached Chicago, we deposited our stuff at the house, which is in the suburbs, and returned to the city to meet up with a friend from graduate school for dinner and drinks. Amy, who doesn't sleep on planes, was dead tired by the time we got home. Staying up late this way killed any residual jet-lag though.

While Amy and her parents were out having dinner this evening, I stayed in to take care of some work. (For one thing, our taxes are extremely late!) When I took a break, I noticed among Amy's bookshelves, cluttered with the volumes we left behind on the move, a catalogue from a Klimt exposition.

The paintings are by now iconic of fin de siècle Vienna, the Secession movement, Art Nouveau. It's the drawings I found engrossing tonight.

The important ones, the ones he sold, he signed in capital letters, the given name sitting atop the surname, the U indistinguishable from the V:

GVSTAV
KLIMT
The lesser works have an extra word added beneath: NACHLASS.

Where Egon Schiele twisted and exaggerated the human form, Klimt is essentially honest. There is a cleanness to his line, an economy in the gestures that belies their weight and occasional messiness. In these sketches, I see verisimilitude.

Klimt likes the same things I like: a woman with upturned buttocks; a nude (seated or standing) raising her arms high above her head thereby bringing the breasts to prominence; a woman lying on the bed: naked below, her thighs apart, a hand on the pubis, the fingers in an arch: reaching, seeking, finding. He likes two women in tandem, asleep and spooned together — lesbianism when it still had the ability to shock.

I remember my first time watching two women at play, observing how they made love, the smoothness of the motions, the fluidity of movements, foreplay stretched out like the hours of the night, kisses and touches, how it is all grace and glide. I remember having two of them to command, instructing them to 69 or finger each other or tribade for their pleasure and mine. I remember joining them, the way their attention converged on my cock, being in one and then the other, the velvet grip of one woman's pussy so different in juxtaposition to the next.

Jen cradled my balls in her hands. Her fingers brushed the perineum while her lips wrapped about my shaft. She prepared me with saliva and tongue and placed me inside Amy's anus. She kissed us both while we fucked and cleaned my cock afterward. We are spending Fourth of July weekend at Jen's. She has a new boyfriend.

Gustav Klimt worked in his studio "surrounded by mysterious, naked women who, while he stood silent before his easel, wandered up and down his workshop, sprawled, lazed about, and made the best of the day, always ready at a signal from the Master to hold obediently still whenever he spotted a pose, a movement, that attracted his sense of beauty when captured hurriedly in a quick sketch." I wonder if the Master had sex with the models in his drawings, with two (or more) at once.

Would that a life in physics were the same. I could use the distraction between one page of equations and the next.