“The
imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is
healthy; but there is a space of life between in which the soul is in ferment,
the character is undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick
sighted; hence proceeds mawkishness.”
Keats
“His is the quintessential coming-of-age story, more
commonly told in first novels than in the visual arts. Whereas older painters
may wistfully look back on their youths, Schiele was one of the few who had the
technical virtuosity to express those experiences as they were happening. His
watercolours and drawings, executed so rapidly and spontaneously, have a
diaristic quality. In these works, we watch Schiele literally grow up, almost
day by day... Much of the uniqueness of Schiele’s achievement derives from the
fact that he recorded experiences of identity formation and sexual discovery
that older artists tend to repress – and he too, of course, gradually learned
to repress them.”
Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele: Drawings and Watercolours,
London: Thames & Hudson, 2003, P.447.
“Orthodox modernism is the broad-scale and almost century
long attempt to counter the complexity of the world with its own reduction.
Egon Schiele, born in 1890, would attempt this on no lesser scale in his
pictures, in paintings and drawings they reveal a phenomenal talent. And yet,
despite their virtuosity, they indulge in a single perspective: the artist’s
own enormous ego, which in a kind of tunnel vision narrows the natural panorama
before his eyes to his own subjective sensations.”(Rainer Metzger, Vienna Around 1900: The Duration of Denial,
‘Vienna 1900 and The Heroes of Modernism’,
Editor Christian Brandstatter, London: Thames & Hudson, 2005, P.26.)
For years, I toyed with
the idea of writing about Schiele. However, I found the task unusually
difficult. The essay I would have written as a teenager, was totally different
to the one I have written as a middle-aged man. Looking at his narcissistic
self-portraits and terror nudes at the age of fifteen, I thanked God for
revealing a young man as tormented, bewildered and thirsty for carnal knowledge
as myself. Looking at his nudes of teenage girls of similar ages to my own - my
responses were that of a peer. Yet now as a middle-aged man, I frankly find
many of them hard to look at. I have less difficulty with his drawings and
paintings of the seventeen-year-old Wally and later of his wife Edith. Nevertheless,
those from his Neulengbach period now strike me as highly problematic.
However, in one crucial respect my response to Schiele’s nudes has not changed – I think they are more than works of crass pornography - I believe them to be psychic explorations. After all, if Schiele had wanted to arouse his viewers, surely he would have produced work that created a fantasy about the body. His nudes on the other hand are quite different. He sought to show the self-possession, frailty, ugliness and heart-breaking humanity of his models. Yes, some of the poses of his models were that of the hardcore pin-up including scenes of masturbation and lesbian embraces – but many others were of that of the theatrical actress or pathological victim in torment. Therefore, in a sense - like his landscapes and town scenes - they were self-portraits in another form.
However, in one crucial respect my response to Schiele’s nudes has not changed – I think they are more than works of crass pornography - I believe them to be psychic explorations. After all, if Schiele had wanted to arouse his viewers, surely he would have produced work that created a fantasy about the body. His nudes on the other hand are quite different. He sought to show the self-possession, frailty, ugliness and heart-breaking humanity of his models. Yes, some of the poses of his models were that of the hardcore pin-up including scenes of masturbation and lesbian embraces – but many others were of that of the theatrical actress or pathological victim in torment. Therefore, in a sense - like his landscapes and town scenes - they were self-portraits in another form.
I think what Schiele
was doing was playing a game of one-up-man-ship with his peers. Neurosis was
fashionable in Vienna in the 1900s, and Schiele must have decided to be even
more neurotic and excessive than his peers and elders. Like Oskar Kokoschka who
had drawn circus children naked in 1906-7, and later had become infamous for
shaving his head like a convict, eating lumps of raw meat in public and having
a life-size doll made of his bewitching muse Alma Mahler - after she had dumped
him. Every bad boy needs a few doors to kick in.
Where Gustav Klimt had
idolized, worshiped and elevated women to an impossibly beautiful and magnetic
level – Schiele sought to reduce them to the level of himself – a carnal young
man surging with hormones and obsessed with sex. As Erwin Mitsch (a past
curator of The Albertina Museum in Vienna, which holds the largest collection
of master works on paper in the world and one of the largest collections of
Schiele’s works) observed in his groundbreaking book on the young Austrian: “Schiele’s eroticism is difficult to define.
It is often accompanied by an expression of almost childlike, naive
astonishment, and can suddenly take on the nature of helpless terror and
deepest despair. Many of his exhibitionist representations of himself reflect
this panic and a fear that closely borders on hysteria.” (Erwin Mitsch, ‘The Art of Egon Schiele’, Oxford:
Phaidon, 1975, P.49.)
Civilization is a double-edged
sword – with rights to personal expression comes responsibility and
accountability. This is something Schiele only learnt near the end of his life.
As for the ‘autonomy’ of art and ‘artistic inquiries’ I find such blather a
mask and deceit. It is a con that artists themselves often fall into - for fear
that they would see themselves as others do - and thus lose their ‘divine’
powers of expression. Art may be the expression of an individual but the
individual is not an island unto themselves. Just because some has a special
talent for art does not make them a good human being – that is just a conceit
and one we do not extend to anyone else – even priests and nuns.
Schiele spent much of
his short life - in rebellion against the lies, hypocrisy and deceitful masks
of human life – yet ironically the history of his oeuvres reception has simply
been a compounding of hypocrisy. I have yet to see any of his many male writers
posed with their cock in hand or many female writers on Schiele posed naked in
stockings with their legs spread for inspection on the jacket cover of their
books. Yet they all talk about the hypocrisy of Schiele’s times!
Looking at a book on
Schiele in Easons bookshop in 1986, I felt an erotic hand-grenade had gone off
in my hands. I knew I would never look at art the same way again. I suddenly
felt understood by a young man - who had died nearly 53 years before me in a
country I had never set foot. By then I had been painting in watercolours for
about two and a half years and had studied, and copied many of the English and
American watercolourists. I had thus grown to think watercolour was only good
for idyllic landscapes or preparatory studies for more ambitious oil paintings.
So to see how this young Austrian took the most traditional even reactionary
medium - which was full of technical rules and customs - and use them to create
such proto-Punk nudes was a revelation.
The way he painted himself and his many female models naked – pained, shamed, carnal, aware of death and fearful of their burgeoning sexuality – gave me a shudder of psychological empathy. I had seen erotic art before in other books devoted to 16th to 20th engravings, watercolours and sketches by mostly crude and vulgar draughtsmen with limited knowledge of anatomy - as well as a few minor works by great masters. However, Schiele was the first undoubted draughtsman of genius who produced voluminous erotic works that could rank alongside the likes of Michelangelo for sculptural power. Schiele like Dalí was able to express vulgar, obscene, perverted and pathological themes and still gain the grudging respect of elderly academics – through the sheer genius of his technical skill and originality - and I greatly admired him because of this.
It was also around the age of fifteen, that I began to see reports and debates about the sexual abuse of children and teenagers. To be honest I did not believe them, or that such a thing was possible. I now know as we all do that many such reports were not the malicious fantasies of children, but a nauseating reality. We all have lost our innocence in that respect. Yet there are many different ways in which a child can be abused. Today we fixate on sexual abuse, while continuing to underplay the emotional abuse and neglect of children. The one child in Schiele’s story - that has never been properly loved and understood - was in fact Schiele himself. His mother never seems to have loved him or given him affection, perhaps because after the miscarriage of two other boys, she was depressive herself, and put too many expectations on Egon. He watched his father who he idolized when young, go mad and then die of syphilis. In compensation, he withdrew into himself and his art, which he made so grandiose and aggressive, that no one could see the real victim of the story - not even himself. In this interpretation I have been influenced by the writings of Alice Miller who discussed the nature of grandiosity and its links with depression: “Narcissus was in love with his idealized picture, but neither the grandiose nor the depressive ‘Narcissus’ can really love himself. His passion for his false self not only makes object-love impossible but also love for the one person who is fully entrusted to his care: he himself.” (Alice Miller, The Drama of Being A Child, Translated by Ruth Ward, London: Virago Press, 1987, P.49.)
They say beware the company you keep in life – so too in art. Schiele lead me astray but he also liberated and befriended me. After him, I became a more authentic artist and began expressing my life in its own idiosyncratic oddity. Inspired by Schiele, I dropped out of school and became antagonistic towards Art Colleges. He also became the first major yard-stick against which I judged myself and my own artistic efforts. I took to dressing in black at all times. I painted my bedroom walls black and red and furnished my room with black furniture and even had black silk bed-sheets. Schiele encouraged me to be unashamed by my inner turmoil and put it down on paper. Where Schiele had dipped his toes in madness I jumped right in. I vowed to outdo Schiele in transgressiveness and sought to become the most honest and transgressive artist of all time.
Egon Schiele, painter,
draughtsman, writer and proto-body-artist was born in Tulln on the River Danube
on 12th June 1890. His
father Adolf Eugen Schiele (1851-1905) was a stationmaster with the Imperial
Austrian Railways, his mother Marie Schiele was a homemaker. Had Schiele’s
father not got sick and then died, it is likely that he would have been given
no choice but to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the Austrian
railways. He was the third child and only son. His elder sister Elvira was
seven years his senior, Melanie four years older while his younger and
favourite sister Gertrud was four years his junior.
In 1896, he went to
school in Tulln and later attended a grammar school in Krems. Scheile’s first
drawings were of trains. They were astonishingly precise and detailed works for
an eight year old to have produced and their technical character suggest he
might have suffered from a mild form of autism. They look nothing like the
slap-dash, free-form drawings of children his age - in fact; they look like the
amateur, eccentric efforts of a middle-aged man with a compass and ruler. Only
the whimsical plumes of smoke from the engines give away the heart of a boy.
Every biography of
Schiele notes that in 1902, his father was forced to retire at the age of 52
because of “mental confusion.” What
they do not say is how long it took the authorities or his family to come to
this realization. Surely, Adolf Schiele had progressively become mentally
unhinged, before they took the opportunity - to force him out of his job? As to
what was the exact cause of his “mental confusion”, that is still open to
debate. Collectors who had large holdings of Schiele’s work, tended to down
play the possibility of a mental illness or venereal disease - such were the
stigma of these afflictions. While writers of a more Romantic bent tended to
play it up. I am in the latter camp. The most likely cause was the debilitating
effects of syphilis a very common disease at the time and which some suggest
Adolf passed on to his wife on their wedding night. One day, when angered by
Egon’s neglect of his studies in favour of drawing, his father destroyed his
sketchbook - a horrific act to inflict on a young artist. Yet in Egon’s case,
an attempt to curb his creativity - only served to make him dig his heals in
more. By 1904, it was noted that his father burnt all the families share
certificates in the stove – thus robbing them of their financial security. At
meal times, he would insist the family set the table for an imaginary guest who
they would have to treat with respect. Again, some dispute these stories. On the 1st of January 1905 Adolf
Schiele died, leaving the fourteen and a half year old Egon especially grief
stricken. His uncle Leopold Czihaczek became his guardian.
Later, in a letter to
his childhood friend Anton Peschka from 12th July 1913, Schiele
remembered his father and the affect his death had on him: “... even Gerti doesn’t know... how much and what mental torments I
suffer. I don’t know whether there’s anyone else at all who remembers my father
with such sadness. I don’t know who is able to understand why I visit those places
where my father used to be and where I deliberately experience the pain in
hours of melancholy... I carry inside me the memory that is more [or] less bound up with externals. – Why do I
paint graves and many similar things? – because this [memory] continues to live on in me.”(Quoted in Egon Schiele, Klaus Albrecht Schroder,
Albertina, Vienna, and Prestel Verlag, Munich, 2005, P.12.)
So in recap between
about the age of eleven and fifteen Schiele had to watch his father slowly go
mad and then die and was estranged from his mother. How did he cope? By
immersing himself in the dream world of paint! In school, his performance was
so bad he was held back a year twice – but in his art, he was already soaring
above his peers. Art would be his kingdom! As Alice Miller has note about
high-achievers: “Behind manifest
grandiosity, there constantly lurks depression, and behind a depressive mood
there often hide unconscious (or conscious but split off) fantasies of
grandiosity. In fact, grandiosity is the defence against depression, and
depression is the defence against the deep pain over the loss of the self.” (Alice
Miller, ‘The Drama of Being A Child’,
Translated by Ruth Ward, London: Virago Press, 1987, P.56.)
Making little progress in high school, he was withdrawn at an early age. His talent for art was also becoming unavoidable even if his mother fought against it tooth and nail. At the age of fifteen, he produced his first self-portraits - thus beginning a life-long fascination with his own appearance - that would culminate in over 100 self-portraits. From the age of 15 to 19, Schiele’s work was that of a talented student, but it was also rather repressed, illustrative, schematic and formal looking. He experimented with a broad range of styles, subjects and techniques – still trying to find himself. It was only at the age of twenty that his work would achieve stupendous facility - combined with real feeling and an uncanny vision.
Marie Schiele tried to
get her son a job with her brother in law in the family block-making factory,
however her sister refused to help remarking: “that a boy should cause his mother so much trouble seems to my husband
a very serious offense... I have no sympathy for the brat either; a lad should
behave himself... only useful people get anywhere in life...” Although
Marie objected to Egon’s desire to become an artist, she finally had to accept
that it might be his only option. He applied to the School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna, where his drawings were
considered so good that they recommend he apply to the Academy of Fine Arts. As Frank Whitford has pointed out: “This advice appears to reflect an altruism
and a belief in the superiority of a rival institution that are most unusual in
teachers of any subject. It is easier to believe that they saw signs in the
young man of a troublesome student and so wished him on the opposition.” (Frank
Whitford, Egon Schiele, London:
Thames & Hudson, 1981, P.32.)
In 1906, against his
guardian’s wishes Schiele took the Academy
of Fine Arts entrance exam, which he passed unlike Adolf Hitler who
notoriously failed to gain entry twice over the following two years. Maria moved the family to Vienna -
close to where his uncle Leopold Czihaczek lived. Schiele took his lunch at his
uncle’s house and his uncle gave him a stipend for his living expenses and art
materials. Schiele drew and painted his uncle and aunt frequently as well as
accompanying them to their summer resort Steinbach on the Brenner. However,
within a few years they had a bitter parting of the ways - when his uncle refused
to support him any longer.
In the Academy of Fine
Arts, Schiele became a pupil under the notoriously reactionary portrait, history
and fresco painter Christian Griepenkerl, who had been a professor at the
Academy since 1874. Just turned sixteen, Schiele was the youngest pupil in his
class, however from the outset he clashed with the pedantic and controlling
Griepenkerl who had a history of conflicts with his young, talented but
difficult pupils like Richard Gerstl in the past. Recounting his time in the
Academy, Schiele told Benesch that one day Griepenkerl had said to him: “For God’s sake don’t tell anyone I taught
you.” (Heinrich Benesch, November 1943, First Published in 1965 by Verlag
der Johannesepresse, NewYork, translated and Quoted in Egon Schiele, Albertina, Vienna, and Prestel Verlag, Munich, 2005,
P.381.) Yet he is only remembered today, if at all, as the teacher of Schiele
and Gerstl! On another occasion, the pedantic, academic painter of portraits
and history paintings had retorted, “The
Devil must have shat you into my class.”
The Academies curriculum
had not changed in over two hundred years, which was normal in European
Academies at the time. Students started with drawing from plasters casts, then
to figure drawing from the life-model and the study of drapes and compositional
exercises. Only after mastering drawing could they progress to the actual
painting classes.
Schiele was to later
pour scorn on his Academic years – trying to suggest that he was a self-made
artist and playing up his conflicts with Griepenkerl. However as Jane Kallir
one of his finest cataloguers suggested: “Griepenkerl
required the students to produce one drawing a day, which was far below
Schiele’s normal quota... he took readily to the professors practice of giving
his students timed assignments. Schiele became something of a speed demon in
his drawings... He began a lifelong quest for the perfect line: an unbroken
continuum in which speed and accuracy were inseparable... In part, Schiele’s
new facility for line may have been an unwitting legacy of Griepenkerl, who
stressed contour drawing as a prerequisite to fresco painting.” (Jane
Kallir, Egon Schiele: Drawings and
Watercolours, London: Thames & Hudson, 2003, P.42-44.) Certainly, the
early crudeness of his painting technique in oils, must have been a result of
leaving the academy early, before fully progressing into the painting classes
and learning his craft.
Later, in a letter to
Arthur Roessler (one of his first patron’s and critical supporters), Scheile
described his early years as a struggling art student. Laying on thick the
story-book nature of his poverty, in a typically self-pitying manner he wrote: “When I made my own independent way,
against the wish of my mother and my guardian, in order to be a freelance
artist, I was in a wretched state. I wore clothes, shoes and hats cast off by
my guardian, all too big for me. The coat lining was torn, the material worn,
and it was baggy and loose on my thin frame. The shoes were worn out, with
cracks in the uppers and big holes in the soles, and I had to drag my feet in
the tattered old boats. The felt hat was faded, fingered, and greasy in places,
and I had to stuff whole folded newspapers into it to prevent it from falling
over my eyes. Undergarments were a particularly delicate item in my wardrobe in
those days. I do not know whether the fantastic rags I had – they were like
tattered remnants of linen – could really be described as underwear at all. My
shirt collars were inherited from my father, and far too big for my thin neck,
and too high into the bargain. So on Sundays and other special occasions I wore
unusual paper collars that I had cut out myself; they were very presentable and
at least they were clean, though unfortunately not durable. To crown it all, my
hair was long and I was usually unshaven. In all, I did not remotely strike
people as the ‘nice young man from a decent civil servant family’ that I in
fact essentially was. My accommodation matched my ‘grooming’. It consisted of
one meagre room, where the light that entered by the dirty window was dim. From
the walls, which sloped in part, the faded wallpaper hung off in tatters.
Little by little I tore off these scraps of wallpaper, which was of a revolting
pattern, entirely, and every week I would paint one more patch of wall plain
white. Whenever I saw my mother I would get reproaches, and that was all; from
my guardian I received five crowns every Monday. The money would mainly go on
twenty cigarettes, which understandably did not last me seven days, so that,
come the weekend, I was obliged to fish the butts out of the rubbish and improvise
a new cigarette that way.” Nevertheless, friends of Schiele at the time
like Paris von Guttersloh, noted that he was always dressed immaculately and
clean shaven.
When not in the
Academy, Schiele took the time to produce far more personal experiments in;
inks, watercolours, gouache and oils. From 1905-07 he produced over 100
paintings - mostly landscapes- influenced by Viennese Secessionist painting
which itself was influenced by the lessons of French Post-Impressionism. In
these idiosyncratic early oil paintings, Schiele could not resist the
dilettantish use of pencil - to score lines in the wet paint in order to
describe the branches of trees and the details of buildings. Schiele’s other
early paintings and drawings were influenced by the Jugendstil movement which was essentially a form of Germanic Art Nouveau which was particularly
influential on popular design, though it could also count Gustav Klimt amongst
it serious artists. In these contradictory paintings, Schiele’s desire to add
ornamental abstract designs in homage to Klimt battled it out with his growing
desire for an expressive depiction of the figure.
In 1907, Schiele
introduced himself to Gustav Klimt and the two were to remain friends until
Klimt’s death in 1918. Klimt was famously in love with women. His studio would
be filled with lounging, flame haired models. As they fixed their hair, posed
for his large oil paintings or masturbated he would draw them in quick sketches
- made without them even noticing. The floor of his studio was covered with piles
of these studies. Klimt’s drawings were erotic hymns to female companionship
and mutual indulgence. They have an intimacy and privacy to them that makes you
feel lucky to be brought into them. They are some of the sexiest, most
depressingly great drawings I have ever seen. Schiele’s drawings on the other
hand are often the opposite of sexy. They make you wonder about desire without
actually desiring.
Schiele asked Klimt if
he had talent, “Yes, much too much!”
The pair would exchange drawings and Klimt would introduce Schiele to prominent
collectors and critics. For a couple of years Egon brazenly pastiched Klimt’s
style and claimed to be the “Silver Klimt.” Schiele would make much of his
friendship with Klimt once painting himself as a seer beside a blinded Klimt in
The Hermits of 1912. So, perhaps Egon
saw him as a substitute father figure but he was also determined to be seen as
a master alongside Klimt. As for Klmit, he had many acolytes and lovers, and
was generous towards many other young artists. Therefore, he perhaps did not
share such strong feelings for Schiele. In the same year, Schiele travelled to
Triest with his twelve-year-old sister Gertrude, where he made beautifully
stylized, oil and pencil paintings of its harbour made on cardboard. Later in
1910, more controversially he made some nude drawings of his sister Gerti. Some
have wondered if they shared an incestuous relationship. However, later in
1912/13, when defending his friend Anton Peschka and Gerti’s new relationship, Schiele
wrote to a friend; “he knows what a rogue
he would be if he were to break off the plant before it ripens, and Gerti would
be a vile person in my eyes if she suffered being touched in that way.” (Quoted
from Art in Hand: Schiele, Kai Artinger, Cologne: Konemann, 1999, P.35.)
In 1908, Schiele had
his first of many public exhibitions - appropriately enough in the Augustinian
monastery in Klosterneuburg. It ran for about six weeks and ten works
represented him - he was only seventeen. Throughout his life, Schiele presented
himself as a misunderstood genius. Yet few young artists in art history, have
been blessed with such early support by collectors or had so many exhibitions
at such a young age. However, it was never enough for Schiele who needed
constant affirmation.
In his final diploma
from 3ed July 1909, his performance was recorded as follows: “Painting of the human figure: ‘satisfactory’
– Exercises in composition: ‘Satisfactory’ - Effort: ‘Satisfactory’ – Progress:
‘Satisfactory’ His conduct was ‘entirely’ in line with Academy rules.” (Quoted
in Egon Schiele, Klaus Albrecht
Schroder, Albertina, Vienna, and Prestel Verlag, Munich, 2005, P.12.) Hardly
the results of a genius, but quite in line with the quality of his academic
work that survives from this period. His charcoal drawings from plaster-casts
and portraits of family friends were technically accomplished works, but their nothing
that special, and they lacked individuality. Given that within a few years he
would become one of the greatest draughtsmen of the human form in Western art,
his life drawings in the Academy were astonishingly schematic, wooden and soulless.
I suspect Schiele was uncomfortable working in the academy, under the glare of
Griepenkerl, all his work in the academy was marked by a self-consciousness
that was to be absent in his later masterpieces.
In 1909, Schiele left
the Academy and with fellow artists Anton Peschka, Anton Faistauer, Franz
Weigel, Hans Massmann, Karl Zakovsek and others founded the Neukunstgruppe. The group later expanded
to include Paris von Guttersloh and Hans Bohler. Schiele who was both the
president and secretary of the group also wrote the groups manifesto for its
first exhibition at the Salon Pisko in Vienna, which later appeared in a
slightly different version of Die Aktion in
1914: “...There are very few new artists,
however; very few. The new artist is, and must be, unconditionally himself; he
must be a creator, he must build the foundations entirely alone without
recourse to anything that has been handed down from the past. Then he is a new
artist. Let each of us one – our-selves... In truth, however, all new artists
create solely for themselves and give shape to whatever they want. They portray
and give shape to everything. Their fellow men relive the experiences of the
artist today in exhibitions. The exhibition is today indispensable.” (Quoted
in Egon Schiele, Klaus Albrecht Schroder, Albertina, Vienna, and Prestel
Verlag, Munich, 2005, P.17.) During the year, Schiele also wrote a number of
Expressionist prose-poems notable for their adolescent egotism, weltschmez and
love of nature.
Schiele also exhibited
four paintings in the International Art Show in Vienna which also included
canvases by van Gogh including, The
Artist’s Bedroom in Arles, which Schiele’s later patron Carl Reininghaus
bought for his collection. The Dutch man’s polychromatic canvas would stay in
his mind and in 1911 – he would pay homage to it in his rendering of his own
bedroom – where black’s, creams, ochre’s and reds would dominate a room so
frail looking it seems unable to stay upright.
Like his father,
Schiele was a spendthrift and thought nothing of blowing all of his money as
soon as he got it. He designed many of his own clothes, made his spiky hair a
trademark and his studio was filled with all black furniture and an odd
assortment of toys, ornaments and folk and Asian artefacts he had collected. He
was a decadent dandy. Another example of Schiele’s narcissism was the
prominence and variation of his signature – which he usually placed near the
centre of his drawings and paintings. Frequently Schiele depicted himself with
his doppelgänger – a visual expression of his split personality – between that
of the angel or mystic and demon. Schiele was a chameleon and his art reflected
his constantly shifting interior life.
In Austria in 1908,
Richard Gerstl a more troubled artist, had depicted himself, agitatedly
painting naked, in his largish oil painting Nude
Self-Portrait with Palette. The painting had followed an unhappy lover
affair, which had left him alone and isolated - only a few months later he
killed himself. The highly-strung Gerstl had painted himself haloed by a white
light, his body surging with energy, his scrotum an impotent smear and his face
on the verge of tears. It was a crucial proto-Expressionist canvas, however
Gerstl was a solitary whose work only began to be exhibited and recognized
after the Second World War and Schiele - like most in Vienna - knew nothing of
his work. Schiele may have known the Dürer, yet to the narcissistic young Egon,
the sub-genre of naked self-portraits must have seemed like an open field for
him to exploit. In the 1900s in art as in life, women posed and men looked.
Posing was passive and compliant and looking was active and powerful. Only
homosexuals, deviants or maniacs would have wanted to paint their own cocks or
turn their own bodies into objects for inspection! Egon rampaged through this
social and artistic custom - becoming his own muse. In fact, these
nude-self-portraits were Schiele’s most radical contribution to Modern and
Post-Modern Art. In this theatre of self, he played many roles; narcissistic
boy, naked dandy, deviant masturbator, shaman, lunatic and lover.
As Klaus Albrect
Schroder pointed out: “All Schiele’s
self-portraits are the signs of a fragmented personality; his double
self-portraits... are the signs of a split personality. His constant assumption
of various roles, his borrowing of masks – whether ‘monk’ or ‘St. Sebastian’ –
exacerbates the difficulty of locating his centre, the unchanging core of his
nature. Who and what is Egon Schiele? An ascetic or an onanist? The quite
individual described by his contemporaries or one who screams and arches his
back in anguish? Each self-portrait by Schiele takes a different aspect of his
ego as its subject: each one throws away the unity of beauty and character
which was the ideology of the self-contained individual at peace with himself
and with the world. It is pointless to search for the authentic Schiele.
Exterior and interior, surface and depths, are no longer quantities that relate
to each other.” (Klaus Albrecht Schroder, Schiele and His Contemporaries: Austrian Painting and Drawing from 1900
to 1930 from the Leopold Collection, Vienna, Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1989,
P.28.)
Egon Schiele wanted to
demonstrate to the world the truth. Not his particular truth, but THE TRUTH.
The world was full of twenty-year-old men with similar views of their own
exalted status as prophets, visionaries and shaman. However, none of them had
anything like his mixture of technical skill, style and egotistical vision at
such an early age.
The notion of the
artist as inspired visionary dates back at least as far as Giotto in Western
Art. Schiele was merely one of the last in a long line of artists who laid
claim to the divine power of the seer. As Klaus Albrecht Schroder and other
have pointed out, the fact that he did so when mechanical reproduction and
photography was beginning to undermine such a position - made his work part of
a reaction by the last artisans against the machine. It was both an elitist and
anachronistic position. One in which the likes of Schiele made a spiritual
withdrawal from the modern world – into the endless lands of their own
subjectivity – making generalizations about humanity on the basis of their own
individuality.
How wonderful it must
have been to be Egon Scheile! He really was a divine presence in a largely
mediocre world! How awful it must have been to be Egon Schiele – isolated from
the world like an aesthetic Frankenstein whose truth and beauty was so strange
and frightful to ordinary people. Scheile was estranged from humankind and
estranged from God - a youth awakening to the limits of the world and trying to
push against them in his art.
In 1910, Schiele met
the art critic Arthur Roessler who introduced him to a number of Austrian
collectors. Roessler became Schiele’s chief advocate and defender, a role he
would continue after Schiele’s death. However, he took a very Romanized and
aggressive approach to Schiele’s life and work which later writers have tried
to down-play.
Another fortuitous
meeting was with Heinrich Benesch a railway official with limited funds but who
would become one of his most loyal collectors. Heinrich Benesch described
Schiele on their first meeting in November 1910: “I arrived to find a slim young man of above average height whose
bearing was upright and unaffected; a thin, pale, but not sickly face, large
dark eyes and thick, longish, dark brown hair that stood out in all directions.
His manner was a little shy, a little reserved, and at the same time
self-confident. He said little, but when I spoke to him, his face always lit up
with the glimmer of a faint smile...” (Heinrich Benesch, November 1943,
First Published in 1965 by Verlag der Johannesepresse, NewYork, translated and
Quoted in Egon Schiele, Albertina,
Vienna , and Prestel Verlag, Munich, 2005, P.380.)
Schiele produced a
series of drawings of his Academy friend and mime artist Erwin Osen. In the clinic of the gynaecologist Erwin von
Graff, Schiele made drawings of pregnant and sick women. They were rather callus
paintings, made without compassion, yet they had an uncanny documentary feel.
Yet again, Schiele was breaking taboos and barriers – through his art and for
his art. He was making the private – public. Meanwhile his friend Erwin Osen
visited the state mental hospital Am
Steinhof to make sketches for a planed lecture entitled: “Pathological Expression in Portraiture.” No
doubt, Schiele studied his friend’s sketches and discussed the body-language of
the mentally unhinged, photographs of which had become popular in books on
hysteria in women and pathology in men. In
1911, Schiele met Valerie Neuzil,
known as Wally, who became his first girlfriend and favourite model up until
his marriage to Edith Harms in 1915. Wally it is said had modelled for Klimt
and it was perhaps him who introduced or passed her on to Egon. She was
seventeen and from a working-class family. Since Klimt slept with many of his
models - Wally may have been Klimt’s lover. Although she was Egon’s only lover
between 1911-1915, she was certainly not his only model. Yet for the next four years,
she played a leading role in his life, art, and arguably, she was his greatest
muse. Since at the time, artist models were considered little short of
prostitutes, Egon seems to have never considered her marriage material and even
made her sign a contract - stating she was not in love with him. As a boy I
dreamed of meeting a red haired, vivacious muse like Wally, and fell in love
with her through Egon’s passionate drawings of her.
Drawing is one of the
most misunderstood art forms today. Those who cannot draw, have never drawn
from life and know nothing of its history or difficulties, are attracted to
illustrative shaded drawings - the kind people have tattooed on their back or
the kind that look like black and white photographs. But those who have
practiced drawing seriously for decades know that the hardest drawings are in
fact the ones that look so simple – just a few lines often made in less than
thirty minutes. In a shaded drawing made over days, you can make a thousand
little mistakes and still finish up with something that makes you look like a
genius to the village idiots. However, in contour line drawing like that
practiced by Rodin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Klimt, Schiele or Picasso at the time –
there was no room for error. Such an approach of course led to many failed
drawings that ended up in the stove, but its very difficulty proved its
attraction. It was a kind of sport in line, in which the draughtsman was like a
fencer and one mistake could lead to a loss. It was an approach where only a
great artist, inspired and at the height of his powers could make immediate
marks that captured the world in its entire outline. Beyond this, they made
such simple lines - a testament to their unique souls – with gifts that went
beyond mere schooling. Training and incessant work could bring you up to
something like the level, but in the end, you had the talent for it or you did
not. That is why for want of any better explication people used to talk of a
God given gift but in Schiele’s case it was more like a gift from the devil.
A scrap of paper, a stick of black chalk and a
handful of watercolours - and Schiele could blow your mind. His drawing was
beyond the notation of details in an academic and systematic manner. It went
beyond blind drawing, where the draughtsman looked intently at the model and
hardly at the page. It went beyond memory drawing, where the figure was
re-imagined and reconceived on paper. His drawing entered the genius arena - where
all of the above had been assimilated and surpassed - to create something
universal and autonomous. Schiele, would draw his models from life in pencil or
black chalk, but only fill in the colour later from his memory. So while his
drawing was realistic his colouring was Expressionistic and uncanny.
In his explosive drawings of this period,
Schiele’s black chalk lines burst from the centre of the paper – the white
gouache against the tan paper animating even further the explosive power of his
contours. Nevertheless, the white also contained and restricted his torsos.
These drawings were as sharp as cut glass – a modernist reaffirmation of Gothic
stain glass. He would reduce the
picture to its most basic elements leaving the figure surrounded by bare paper,
and giving no suggestion of the rooms in which they posed. This only served to
increase the intensity of the bodies depicted, and gave them a universal and
timeless quality. Schiele painted genitals in a magnetic way – throbbing with
lust and decay. They took on a fantastic quality, which competed with the faces
for attention. In these drawings Schiele proved himself to be an incredible
caricaturist, who freely distorted and accentuated anatomy to make a more
emphatic and carnal observation on the human animal. As Mitsch pointed out: “Schiele’s eroticism has nothing in common
with the decadent sensual knowingness or spiciness of the “fin de siècle.”
Instead it expresses human bondage and is to be understood as a burden that is
painful to bear. Aimed, from the beginning, at outspokenness and truthfulness,
it assumes almost inevitably a daring form... Along with the
impressionistically sensitive eroticism of Rodin and Klimt, that of the Belgian
Felicien Rops seems to have been a particularly strong influence... The
affinity between the two artists is shown by their effective use of clothes and
accessories which reveal more than they hide, and so enhance the erotic impact.”
(Erwin Mitsch, The Art of Egon
Schiele, Oxford: Phaidon, 1975, P.49.)
Schiele’s drawings while nearly always
unmistakable his, were full of invention, experimentation and changes of mood.
He played with composition; often drawing his models from unusual angles like
from above on a ladder or low down on a stool - with them towering above him. After
drawing a model lying on a bed, he would often turn the drawing vertically and
sign it so – creating another eerie effect of levitation. He encouraged his
models to adopt difficult and unnatural poses, so much so, that the sessions became
a partnership. He would do the line drawing in front of the model but then colour
in the drawing after she had gone. He adopted different mediums and mixed them
in unexpected ways and at least in his drawings his use of colour could be
uncanny, daring, emotionally charged and sometimes verging on the abstract. In
this respect, his work differed dramatically from that of the crass, obsessive
pornographer.
Unlike his masterful contemporary Oskar
Kokoschka, Schiele was never a natural ‘painterly-painter’.
As Rudolf Leopold has pointed out “Whereas
Kokoschka went on to evolve a spectacular, almost Baroque painting style,
Schiele was and remained a Gothic artist: a dreamer and a realist at the same
time.” (Rudolf Leopold, ‘Schiele and
His Contemporaries: Austrian Painting and Drawing from 1900 to 1930 from the
Leopold Collection, Vienna’, Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1989, P.46.) He took
many risks in his drawings but far fewer in his paintings. He seemed to lack
the attention-span required for ambitious paintings and thus produced them in a
slap-dash manner. All his figures were bound by a dark contour line and he
rarely exploited oil paint’s sensual possibilities. Frequently his oil
paintings - were merely drawings filled in with cheep paints and wore-out
brushes. Moreover his faulty early technique (he often painted thin over fat)
and the inferiority of his materials, has meant that many of his early oil
paintings have cracked and blistered disastrously.
In his nudes, Schiele frequently exaggerated
the features and body types of his models – making them look thinner and
gaunter. In his landscapes and town scenes, he often altered the view to give
it greater visual impact – sometimes painting the town as though seen from high
up and giving them an anthropomorphic quality where the houses took on the
appearance of heads with the windows as blinded eyes and the doors like shut mouths.
In his self-portraits in particular, he liked to make his own features look
more insane, haggard and malnourished as well as even suggesting amputated
limbs, making clear - his strange mixture of fascination and repulsion - with
his own body. Commenting on Schiele’s nude self-portraits of 1911 Mitsch noted,
“The monologue of the self-portraits
continued throughout 1911. There was now a new accent on weariness and
melancholy, resignation and submission... The pathos of revolt has faded into
weariness and submission; the cry of affliction is followed by an exhausted
collapse. The body is forced into the narrow shape of the picture... The frame
has become a prison from which there is no escape.” (Erwin Mitsch, ‘The Art of Egon Schiele’, Oxford:
Phaidon, 1975, P.31.)
Klaus Albrecht Schroder has pointed out the
“greedy eye” of both Klimt and Schiele and the “unlimited authority” they gave
their own gaze over the bodies of their models both male and especially female,
remarking that: “Ever since the dialogues
of Plato, the eye has been allotted a higher status than the other senses, as
the sense capable of perceiving the essence of things. This distinction is
something that the eye has constantly had to justify by its good conduct in
resisting the blandishments of the body... what has always been despised about
the eye is its capacity for voracious greed. A whole metaphorical tradition of
ocular aggression is encapsulated in Ovid’s oft-repeated phrase about
‘deflowering with the eye alone’. (Klaus Albrecht Schroder, ‘Schiele and His Contemporaries: Austrian
Painting and Drawing from 1900 to 1930 from the Leopold Collection, Vienna’,
Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1989, P.31.)
In 1911, Schiele and Wally rented a summerhouse
with garden in Krumau (his mother’s birthplace) and caused much consternation
amongst the locals, because of their bohemian clothes and improper relationship.
Wally at seventeen was still underage and they were living in an open
relationship. They never attended mass, Schiele insulted passersby in the
street and encouraged local boys and girls to come and pose naked for him. When
he was seen drawing a naked teenager in his garden, his landlord gave him his
notice. They were forced to leave in
August.
The couple moved to a new home in Neulengbach. Again,
Schiele invited neighbourhood children to pose for him. “Schiele, like his great colleague Klimt, was an eroticist. He was very
liberal in sexual matters. This may be acceptable in the case of professional
artist’s models, but not when it comes to children, whom he liked to draw a
great deal, especially in the nude. In doing so, he gave no consideration to
their innocence (as far as this was still intact.) This was a consequence not
of depravity, but of thoughtlessness and a lack of concern. He never indecently
assaulted the children...” Heinrich Benesch, November 1943, First Published
in 1965 by Verlag der Johannesepresse, NewYork, translated and Quoted in Egon Schiele, Albertina, Vienna, and
Prestel Verlag, Munich, 2005, P.385.) Again, I am suspicious of such flattering
descriptions of Schiele by Benesch who had a vested interest (in the form of
the largest single collection of Schiele works which he subsequently donated to
the Albertina Museum in Vienna) in defending and promoting Schiele’s posthumous
reputation.
Friends like Benesch warned Schiele about his
use of underage models but he seems to have taken no notice. But when he took
in a runaway thirteen-year-old girl, her father accused them of abduction. Arrested
on the charge of seducing a minor, Schiele was and put in prison in St. Polten. During the court case, the
judge burnt one of Schiele’s drawings, but the charge of seducing a minor was
dropped. Nevertheless, charged with exposing children to nude drawings in his
studio, Schiele was given a three-day sentence. In all he spent twenty-four
days in prison. He was released on May 8th 1911.
“The Single Orange Was the Only Light.” (19th April 1912.)
“I Feel
Not Punished but Cleansed!” (20th April 1912.)
“The Door
to the Open!”
(21st April 1912.)
“Organic
Movement of Chair and Pitcher.” (21st April 1912.)
“Two of
My Handkerchiefs.” (22ed
April 1912.)
“Art
Cannot Be Modern; Art Is Primordially Eternal.” (22ed April 1912.)
“Hindering
the Artist Is a Crime, It Is Murdering Life in the Bud!” (23ed April 1912.)
“I Love
Antitheses
(24th April 1912.)
“Prisoner!” (25th April
1912.)
“For Art
and for My Loved Ones I Will Gladly Endure to the End!” (25th April
1912.)
“All
Things Balance out Physically Most Surely.” (26th April 1912.)
“My
Wandering Path Leads over Abysses.” (26th April 1912.)
I have read at least
two dozen books on Egon Schiele and in all of them; I have found an evasion of
the issue. Some used the defence of hypocrisy – plenty of Austrian men were
using child prostitutes. Some used historical relativism saying that the age of
consent in Austria in the 1900s was fourteen and thus we should not judge
Schiele by today’s standards. Some have claimed that we simply can never know
what really happened and so we must give Schiele the benefit of the doubt. While
the most popular defence has been to avoid the human issues and concentrate on
the purely aesthetic aspects of Schiele’s art. The most honest summation of the
issue I found was that given by Jean-Louis Gaillemin: “It is also clear that, even if Schiele’s behaviour with the
Neulenbach children was irreproachable, he should never have asked them to pose
for him without seeking their parents’ permission, as some of his friends
advised him to do. What is more, Schiele never concealed the feelings he had
for some of the Madchen, be they slender women or precocious little girls. The
most famous portrait of Poldi Lodzinsky, in which her hands are positioned so
as to stimulate a vagina, suggests that he had a close relationship with her,
or at least he wanted to have one. There is more evidence of this in a prose
poem of 1910: “Portrait of the pale silent young girl: a pollution of my love –
yes, I loved everything. The girl came along. I discovered her face, her
subconscious, her working girl’s hands, I loved everything about her. I had to
paint her, because she was looking at me and was so close to me – Now she has
gone. Now I have nothing left but her body.” (Jean-Louis Gaillemin, Egon Schiele: The Egoist, London:
Thames & Hudson, 2006, P.73)
After the trial, many
of Schiele’s collectors and friends distanced themselves from him – save for
Wally, Heinrich Benesch and Arthur Roessler who remained steadfast. He learned
that agony was exclusive. Everyone wanted a part of his genius but few wanted
his castigation. In 1922, four years after Schiele’s death Roessler published
what he claimed where Schiele’s ‘Prison
Diaries’. It has since been proved that they were forgeries concocted by
Roessler.
As Jane Kallir has
pointed out, from 1913 onwards, Schiele painted few works of children apart
from in 1918 when he would draw a mother and child who were professional models
and their poses were maternal and beyond reproach. So at least he had learned
his lesson.
After his release –
almost in an attempt to flee his demons - he travelled even more, first to
Carinthia and Trieste, then Munich, Bregenz and Zurich. In a telling letter to
his mother in March 1913, Schiele revealed the full extent of his egotism and
narcissistic self-absorption: “Without
doubt I shall be the greatest, the most beautiful, the most valuable, the
purest and the most precious fruit. Through my independent will all beautiful
and noble effects are united in me... I shall be the fruit which after its
decay will still leave behind eternal life; therefore how great must be your
joy – to have born me?” Surely, these high-flown words expressed the simple
thing he had wished she’d said to him as a boy, “I love you.” Given that her
son was now an ex-convict, one can forgive the lack of response she gave him.
In his drawings of 1913-15,
Schiele drew his figures with a line reminiscent of stitches, thorns or barbed
wire. Many of these drawings looked like studies for wire sculptures - such was
his increasing concern to render the heavy physicality of the figures. He began
creating double nudes in which Wally was entwined with a doll like other. In
fact, the depersonalization of all his models became apparent as he searched
for a more autonomous and mature vision of humanity. In collaboration with the
photographer Anton Josef Trcka, Schiele produced a series of portraits of
himself in his studio and posing. He learned etching and woodcut techniques
from Robert Philippi and thus between May and August he produced eight prints.
In January and February
1914, Gustav Pisko’s Salon hosted an exhibition of submitted work for the Carl
Reininghaus Prize. The show included work from twenty-five Austrian and
International artists. Schiele submitted an allegorical canvas called ‘Encounter’. It was subsequently lost
and is known now only through a black and white photograph. Schiele hard up for
money, hoped to win the prize but it went to his friend Paris von Gutersloh.
Insult was added to injury, when A.F. Seligmann in the Neue Freie Presse
ridiculed Schiele’s efforts: “...
Unfortunately he puts his exceptional talents to no other use but to create
horribly mannered and perverse caricature, and to reproduce hideous
hallucinations so ludicrously exaggerated that they make us laugh instead of
shudder...” (Quoted in Egon Schiele, Klaus Albrecht Schroder, Albertina,
Vienna, and Prestel Verlag, Munich, 2005, P.26.)
In 1914, while still
with Wally he courted Edith and Adele Harms the daughters of his landlord, who
lived across from his studio in Vienna. Egon used Wally as an escort initially
in order to seduce these proper middle-class girls whose parents disapproved of
this young man. In his first letter to the sisters written in his idiosyncratic
Gothic print and illuminated with coloured crayon (both serious and childlike
like its form and content), Schiele assured the girls that he was not an
‘apache’ and that his bad-boy stance was just an act. In Schiele’s drawings of
Wally near the end, she began to stare back at him with a mixture of hurt
pride, aggression, confrontation and resignation. Before Egon and Wally parted
he painted Death and The Maiden, one
of his most intimate and moving paintings, in which the lovers embraced, and
Schiele played the part of Death for the last time.
Schiele’s treatment
of Wally in the end was despicable. For all his bad-boy stances, he was going
to dump the working class girl and marry “advantageously.” Wally was good
enough as a girlfriend and model/whore but not good enough to marry – that
required a Madonna. Yet in a cafe, he tried to arrange with Wally to meet once
a year, every summer for a holiday together – without Edith. Horrified by Egon’s
naïve and selfish suggestion, Wally calmly told him it was impossible and
walked out. The pair was never to meet again. Wally joined the Red Cross and
worked as a nurse on the Balkan front – where she was to die of scarlet fever
in December 1917.
On 17th
June 1915, he married Edith Harms and then reported for military duty four days
later. He was assigned guard duties and clerical tasks near Vienna. Unlike
Germany, which gave its nations artists no special treatment (and many like
August Mack and Franz Marc were to die on the front) the Austrian army gave its
artists special non-combat duties away from the front line. However, with his
marriage and conscription, Schiele’s adolescence was over and he had taken on
the duties of the adult world.
In 1916, he worked in
the food supplies section, at the officers POW camp at Muhling in Lower
Austria. During which time he made many tender and humane drawings of Russian
prisoners as well as wonderfully elegant, almost Japanese looking drawings of
the supplies room where he worked. In early September 1916, the art magazine Die Aktion ran a Schiele issue making
Schiele alongside Kokoschka the most famous representative of Austrian
Expressionism.
Schiele’s drawings of
1916-1918, became more sensual, respectful and even self-censoring compared to
those of his earlier periods. Perhaps he was now more conscious of his need to
support his family, secure his reputation and please his public. It is no
coincidence that these late drawings and paintings are the ones turned into
posters today. Some have called Schiele’s drawings of Edith stiff and
unemotional. However, I disagree – they are in fact works of great love,
respect and propriety. Schiele would not reduce his wife to a whore in his work
the way he had Wally and countless other girls. Both Edith and her sister Adele
posed for Schiele and often it is hard to discern which sister posed for which
drawings. After their deaths, Adele claimed that she was having an affair with
Egon at the time and certainly, his drawings of her were more erotic than those
of his wife.
In 1917, with other
leading artists Schiele proposed to establish a “Kunsthalle” artist’s cooperative and produced a poster to
advertise their group. Photographs of Schiele in 1918, showed him prematurely
aged and looking at least ten years older than his twenty-eight years.
In order to support his new wife Schiele began producing more drawings than ever before and his calendar for 1918 for example recorded 177 sessions with models. At their best, they were virtuoso performances in which he threw single lines around the figure - rarely lifting the charcoal from the paper and making few adjustments other than adding some soft shading - which added greater plasticity to the forms. However, at their worst, they had a crude, facile quality and lacked the intensity and transgressive daring of his previous efforts.
His paintings on the
other hand became more highly worked and sensually satisfying – however he was
still only just catching up with the canvases of Kokoschka. While he continued
to use sombre ochre’s, grey’s and cream’s in the figures he began to experiment
with vivid Expressionistic colours in the back grounds. Unfortunately, many of
these late canvases were not completed because of his early death, and one can
only guess how he might have finished them.
On 6th
February 1918, Gustav Klimt died. The following day, Schiele drew three
drawings of Klimt on his deathbed and in the periodical Der Anbruch on 15th
February 1918, paid this tribute: “Gustav
Klimt, an artist of unbelievable perfection, a man of rare profundity, his work
a sacred shrine.”
In March 1918, The Viennese Secession placed the gallery at
Schiele and his Neukunstgruppe’s
disposal. Given a room to himself, he hung nineteen large oil paintings and
twenty-nine drawings. The show was a financial and commercial success. “Schiele's preference is to paint and draw
the ultimate in vice and the ultimate in degradation; woman as an
instinct-ridden herd animal, rid of all the inhibitions of morality and shame.
His art – and it is art – does not smile: it grins a ghastly and distorted grin.”
(Armin Friedemann, Wiener Adendpost, 21st
March 1918.) At last, Schiele had
made it. Nevertheless, fate would not allow him to enjoy his turn in fortune
long.
On 19th
October 1918, Edith contracted the Spanish Flu and died nine days later on 28th
October, she was six months pregnant. The day before she died, Schiele drew his
last portrait of her – with her tired, feverish head in her hand. Schiele
contracted the illness and died three days later on the morning of 31st
October, he was only twenty-eight. His last words (reported by his sister in
law) were, “Now the war is - and I must
go.” Martha Fein took photographs of Schiele on his deathbed and Anton
Sadig made a death mask. On 3ed November 1918 in the cemetery at Ober-Sankt-Veit, they buried Schiele, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire
capitulated to the Allied Powers.
According to Jane
Kallir, Egon Schiele’s surviving
oeuvre comprises about 334 oil paintings on canvas, panel or cardboard and
2,503 works on paper in various mediums like; watercolour, gouache, black
chalk, charcoal or pencil. There were doubtless some paintings and very many drawings,
which did not survive. Early in his career, he often worked with the cheapest
materials including wrapping paper and cardboard. From 1911, when he had
greater funds for art materials, Schiele’s preferred drawing support was
Strathmore Japanese vellum. Schiele’s approach to watercolour was inventive and
disrespectful in a way only a master could be. He would add gum with his
watercolours – often mixing them on the paper with a coarse brush giving the
flesh of his models a sickly look of transparent tinted glass. The poverty of
his materials has meant that those that have survived are in very poor
condition and can be shown only sporadically. Seen in a darkened room, framed
under glass – Schiele’s drawings are far more contained and discreet than in
the reduced, glossy colour reproductions of a book. In the flesh, one is struck
by the delicacy and decorativeness of Schiele’s line, the drabness of some of
his colour and the shabby quality of much of the paper he used. Unlike other
famous Expressionists from the period like Kirchner, Nolde and Kokoscka,
Schiele approached his figurative paintings from the angle of a prodigy with a
complete mastery of drawing and thus a desire to make a pact between distortion
and realism. His late work began to show the signs of a maturing vision and a
broadening painterly grammar, which made his premature death so tragic.
If he had lived,
would he have developed into a mature master? In addition, if he had, would his
ageing works be as compelling as his early entries into art history? My bet
would be that like most of the Expressionist artists of his day, he would have
failed to sustain his explosive early promise. His work would probably have
achieved ever-greater technical virtuosity, but at the expense of the
shattering honesty and directness that made his work of 1910-1914 so radical.
He may also have happily gone in to teaching, since he seemed to see himself in
that role already.