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Cover: Stéphanie Angoh

ISBN 978-1-78160-603-2

Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

Egon
Schiele

1. The Scornful Woman (Gertrude Schiele), 1910.

Gouache, watercolor and black crayon with

white highlighting, 45 x 31.4 cm. Private collection

In 1964, Oskar Kokoschka evaluated the first great Schiele Exhibition in London as “pornographic”. In the age of discovery of modern art and loss of “subject”, Schiele responded that for him there exists no modernity, only the “eternal”. Schiele's world shrank into portraits of the body, locally and temporally non-committal. Self-discovery becomes an unrelenting revelation of himself as well as of his models. The German art encyclopedia, Thieme and Becker, qualifies Schiele as an eroticist because Schiele”s art represents the erotic portrayal of the human body. In this case, however, it is for him not only a study of feminine, but also male nudity. His models characterize an incredible freedom with respect to their own sexuality, self-love, homosexuality or voyeuristic attitudes, as well as skillful seduction of the viewer.

Clichés and criteria with regard to feminine beauty, perfect smoothness and sculpture-like coolness, however, do not interest him. He knows that the urge to look is interconnected with the mechanisms of disgust and allure. It is the body which contains the power of sex and death within itself. The photograph, Schiele on his Deathbed (p.8), depicts the twenty-eight year old nearly asleep, the gaunt body completely emaciated, head resting on his bent arm; the similarity to his drawings is astounding.

Because of the high danger of infection, the last visitors were able to communicate with the Spanish flu-infected Schiele only by way of a mirror, in which he viewed himself and his models, which was set up on the threshold between his room and the parlor.

During the same year, 1918, Schiele had designed a mausoleum for himself and his wife. Did he know, he who had so often distinguished himself as a person of sight, of his sudden end? Does individual fate fuse collectively with the fall of an old system here, that of the Hapsburg Empire? Schiele”s productive life scarcely extends beyond ten years, yet during this time he produced 334 oil paintings and 2,503 drawings (Jane Kallir, New York. 1990).

He painted portraits and still-life-like land and townscapes; however, he became famous as a draftsman. While Sigmund Freud exposes the repressed pleasure principles of upper-class Viennese society, which puts its women into corsets and bulging gowns and grants them solely a role as future mothers, Schiele bares his models. His nude studies penetrate brutally into the privacy of his models and finally confront the viewer with his own sexuality.

2. Nude Girl with Folded Arms
(Gertrude Schiele), 1910.

Watercolor and black crayon,

48.8 x 28 cm. Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

3. Seated Female Nude with Raised Right Arm, 1910.

Watercolor and black crayon, 45 x 31.5 cm

Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien, Vienna

4. Schiele on his Deathbed, 1918

Schiele’s Childhood

Under the sign of modern industrial times, with the noise of racing steam engines in factories and the human masses working there, Egon Schiele is born in the railway station hall of Tulln, a small, lower Austrian town on the Danube on June 12, 1890.

After his older sisters Melanie (1886-1974) and Elvira (1883-1893), he is the third child of the railway director Adolf Eugen (1850-1905) and his wife Marie, née Soukoup (1862-1935). The shadows of three male stillbirths are a precursor for the only boy, who in his third year of life will lose his ten-year-old sister Elvira.

The large infant mortality rate was the lot of former times, a fate which Schiele’s later work and his picture of woman will characterize. In 1900, he attends the grammar school in Krems. But he is a poor pupil, who constantly takes refuge in his drawings, which his enraged father burns. In 1902, he sends his son to the regional grammar and upper secondary school in Klosterneuburg. The young Schiele has a difficult childhood marked by the illness of his father, who suffers from syphilis, which, according to family chronicles, he is said to have contracted while on his honeymoon as a result from a visit to a bordello in Triest.

5. Reclining Girl in Dark Blue Dress, 1910.

Gouache, watercolor and pencil with

white highlighting, 45 x 31.3 cm. Private collection,

courtesy of Gallery St. Etienne, New York