Egon Schiele

gigatos | January 20, 2022

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Summary

Egon Schiele , Listen, born June 12, 1890 in Tulln an der Donau and died October 31, 1918 in Vienna, is an Austrian painter and draftsman attached to the expressionist movement.

Coming from the petty bourgeoisie, he affirmed his vocation as an artist against his family. His talent for drawing led him to be admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna at the age of sixteen and he soon discovered other horizons through contact with the Secession, the Viennese Atelier and Gustav Klimt. At the end of 1909, as his talent was revealed, he founded a short-lived “Art Nouveau group” with several painters, musicians and poets – he himself wrote rather lyrical texts.

In an egotistical cult of his artistic “mission”, Schiele made the undressed body his privileged field of expression: adult bodies, starting with his own, but also children”s bodies, which earned him several weeks in prison in 1912. In 1915, he left his companion and model Wally Neuzil to marry a more “decent” young woman, Edith Harms. He was assigned to the rear of the front line for health reasons, but he lived through the war painting a lot, started to sell, to see the light of day, and after Klimt”s death in 1918, he became the new leader of Viennese artists. It was then that he succumbed, along with his pregnant wife, to the Spanish flu.

Egon Schiele produced about 300 oil paintings and more than 3,000 works on paper in which drawing is often combined with watercolor and gouache: still lifes, landscapes, portraits, allegories and above all self-portraits and countless female and male nudes, with sometimes crude postures or details. Even if the sharp line and the palette have softened in ten years, the whole is striking by its graphic intensity, its contrasts, its unrealistic and even morbid colors; as for the emaciated, disarticulated figures, as if floating in the void, they seem to embody sexual or existential anguish, solitude and even suffering, in a work marked by violence.

It is in fact difficult to annex Schiele to a group. Between Art Nouveau and Expressionism, free from the norms of representation and leading his quest in solitude without interest in theories, he expressed in a very personal way his exacerbated sensitivity while echoing the disenchantment and latent conflicts of a society in decline. A player in the Austrian artistic revival, recognized if not appreciated during his lifetime, he was not the “cursed artist” that the legend wanted to associate with his marginal life. The convulsive or impudent treatment of his subjects continues to surprise us a century later. He entered the history of modern art as a major painter and draughtsman, and some creators refer to his work from the second half of the 20th century.

Beyond the testimonies, gallery archives, family or administrative documents, Egon Schiele”s short life is also known thanks to his own writings: various notations and autobiographical fragments written in poetic prose, to which are added numerous letters to friends, lovers, collectors, buyers, provide information on his psychology, his life, and sometimes his work or his aesthetic conceptions. As for the Prison Diary published in 1922 by his fervent defender Arthur Roessler, it contributed to the myth of the misunderstood artist, victim of the rigidities of his time.

Childhood and education (1890-1909)

Egon Leo Adolf Ludwig Schiele was born on June 12, 1890 in the office of his father, a stationmaster in Tulln, on the banks of the Danube, some thirty kilometers upstream from Vienna. The only surviving son of Adolf Schiele (1850-1905) and Marie née Soukup (1862-1935), he had two older sisters, Elvira (1883-1893) and Melanie (1886-1974), but preferred his younger sister, Gertrude known as Gerti (1894-1981). His childhood was disrupted by his school failures and the crises of a father who was probably syphilitic, until, disappointing the family ambitions but realizing a very early vocation, he went to train as a painter in the capital.

The Schiele family is closely linked to the world of railroading and hopes for a career for its only male descendant.

Egon Schiele came from “an exemplary background in the declining Austro-Hungarian Empire: Catholic, conformist and devoted to the state. Grandfather Karl Schiele (1817-1862), an engineer and architect from Germany, built the railroad line from Prague to Bavaria, and Leopold Czihaczek (1842-1929), husband of one of Adolf”s sisters, was a railway inspector. The maternal grandfather Johann Soukup, of rural origin, worked on a train line in South Bohemia and would have been a real estate developer.It was in Krumau (present-day Český Krumlov) that Adolf Schiele met his daughter Marie around 1880, who became his wife. The young couple had a modest fortune in shares in the Austrian State Railway Company, in addition to the advantageous position of a job in the civil service of this bureaucratic country.

The handsome Adolf liked to wear his gala uniform or take his family for a ride in a carriage – his son would inherit his penchant for spending money. At the turn of the century, Tulln an der Donau was an important railroad junction and, in the absence of other distractions, the child developed a passion for trains: he played with the locomotive, set up circuits for his miniature cars and, from the age of ten, inspired by his father”s sketches, drew stations, passengers or convoys with remarkable precision – as an adult, he would still play with the train or imitate its various sounds. His father imagined him to be an engineer in this field and was irritated by his predilection for drawing – which would date back to his eighteenth month – until one day he burned one of his notebooks.

After elementary school, since Tulln had no secondary school, Egon went to Krems an der Donau in 1901, where he enjoyed the garden of his landlady more than the discipline of the college. The following year he attends the Gymnasium in Klosterneuburg, where his father has taken early retirement for health reasons. Egon fell behind in his studies, became withdrawn and missed classes. Definitely disgusted with school, he only succeeds in drawing, calligraphy and, despite a fragile constitution, in physical education.

Although it affects him deeply, the death of his father will somehow allow Schiele to realize his vocation.

The family atmosphere suffered from the father”s mental problems. Like many middle-class people of his time, Adolf Schiele contracted a venereal disease before his marriage, probably syphilis, which may explain why the couple lost two infants and why Elvira died of encephalitis at the age of ten. In a few years he went from harmless phobias or manias, such as conversing at the table with imaginary guests, to unpredictable fits of rage: he would have thrown into the fire the stock market securities that completed his pension. He died of general paralysis on January 1, 1905, at the age of 55.

Egon seems to have had a very strong relationship with his father. This death was “the first and greatest tragedy of his life” and, even if he is not certain that this idealized father would have approved of his project to become a painter, he “will always nourish feelings of affectionate devotion for”. His very first self-portraits, as a dandy a bit full of himself, are perhaps for him a narcissistic way to compensate for the loss of the father whose place he claims to take as “man of the house”.

The teenager finds comfort in the company of his two sisters and in nature, where he draws and paints a few luminous gouaches, rather than with his mother, whom he considers cold and distant. Since her widowhood, Marie Schiele has become embarrassed and dependent on her male entourage, especially Leopold Czihaczek, the boy”s guardian. Egon, who expects immense sacrifices from her, will hardly be grateful to her for having finally supported his vocation: he will always reproach her for not understanding his art, while she will not forgive him for devoting himself to it selfishly without caring too much about her, and their conflicting relations will give rise to ambivalent representations of motherhood.

At the Klosterneuburg high school, Egon is strongly encouraged by his drawing teacher, Ludwig Karl Strauch, a graduate of the Fine Arts Academy and an avid traveler, who provides him with intellectual openness and develops graded exercises for him. He joined forces with an art critic canon and the painter Max Kahrer to convince Mrs. Schiele and her brother-in-law not to wait for Egon to be expelled from high school. A “useful” education was first considered with a photographer in Vienna, then at the School of Applied Arts, which recommended the Academy of Fine Arts for the budding artist. In October 1906, his application having been accepted, Egon successfully passed the practical tests of the entrance exam, for which even Strauch did not think he was mature: his drawings of perfect realism impressed the jury and he became the youngest student in his division.

During his three years at the Beaux-Arts, Schiele received a strict and conservative education without pleasure.

At first he lived in the rich apartment of Uncle Leopold, who now acted as a model and took him to the country or to the Burgtheater. The young man continued to have lunch at home when his mother moved to Vienna and then when he rented a shabby studio near the Prater, Kurzbauergasse 6. His poverty frustrates his desire for elegance: he will tell how he not only had to smoke cigarette but also to make false paper bowls and to arrange, stuff and wear out his uncle”s old clothes, hats or shoes that were too big for him. In this city that he did not like, he was as disappointed by his studies as by the “bourgeois” routine. He painted a lot outside of class, more provocative in his choice of subjects (a woman who smoked, for example) than in his post-impressionist style. During a stay in Trieste, which further strengthened their mutual affection, his little sister Gerti agreed to pose nude for him in hiding from their mother.

Unchanged for a century, the teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna consisted of a very progressive apprenticeship in drawing during the first year (from antique plaster casts and then from life, nudes and then portraits, male and then female models, study of drapery and then composition) and under constraints: pencil without color, chalk without pencil, highlights obtained from the white of the paper, limited time, etc. The studies that have been preserved attest to the progress – human anatomy – as well as to the demotivation of the young Schiele: “his academic portraits are strangely lacking in emotion, and it is almost painful to see the trouble he went through to achieve them,” remarks the art historian Jane Kallir, the greatest specialist of his work. He only gets “fair” ratings.

In the fall of 1907, the student took up color theory and chemistry, but his painting, which he may have partially destroyed, was more difficult to follow: his oil paintings on cardboard, with their impasto typical of Stimmungsimpressionnismus (“moody impressionism”, Austrian motif painting of before 1900), did not express much of his personality in any case. In the following school year he came under the authority of the portrait and history painter Christian Griepenkerl, director of the school and a staunch defender of classicism.

The master quickly took a dislike to this rebellious student, while reluctantly recognizing his talent, which he had helped to consolidate and which was, moreover, affected by the prevailing Jugendstil artistic movement. Although Schiele obliged himself to send one drawing a day to the academy – a minimum requirement that was much lower than his personal production rate – he no longer went to the academy except to get free models. He took the lead in a protest movement and then, after a mediocre final exam, slammed the door between April and June 1909. From this suffocating academic straitjacket, Egon Schiele nevertheless emerged with “a technique that he would be able to transform into an instrument of invention”.

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From Secession to Expressionism (1908-1912)

At the turn of the 20th century, Austria-Hungary was frozen in its weaknesses. An elderly monarch, conservative forces, an economic boom but a miserable proletariat, a cultural plurality in the face of nationalism: this was Robert Musil”s “Cacania”, whose moral emptiness Karl Kraus and Hermann Broch also denounced. However, the capital was experiencing a golden age: without political or social questioning and with the favor of the dominant class, the intellectual and artistic ferment of Vienna made it a center of modernity rivaling Paris, where Schiele began a very personal journey.

For the young painter, discovering the work of Gustav Klimt, the Viennese Secession movement and European modern art was an essential step, but one that would soon be over.

At the turn of the century, the imposing Vienna of the Ring, marked by the pompous art of Hans Makart, saw its aesthetic habits implode as well as some of its frames of thought (Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein). Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), who initially worked in Makart”s shadow decorating the Museum of Art History or the Burgtheater, founded in 1897 with painters (Carl Moll), architects (Josef Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann), and decorators (Koloman Moser), a movement inspired by the Munich Secession.

The Secession Palace was built the following year to combat official or commercial art, to make Impressionism and Post-Impressionism known, to open up art to the masses and to promote young talent, often from the applied arts. In connection with the concept of total work of art, it is a question of reconciling art with life by reducing the gap which separates it from the minor arts, even from the craft industry. In 1903 is thus created, on the model of the English Arts and Crafts, the Wiener Werkstätte, very productive workshop which privileges the decorative stylization and the geometrical, abstract motives or freed from the perspective: Klimt, drawing for example mosaics for the Stoclet Palace of Brussels, remains faithful to him even after having left the Secession in 1905.

It is not impossible that Schiele, an admirer of Klimt”s “flat and linear style”, received his encouragement as early as 1907. He certainly met him at the gigantic Kunstschau of 1908, an international art exhibition where the sixteen canvases of the master were an illumination for him, while those of Oskar Kokoschka struck him with their iconoclastic violence. His first personal encounter with Klimt, who praised his genius for drawing, would have represented a father figure for him in 1910.

From 1909 onwards, Schiele appropriated Klimt”s style by transforming it: his portraits retained their flatness and some decorative elements, but the backgrounds became empty. His graphic activity intensified independently of the paintings; he drew maps, dresses and men”s suits for the Werkstätte, and would have collaborated with Kokoschka in the decoration of the Fledermaus cabaret.

Defying the ban on students exhibiting outside the academy, the self-proclaimed “Silver Klimt” participated in the 1909 Kunstschau, the last major event of the Viennese avant-garde, where the public could see paintings by Gauguin, Van Gogh, Munch, Vallotton, Bonnard, Matisse, Vlaminck… Schiele”s four paintings went unnoticed, but the experience emboldened him. Together with former students of Griepenkerl – including Anton Faistauer and especially Anton Peschka, his best friend – he founded the Neukunstgruppe, the “Art Nouveau group” which in December exhibited collectively in a gallery: Arthur Roessler, art critic for a social-democratic newspaper, discovered Schiele with enthusiasm and soon introduced him to collectors such as Carl Reininghaus, an industrialist, Oskar Reichel, a doctor, and Eduard Kosmak, an art publisher.

In a few months, at the end of 1909, Egon Schiele found himself and declared, which would not prevent him from venerating him all his life: “I have come full circle with Klimt. Today I can say that I have nothing more to do with him.

Egon Schiele asserts his expressionist tendencies as well as his exacerbated egocentrism.

From the spring of 1910 he distanced himself from the Neukunstgruppe, whose manifesto he had drafted and which claimed the autonomy of the artist: “Art always remains the same, there is no such thing as new art. There are new artists, but very few. The new artist is and must necessarily be himself, he must be a creator and must, without intermediary, without using the inheritance of the past, build his foundations absolutely alone. Only then is he a new artist. Let each of us be himself”. He sees himself as a prophet invested with a mission, the artist having for him a gift of prescience: “I became a seer”, he writes with Rimbaldian accents.

This year was a decisive turning point for Schiele: he abandoned all reference to Klimt and, particularly under the influence of his friend Max Oppenheimer, leaned towards the emerging expressionism. Oil painting remained his goal, but he drew a great deal, both preparatory sketches and full-fledged works, and refined his watercolor technique. A rare case in the history of art, Egon Schiele, having already acquired an extreme virtuosity, expresses at the time when he experiences them adolescent torments such as conflicts with the adult world, anguish about life, sexuality, death. Very inclined to introspection, he recomposes the world and art from himself, his body and that of his models becoming a field of study at the limits of pathology.

In view of the number of self-portraits from this period, Jane Kallir speaks of “pictorial onanism”. This “maniacal observer of his own person: on some paintings he splits himself, on others he paints only his face, hands, legs, or amputated limbs, on still others he is in full erection. His nude self-portraits seem to record his impulses in the manner of a seismograph, even exhibitionism, efforts to channel his erotic demons in a repressive society: but, as in his esoteric letters and poems, his major preoccupation would be the experience of his self, his spirituality, his being in the world.

The same tortured tension is found in the nudes whose hermaphroditism (poorly differentiated faces, puny penises, swollen vulvas) could translate the sexual ambivalence of the artist. He began an obsessive exploration of bodies that led him to demand almost acrobatic postures from his models. He has relationships with some of the women who pose for him and another female model will testify that, apart from the exhibition of private parts, posing for him was not fun because “he only thought about that”. Is his gaze fascinated and terrified by his discovery of women and a sexuality that cost his father his life, or is it of a cold scalpel? In any case, it is known that he was able to see and draw pregnant patients and newborns freely in a gynecological clinic, with the approval of its director.

His portraits of street children are more natural. The man who calls himself an “eternal child” has an easy rapport with them and easily convinces girls from Vienna”s miserable neighborhoods to pose naked for him, where child prostitution, “legitimized” by a sexual majority at 14, is common. For his first commissioned portraits, on the other hand, with their air of hallucinated puppets, “only those close to him could accept these images, which are as much theirs as those of the painter”s psyche: some refused them, such as Reichel or Kosmak.

Despite intense work, these are lean years. Leopold Czihaczek gave up his guardianship and financial support in 1910, but his nephew spent a lot of money on his clothes and leisure activities – especially on cinema – as well as on his art. The structure of patronage in a country where there were no art dealers also prevented him from building up a clientele outside of collectors – Heinrich Benesch, for example, a railroad inspector who had admired Schiele since 1908, had little money. This may also have pushed Schiele towards drawings and watercolors: they sell more easily. Nevertheless, in April-May 1911, the Viennese public, still sensitive to the decorative seductions of the Secessionists, rejected his first solo exhibition at the renowned Miethke Gallery.

Fleeing Vienna for the countryside without giving up his habit of posing children, Schiele got into trouble.

In the spring of 1910 he confided to Anton Peschka his nostalgia for nature and his disgust for the capital: “How odious everything is here. All the people are jealous and false. Everything is shady, the city is black, everything is just a trick and a formula. I want to be alone. I want to go to the Bohemian forest.

He does so by spending the summer in Krumau, his mother”s hometown, on a loop of the Moldau. With Peschka and a new friend, Erwin Osen – a visual artist and mime artist apparently trying to take advantage of his candor – he even plans to found a small artists” colony. The group caused a stir with its eccentricities – Egon”s white suit and black melon, for example – especially since an 18-year-old high-school student who appeared with them, Willy Lidl, was perhaps Schiele”s lover. After a winter in Meidling, Schiele returned to Krumau to settle down.

He embarked on allegories on the theme of the mother (pregnant, blind, dead) and urban landscapes that exude a stifling and disturbing atmosphere. Yet in the house he rented on the hillside by the river, Schiele experienced unmixed happiness for the first time in his life: he lived with the discreet 17-year-old Wally Neuzil, probably a former model of Klimt”s; Willy had perhaps not yet been repatriated to Linz by his family; and finally, “a whole fauna of friends” as well as the children of the neighborhood were constantly on parade.

However, the free union was very much frowned upon, Egon and Wally, who did not go to mass, were suspected of being “red” agitators, and the village finally knew that its children were posing for the painter. At the end of July, caught sketching a naked girl in his garden, Schiele had to flee the scandal. A month later he moved to Neulengbach, but he did not change his lifestyle, believing that an artist need not worry about what people might say, nor about the fact that a provincial town did not offer the anonymity of a capital. The rumors are again going well and in April 1912 a second affair breaks out.

Tatjana von Mossig, 13 years old, daughter of a naval officer, has fallen in love with Egon and runs away from home one stormy night. The embarrassed couple takes her in for the night and Wally drives her to Vienna the next day. The young girl does not want to go to her grandmother”s house and takes her to a hotel to sleep. When they returned, Tatjana”s father had already filed a complaint for statutory rape. During the investigation, some 125 nudes were seized, one of which was pinned to the wall, and the painter was remanded to the Sankt Pölten prison. He spends about three weeks there, expressing his distress through writing and drawing: he cries out for the murder of art and the artist, but understands that he should have sought the consent of their parents before making these drawings of barely pubescent children, which he himself describes as “erotic” and intended for a particular audience.

Egon Schiele appeared on May 17 under three charges: abduction of a minor, incitement to debauchery, and indecent assault. Only the last one was finally retained, the problem not being to determine whether his works were art or simple pornography, but that minors had been able to see them: the artist was sentenced to three days in prison in addition to the preventive period. His friends were pleased with this short sentence compared to the six months he was facing, but Arthur Roessler built a reputation of martyr artist from his memories of his cell and the fact that the judge had symbolically burned one of his drawings in the courtroom.

If he was able to measure during this ordeal the fidelity of Roessler, Benesch or Wally, Schiele emerged from it very shaken. He, who had always loved it, travels during the summer of 1912 (Constance, Trieste). Back in Vienna, he rented a studio at Hietzinger Hauptstrasse 101, which he never left and which he decorated as always according to a sober “Wiener Werkstätte” aesthetic: black painted furniture, colored fabrics, toys and folk objects, not forgetting the essential accessory to his painting, his large standing mirror. He now dreams of a new beginning.

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The maturity (1912-1918)

Schiele”s success grew from 1912 onwards and he participated in exhibitions in Austria and abroad. The First World War did not interrupt his activity, but his production, richer in paintings, fluctuated according to his postings behind the front. Moreover, less rebellious than penetrated by his creative mission, he integrated certain social norms, which manifested itself in a sudden “petit-bourgeois” marriage. The Spanish flu took him away just as he was beginning to play a key role in the next generation of Viennese art.

The Neulengbach tragedy, which aroused Schiele”s contempt for the “Cacania”, also provoked a salutary shock in him.

The painter slowly recovered from his prison experience and expressed his revolt against the moral order through self-portraits as a flayed man. Cardinal and Nun (Caress), which parodies Gustav Klimt”s The Kiss and is both symbolic and satirical, dates from 1912. Schiele depicts himself as a high priest of art, accompanied in his quest by Wally, and mocks the Catholicism that was weighing down Austria-Hungary.

The Neulengbach affair strengthened Schiele”s union with Wally, even though he insisted on her freedom and made her keep her home and declare in writing that she did not love him. He often painted her, apparently with more tenderness than his later wife. The scandal did not help his relationship with his mother, but their exchanges, in which he still plays the head of the family, give information about her: Melanie lives with a woman, Gerti and Anton Peschka want to get married – which Egon accepts so badly that he tries to separate them -, Marie seems to her son unaware of his genius. “Without a doubt I am becoming the greatest, the most beautiful, the rarest, the purest and the most accomplished of the fruits will leave behind eternal living beings; then how great must be your joy at having begotten me”, he writes to her in a burst of exaltation revealing an ingenuous vanity. He always likes to stage himself, grimacing in front of his mirror or the lens of his photographer friend Anton Josef Trčka.

Even though he feared losing his “vision”, that is to say the introspective posture that had so far permeated his work, Schiele gradually admitted that for his very artistic mission he had to abandon what Jane Kallir referred to as his solipsism and take into account the public”s sensibility: he stopped drawing children, toned down the boldness of his nudes, and resumed his allegorical research. Without neglecting his work on paper, he transferred his motifs to oil painting, while his style became less acute: his landscapes became more colorful, his female models more mature, more robust, and more modelled.

His imprisonment earned him a certain amount of publicity and he met other collectors: Franz Hauer, owner of a brewery, the industrialist August Lederer and his son Erich, who became a friend, and the art lover Heinrich Böhler, who took drawing and painting lessons from him. Interest in his work grew in Vienna and, to a lesser extent, in Germany: present from 1912 at the Hans Goltz gallery in Munich alongside the artists of the Blue Rider, then in Cologne for a Sonderbund event, he sent his works to various German cities, but his exhibition in the summer of 1913 at Goltz was a fiasco. The beginning of the war did not affect his activity and some of his works were shown in Rome, Brussels and Paris.

His money problems were as much due to his own carelessness as to the conservatism of the public: considering that living beyond one”s means was typically Austrian, sometimes reduced to sewing together pieces of cloth, threatened with eviction, he was able to fall out with a hesitant buyer: “When you love, you don”t count!” At the beginning of 1914, he has 2,500 crowns in debt (the annual income of a modest family) and considers a job as a teacher or cartographer. In July, he escaped mobilization because of a heart condition and was pushed by Roessler because it was more lucrative. He started drypoint, “the only honest and artistic engraving technique” according to him: after two months he mastered it perfectly but abandoned it, preferring to use his time for painting and drawing.

At least he sells his few prints and drawings. Thanks to Klimt, he received commissions, corresponded with the magazine Die Aktion and was able to write to his mother: “I have the impression that I am finally going to get out of this precarious existence.

Egon Schiele experienced a less productive period when he had to adjust to being a married man and a soldier.

Was he already thinking of a “marriage of reason” in the fall of 1914, when he tried to attract the attention of his neighbors across the street with his antics? On December 10, he wrote to the Harms sisters, Adele (Ada) the brunette and Edith the blonde, inviting them to the movies, with Wally Neuzil as chaperone. He finally opted for the second, his youngest daughter by three years, and managed to convince her father, a former mechanic who had become a small landowner and who had given his daughters a bourgeois education and saw every artist as an immoral bohemian. The union was celebrated on June 17, 1915 according to the Protestant worship of the Harms, in the absence of Marie Schiele and in a hurried manner because Egon, judged in the meantime fit for unarmed service, had to join his garrison in Prague on the 21st.

He saw Wally one last time, who had refused his proposal to spend the vacations together every year. He then created a large allegorical painting of which they were the models and which he renamed in 1917 Death and Young Girl, learning that she had succumbed to scarlet fever on the Balkan front while working for the Red Cross.

As a honeymoon Egon and Edith go to Prague, where he is drafted under harsh conditions into a Czech peasant regiment. She moves into the Hotel Paris, but they can only talk to each other through a gate. Egon finds these first days all the more difficult because, not very political but anti-nationalist and envious of the liberal countries, he is one of the few Austrian artists who do not support the entry into the conflict nor the war effort. He did his training in Neuhaus and spent his leave in the hotel with Edith. However, Edith, not very well prepared for an autonomous life, flirts with an old friend and then with a non-commissioned officer: Egon proves to be extremely jealous and possessive, especially since he finds her less devoted than Wally. She, although embarrassed to pose for him because she must then sell the drawings, would like to forbid him to have other models.

Their relationship improved when he returned in August near the capital. Sent in May 1916 to the Russian prisoner of war camp of Mühling, north of Vienna, he is promoted to corporal. A lieutenant provided him with a studio and he rented a farmhouse with Edith, but she was isolated and bored: each of them closed in on himself, their understanding probably not being deep enough – the painting Seated Couple, which depicts both of them at this time, seems to reflect not so much the intoxication of love as a kind of common anguish.

Apart from drawings – a few nudes, Russian officers, landscapes – Schiele painted only about twenty pictures in two years, notably portraits of his father-in-law, whom he liked, and of Edith, whom he had difficulty animating: she often looked like a well-behaved doll. The opportunities to exhibit become scarce in wartime. On December 31, 1914, Schiele opened a solo exhibition at the Arnot Gallery in Vienna, for which he designed the poster, a self-portrait of Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows. He then participated in events organized by the Vienna Secession and those of Berlin, Munich and Dresden. His period of revolt and constant formal research came to an end.

Assigned to Vienna itself, Schiele returned to intense artistic activity and acquired a certain notoriety, at least in the German-speaking world.

In January 1917, he was assigned to the headquarters of the Military Administration in the central district of Mariahilf. A benevolent superior entrusted him with the task of drawing the country”s supply offices and warehouses for an illustrated report: he spent time in Tyrol. His return to his studio in Hietzing and the leisure time that the army gave him galvanized him: “I want to start all over again. It seems to me that so far I have only been training my weapons,” he writes to Anton Peschka, who has since married Gerti and has a son.

Schiele went back to drawing nudes with disconcerting postures or lesbian couples, in a more naturalistic style, free of his personal feelings. He resumed painting landscapes and portraits, and continued his projects for monumental allegorical compositions in small formats, which did not sell well. The year 1917 was one of the most productive of his career. Taking over the leadership of the Neukunstgruppe after Anton Faistauer, he had the idea of a Kunsthalle, a vast art gallery that would be a meeting place for the public to promote young artists and to raise Austrian culture.

Schiele once again had his friends and family pose for him, as well as Adele Harms, who resembled his sister to the point that their portraits became one and the same, but she was not at all prudish – she claimed to have had an affair with her brother-in-law. He painted less and less Edith, who had put on weight and complained in her diary of being neglected: “He surely loves me in his own way…”. She can no longer prevent her studio from being invaded like Klimt”s by “a harem of models”, “on which hovers the jealous shadow of”. Egon Schiele becomes a portraitist of men. The Portrait of the Seated Artist”s Wife was purchased by the future Belvedere Gallery: this official commission – the only one during his lifetime – obliged him to cover the variegated checks of the skirt in gray-brown.

In February 1918, Schiele painted a funeral portrait of Gustav Klimt and published his eulogy in a magazine. In March, the 49th exhibition of the Vienna Secession was a consecration: occupying the central hall with 19 paintings and 29 works on paper, he sold almost everything, opened a waiting list and was hailed by some of the international specialized press. In April, he was transferred to the Army Museum to mount exhibitions, and during the last year of the war he had to suffer only from rationing.

In demand from all sides (portraits, illustrations, theater sets), he notes in his notebook some 120 posing sessions. His income increased to the point that he acquired works by other artists and in July rented a large studio in Wattmanngasse 6, not far from the previous one, which remained his apartment. He appears above all as the natural heir of Klimt and the new leader and defender of the Austrian artists: on the poster of the exhibition he had represented himself presiding over one of their meetings in front of the empty chair of the deceased master.

Egon Schiele and his wife, who had been pregnant since April and whose diary echoed a solitude that had now been accepted, lived in different spheres; he cheated on her while watching over her and sent her to Hungary for the summer to rest. The painting Crouching Couple – exhibited in March and retitled The Family after the painter”s death – does not express a desire for or a refusal of fatherhood, but rather a pessimistic vision of the human condition, through the absence of communication between the characters: it has nevertheless “become the symbol of Schiele”s dazzling and tragic life.

At the end of October 1918, Edith contracted the Spanish flu, which had become pandemic. On the 27th Schiele made a last drawing of her and she scribbled a message of mad love to him; she died on the morning of the 28th with the child she was carrying. The next day, Peschka discovered his friend already ill and shivering in his studio, and took him to the Harms” house where his mother-in-law was watching over him. On the evening of the 30th, Egon received a last visit from his mother and his older sister. He died on October 31, 1918 at 1:00 pm and was buried on November 3 at his wife”s side in the Viennese cemetery of Ober-Sankt-Veit.

On learning on his deathbed of the imminent armistice, Egon Schiele is said to have whispered: “The war is over and I must leave. My works will be shown in museums all over the world.

Egon Schiele”s 300 paintings, the result of a long process, and his 3,000 works on paper, promptly executed, are all imbued with the same obsessions, and treated with a graphic intensity that transcends classification by genre. The absolute singularity of the Austrian artist – who remains resolutely on the fringe of the trends of his time – lies in the way he disrupts the representation of the body, charged with tension as well as eroticism or tortured to the point of ugliness. Reflecting a societal disenchantment and a crisis of the subject, at the beginning of the 20th century, this work, full of intimate anguish, also aims at universality.

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Between art nouveau and expressionism

After a fervent adherence to the elegance of Art Nouveau, Schiele leaned towards the nascent expressionism. From then on, he was torn between these two poles, purging the aesthetic artifices in order to extract the means to express his raw sensitivity, without ceasing – which distinguishes him from a Kirchner or a Grosz – to see the line as a fundamental element of harmonization.

Indifferent to artistic theories and movements, Schiele only borrowed from Gustav Klimt.

His work bears no trace of the traditionalist curriculum of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts: from the winter of 1907-1908 he abandoned classical perspective or certain formal details. Although he did not spend time in Paris, the home of the European avant-garde, he was familiar with Gustave Courbet, the impressionism of Manet and Renoir, which is reflected in his early landscapes, and post-impressionism, which is evident in his views of Trieste, through the exhibitions at the Palais de la Sécession and private collections: More than Cézanne or Gauguin, it would be Van Gogh – the Room at Neulengbach thus evokes Van Gogh”s Room in Arles -, Edvard Munch and the sculptor George Minne who would have had the greatest impact on him.

Immersed in the era of influence of the Jugendstil, Schiele first borrowed from the “commercial” art nouveau (posters, illustrations), and even from Toulouse-Lautrec, simple contours, flat tints of color, and a two-dimensionality where the foreground and background merge. Wishing to emphasize the pictorial surface and the aestheticism of the line, he was then inspired by the compositions of Gustav Klimt, whose art would be, according to Serge Lemoine, a “violent and mannered exaggeration”. A less eroticized figure, projected into a more open but hostile space: his Danae is already moving away from Klimt”s.

The Kunstschau of 1908 – which contributed to the advent of Expressionism – revealed the exhaustion of the decorative trend and the need for more evocative painting. Exploiting the tension between the decorative aspect and human depth, Schiele quickly moved away from stylization and reversed his mentor”s tendency: far from saturating the backgrounds in the sort of “horror vacui” central to Klimt, he drove out almost all motifs to give primacy to the human. Less radically than Oskar Kokoschka, however, Schiele abandoned Art Nouveau around 1909 to concentrate on the physiognomy and gestures of the model.

Around 1910 his line became more angular, with expressive breaks, and his palette darker, even unrealistic: stripping, disarticulation bordering on caricature, and emphasis on the somatic characterize his nudes and self-portraits. Seeking emotion above all, Schiele uses reds, yellows, and greens that are not found in Kokoschka or Oppenheimer but in French Fauvism and German Expressionism: yet he is not necessarily familiar with them – any more than he was with Cubism when he geometrized his forms in 1913.

Schiele was therefore mainly influenced by Klimt, until 1909-1910. Beyond that, he explored the same themes as Klimt, such as the links between life and death, but in an expressionist orientation which, regardless of the dynamism of the colors, erased the ornamental aspect by an incisive line.

Even when his style calmed down on the eve of the war, his art would still be explained by a contradiction between the Klimtian desire to create a decorative surface and that of “obtaining an extraordinary expressive intensity”.

Closely correlated to his inner life, the evolution of Schiele”s artistic means was meteoric.

He always aimed for “the perfect line, the continuous stroke that inseparably combines speed and precision”: in 1918 he executed his drawings almost in one go. Witnesses praised his drawing skills. Otto Benesch, the son of his first patron, recalls the posing sessions where a number of drawings preceded a portrait: “Schiele drew quickly, the pencil gliding as if driven by the hand of a spirit, as if playing, on the white surface of the paper. He held it like a Far Eastern painter holds his brush. He did not know the eraser and, if the model moved, the new lines were added to the old ones with the same safety. His line is synthetic and precise.

Whether or not he was aware of Vassily Kandinsky”s reflections on this subject, Schiele worked on his line to charge it with emotion, breaking it up to make it a privileged medium of expressivity, psychology and even spirituality. The angular line of the early 1910s gradually gave way to rounder, more voluptuous contours, sometimes embellished with “expressive deviations” or hatching and small loops perhaps transposed from engraving.

In the space of a few years,” notes Gianfranco Malafarina, “Schiele”s line went through all the possible avatars,” sometimes nervous and jerky, sometimes dolorous and quivering. Except between 1911 and 1912, when the line in very hard lead pencil is barely visible, the outlines in grease pencil are strong. They mark a boundary between the flatness of the sheet and the volumes of the subject, which the painter sculpted more in the last years: he ended up shading his charcoal portraits in an almost academic way.

In his drawings, Schiele used watercolor and the more manageable gouache, sometimes thickened with glue to force contrast. He went from juxtaposed flat tints with slight overlaps to more melted transitions, and he also practiced wash painting. By 1911 his technique was perfected: on smooth paper, even treated to repel water, he worked his pigments on the surface; the sheet was compartmentalized into colored areas, each one treated separately, some, like the clothes, being filled in with large, more or less visible brushstrokes. To set the figure with a white or pigment highlight will only have a time; to mix lead pencil, chalk, pastel, water paint and even oil paint will last until the end.

He never colored his drawings in front of the model,” continues Otto Benesch, “but always afterwards, from memory. From 1910 onwards, the acidic or discordant colors were reduced in favor of browns, blacks, blues, dark violets, not excluding white or bright tones, ochres, oranges, reds, greens, blues, even for the flesh. This chromatism not concerned with realism drifts willingly “towards the macabre, the morbid and the agony”. From the eve to the end of the war, Schiele”s palette, which was less important to him than the sculptural quality of the drawing, became muted. In painting, he applied color in small strokes, used the spatula and experimented with tempera.

“If Schiele initially imitated the clear washes of his watercolors in his paintings, his works on paper acquired the pictorial expressiveness of his paintings from 1914 onwards,” says Jane Kallir. His work evolved from broken lines and aggressive forms of transgression to a closed line and more classical forms: Malafarina compares his path to that of the “cursed painter” Amedeo Modigliani and W. G. Fischer adds that “in the artistic geography of the time, the Austrian Schiele holds a place between Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Amedeo Modigliani, between the North and the South, between the angular and dramatic style of the German and the soft and melodious forms of the Italian.

Like his non-living subjects, his contorted figures are as if suspended and captured from above.

Schiele, who had dreamed of flying over cities like a bird of prey, also favored an aerial perspective in his nudes and portraits. He dreamed of flying over cities like a bird of prey, but in his nudes and portraits he also favored a view that was close to aerial perspective: in Krumau, he went to the castle hill to see the city and the river; in his studio, he often climbed onto a stepladder to draw his models lying on the floor or on a sofa from a height. Finally, he sometimes combined a bird”s eye view, a frontal view and a lateral view when he represented two characters, or the same one in different positions.

In reaction to the ornamental profusion of Art Nouveau and Klimt in particular, Egon Schiele simplified the background, reducing it to an anodyne background until it was completely eliminated. His drawings leave the white or cream color of the paper visible. On the canvases, the often light gray background of pre-1910 becomes darker, indeterminate, or is reduced to a juxtaposition of colored surfaces suggesting a setting.

“Schiele treats his models severely, projects them into a condensed form on the front of a stage without reference points, empty of any accessories,” which gives them, especially when they are naked, a kind of vulnerability. The impression of floating means that some of the drawings could just as easily be turned the other way.

Unlike Klimt, Schiele thinks silhouette and structure before coloring. While the square formats of the paintings call for the subject to be centered, the drawn bodies are framed in a particular way: off-center, always likely to be truncated (feet, legs, arms, top of the head…), they are inscribed as if by force in the margins of the representation space, parts of which remain empty.

Eccentric framing, vacant background, plunging view, simultaneity of non-synchronous states provoke in the spectator a feeling of incompleteness or displacement from reality.

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Appropriation of genres

Egon Schiele did not so much question the genres established by the academic tradition and then enriched in the nineteenth century as he did their treatment and their boundaries: thus, self-portraiture invaded nudes and allegories. For commissioned portraits and existential themes, he often chose large canvases (140 × 110 cm) or the square form favored by the Viennese Secession: he reserved small formats on paper for more intimate subjects, the choice of which shocked some of his contemporaries.

Dominated by urban landscapes, Schiele”s non-human motifs become metaphors for “the sadness and ephemerality of existence.

Egon Schiele asserted that “drawing from nature means nothing to me, because I paint best from memory”: he did not paint much from the motif, but kept visual impressions from his walks, which fed into his work in the studio. His landscapes and still lifes, initially created in the various styles that coexisted at the beginning of the 20th century – late impressionism, post-impressionism, Art Nouveau -, then slipped into a more or less symbolic anthropomorphism.

The artist has always shunned the modern metropolis and, unlike the Impressionists, the Italian Futurists or Ludwig Meidner, shows neither the traffic nor the bustle. He prefers the towns along the Danube or the Moldau, but he finds them depressing. Deserted, bordered or even surrounded by a threatening dark water, the windows of the houses opening on black holes: this subjective representation of the cities corresponds to the emotional state of the painter, to his feeling that things die or that, filled with a hidden life, they exist independently from men.

Far from signifying a distance from the motif, the aerial perspective would make it possible to project onto it “the frightful guests who suddenly burst into the artist”s midnight soul”, as his friend the painter Albert Paris Gütersloh said: these give way during the last years to more concrete observations, such as drying laundry. Shortly before 1914 and although still deprived of figures, Schiele”s urban landscapes seem to “wake up” and, rid of any symbolic dimension, display bright colors or serve as a pretext for very graphic constructions around well-marked verticals, horizontals and diagonals.

As in his youthful poems or those of the expressionist Georg Trakl, Schiele favored autumn for his landscape painting, often centered on trees: with him, “the experience of nature is always elegiac,” says Wolfgang Georg Fischer. In a stylization that borders on abstraction, he seems to identify with the elements of the landscape, evoking in a letter to Franz Hauer “the bodily movements of mountains, water, trees and flowers” as well as their feelings of “joy and suffering”. Until the end, his landscapes, less realistic than visionary, remain very constructed and rather melancholic, even when the palette becomes warmer and the forms softer.

Schiele painted very few still lifes. Apart from a few objects or corners of the prison in Sankt Pölten, they are flowers, mostly sunflowers, isolated and etic like his trees, or even deadened by the framing, lacking the warmth they might have in Van Gogh”s work: the way the browned leaves hang, for example, along the stem, evokes human attitudes or something dead.

“The tension between expressive gesture and faithful representation one of the essential characteristics of Schiele”s portraiture.”

Egon Schiele first painted his sisters, his mother, his uncle, and then expanded his circle of models to include artist friends and art critics or collectors interested in his work – but not Viennese celebrities as suggested by the architect Otto Wagner.

Arthur Roessler observes an unfailing fascination with stylized figures or expressive gestures: exotic puppets, pantomimes, dances by Ruth Saint Denis. The portrait of Roessler himself, in 1910, is thus structured by a play of contrary movements and directions; a strong inner tension emanates from the hypnotic gaze of the editor Eduard Kosmack; an indecisive symbolism – a gesture of protection? distancing? – unites Heinrich Benesch with his son Otto in a certain stiffness. Such portraits raise the question of “who, the subject or the artist, is really baring his soul?

After 1912, Schiele stopped identifying himself with his (male) models and showed an increasing finesse of perception, first in his drawings and then in his commissioned portraits. He succeeded in rendering the moods of the models with a reduced number of details, even if, for example, Friederike Maria Beer, the daughter of a friend of Klimt”s, still appears somewhat disembodied, hanging in the air like an insect in her Werkstätte dress. In some of the portraits, Roessler felt, Schiele “was able to turn the interiority of the man outward; one was horrified to be confronted with the possible vision of what had been carefully concealed.

Around 1917-1918, the artist still framed his figures tightly but reappropriated the space around them, sometimes a setting that was supposed to represent them, such as the books piled up around the bibliophile Hugo Koller. In the portrait of his friend Gütersloh, the vibratory application of color perhaps heralded a new aesthetic turn in Schiele”s career.

“Never have the criteria of naked beauty, codified by Winckelmann and the Academy, been so flouted.”

Raw nudity, deprived of the veil of mythology or history, neither channeled nor aestheticized by the classical canons, still scandalized many at the beginning of the 20th century. However, abandoning the Art Nouveau which also celebrates beauty and grace, the Austrian painter first breaks traditionally idealized images with his provocative drawings of young proletarians, homosexual couples including lesbians, pregnant women and, in a parodic register, newborns “homunculus of a shocking ugliness. His female and male models, including himself, look malnourished or stunted and their willingly asexual physique has led to talk of “infemininity” about his female nudes.

Until around 1914 and like Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele drew or painted with “the crudity of a vivisection” emaciated faces deformed by rictus and bodies whose flesh is rarefied: bony limbs, gnarled joints, skeletons protruding under the skin, blurring the boundary between inside and outside. If the men are more often seen from behind than the women, all give the impression of suffering bodies, brutalized by their posture, dislocated or with stumps: while the broken line confers on them a tense fragility, the plunging vision increases their suggestive presence and the void their vulnerability. As for the genitals, they are sometimes concealed, or suggested by a red note, sometimes underlined, exhibited in the middle of raised clothes and white flesh, as in the painting Vue en rêve.

In the drawings, quasi-abstract surfaces distinguished by color are opposed to the more realistic facture of body parts, and the fleshy areas to the dark masses of hair or clothing. “The sporadic and partial use of color appears to be the site of another brutality inflicted on the body,” says Bertrand Tillier, recalling that Viennese critics spoke of “rot” in the face of the greenish or bloody hues of the early period. In the late paintings, the bodies stand out against vague furniture or a crumpled sheet like a flying carpet.

The evolution of the last years leads the painter to represent icons rather than individualized women. Gaining in realism, in thickness distinct from the artist”s personality, his nudes become paradoxically interchangeable: the professional models are not always distinguishable from others, nor Edith from Adele Harms. For Jane Kallir, “it is now the portraits that are fully animated while the nudes are relegated to an ethereal aestheticism.

Egon Schiele left about a hundred self-portraits, including nudes “with the appearance of disarticulated puppets, with swollen flesh, masturbating, have no precedent in Western art.

Overloaded with expressive elements, especially from 1910 to 1913, his self-portraits are not flattering: ascetically thin, the painter shows himself in strange contortions, his face shaggy, grimacing or afflicted with a squint, a probable reference to his family name, schielen meaning “squint” in German. As in the portraits, his quest for truth involving an impudent nudity has no mimetic relationship with reality. His hairy, wrinkled body, marbled with phantasmatic colors, or truncated when not half cut off by the framing, illustrates not only his desire to challenge classical idealization but the fact that with him, “self-representation has little to do with exteriority.

The symbolic motif of the double, inherited from German Romanticism, appears in several self-portraits. Is Schiele thinking of the variability of his features, or of an astral body? Does he suggest the contradictions of his psyche, the fear of a dissociation of his self or to suggest a duality? Does he represent – without knowing the works of Freud or psychoanalysis – an image of the father?

“The most convulsive poses in the self-portraits could be analyzed as orgasms, masturbation would also explain the appearance of the “double”, the only manipulator, the only one responsible. It is in this sense that Itzhak Goldberg looks at the importance of the hands in the paintings and particularly Schiele”s nude self-portraits. These, according to him, “are sometimes presented as an ostentatious and provocative demonstration of masturbation, a challenge to society, and sometimes as the staging of a rich series of stratagems serving to prevent the hand from undertaking these irrepressible activities”: the subject then projects his hands away from his body or turns a worried gaze towards the viewer, as if to clear himself of guilty actions.

Jean-Louis Gaillemin sees in these series of self-portraits a deliberately unfinished quest for the self, a kind of experimentation. Reinhardt Steiner believes that Schiele was rather trying to express a vital or spiritual force, the idea of which came to him from Friedrich Nietzsche and the theosophy in vogue at the time: “I am so rich that I must offer myself to others,” he wrote. In any case, Jane Kallir finds in them “a mixture of sincerity and affectation that prevents them from falling into sentimentalism or mannerism”, while Wolfgang Georg Fischer concludes to a “pantomime of the self that makes him a unique artist among all the other artists of the 20th century”.

From 1910 until his death, Egon Schiele “imagined large allegorical compositions intended to renew the social role of painting. It will be a failure.

He may remember the monumental canvases that launched Klimt”s career. He attributes to himself above all a receptivity close to mysticism and, valuing oil painting, seeks to translate his quasi-religious visions into it. Since 1912 Schiele has kept a vision of himself as a martyred saint victim of the Philistines: in The Hermits, a homage to Klimt, both in robes seem to form a block on an empty background. His compositions, like those of Ferdinand Hodler, are part of a “mystic-pathetic” tradition inherited from the 19th century, which sees the artist as a prophet seer or a martyr: their interpretation is no less delicate, since many of them have disappeared.

The year 1913 saw him launch into canvases imbued with an obscure spirituality: he would have aspired to an immense life-size composition for which he multiplied studies of men for which a calligraphic cartouche specifies the psychological character (The Dancer, The Fighter, The Melancholic) or the esoteric (Devotion, Redemption, Resurrection, Conversion, The One Who Calls, The Truth Was Revealed). Carl Reininghaus is very interested but this work remains unfinished: the canvases are re-cut, only remains Encounter (Self-portrait with a saint) in front of which Schiele is photographed in 1914 by his friend Anton Trčka.

In the years that followed, the large square formats invited him to develop the subject in an emphatic mode; self-portraits mingled with figures whose bodies were fleshed out, whose attitudes evoked ritualized ecstasies (Cardinal and Nun, The Hermits, Agony). Those whose subject is the mother or birth are of a symbolist theme treated in a gloomy way because of the relationship between Egon and Marie Schiele. The titles – Dead Mother, Blind Mother, Pregnant Woman and Death -, the maternal figures closed in on themselves, the recurring theme of blindness, indicate that it is not a question of happy motherhood but of “blind” motherhood, i.e. without love, and linked to misfortune. At the same time, “the mother who carries and nourishes the genius of the child becomes the central symbolic figure of a mystical conception which makes of the art a priesthood”.

If the last large canvases appear more voluptuous and less somber – Reclining Woman indulging in solitary pleasure, Lovers shyly embracing -, the message behind the anecdote remains enigmatic because they are cut off from their purpose, if not unfinished.

Singularity and meaning

From 1911 onwards, three interdependent and transversal themes emerge in Schiele”s work: birth, mortality and the transcendence of art. This explains his taste for allegory, but above all his unique way of treating the human body, influenced not so much by his fantasies – which does not eliminate the questions about his nudes – as by his time and a society whose weaknesses and obsessions he quite consciously translated.

Egon Schiele “seized the body with a rare violence”, the place of sex in his work being often misunderstood.

Although he abstained from any physical relationship with his underage models, he did not hide the fact that they disturbed him, and rumor has it that he had the most important collection of pornographic Japanese prints in Vienna: in view of his first nudes, many of his contemporaries saw him as a voyeuristic and exhibitionist sex maniac. If these works were initially the expression of his personal anguish, an emotional and stylistic distancing after 1912 proves in any case that he integrated the sexual norms of his time, and his friend Erich Lederer declares: “Of all the men I have known, Egon Schiele is one of the most normal.

“But where does the nude end and the erotic begin? asks J.-L. Gaillemin. Where does the “seeing” artist become a voyeur? From the beginning, Schiele”s work on bodies is inseparable from his artistic quest, from his formal experiments without any necessary link with the represented subject. Contorted to the point of grotesqueness, these bodies remain, in the eyes of some, intensely erotic, while others judge the effect of their tortured nudity to be inverse: “His nudes have absolutely nothing exciting about them,” writes J. Kallir, “but are, on the contrary Kallir, but are on the contrary “often frightening, disturbing or frankly ugly”; “if his nudes are ambiguous, concedes Gaillemin, his “erotica” are of a disturbing coldness”; sensuality and eroticism “are only sketched, because their effect is at once denied”, adds Bertrand Tillier.

Through a gesture, if necessary exaggerated, Schiele”s nudes become the privileged vehicle of a representation of universal feelings or tendencies, starting precisely with the emotions and sexual impulses. The provocation targets the aesthetic norms imposed as the prohibitions of the Belle Époque society: obscene perhaps but not voyeur, Schiele is a breaker of taboos who dares to evoke sex, masturbation or homosexuality, male and female.

However, he most often gives an image that is neither joyful nor serene, but worried, joyless, marked by a neurotic or even morbid component. His models rarely look relaxed or fulfilled – their constrained poses being, according to Steiner, precisely what distinguishes Schiele”s quasi-clinical gaze from that of Klimt, which is more voyeuristic in the sense that it invites the viewer into scenes of intimate abandon. His self-portraits show a sad phallus deprived of an object, which betrays the obsessions as well as the guilty malaise of civilized man. Tillier brings this perhaps sado-masochistic ability to track down the shameful little secrets of the individual closer to the art of the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

Just as his models” movements would be phantasmagorias, “his nudes and eroticized couples illustrate sexual fantasies,” Fischer notes. Schiele”s nudes, “tormented by the effects of sexual repression, offer astonishing similarities with the discoveries of psychoanalysis” on the power of the unconscious, confirms Itzhak Goldberg after Jane Kallir, and most commentators evoke Charcot”s and Freud”s research on hysteria. Schiele first violated in his own way the same taboo as the latter: the myth of asexual childhood, which had allowed Lewis Carroll to photograph more or less undressed little girls in all good conscience.

Exploring the expressive resources of physiognomy to the limits of pathology, Schiele produced drawings that Steiner likens, by their spasmodic or ecstatic tensions, to the anatomical drawings and sculptures of Dr. Paul Richer. It is also possible that he may have seen photographs taken at the Salpêtrière Hospital when Charcot was staging his patients. Schiele did not represent hysterics,” says the artist Philippe Comar, “he used this repertoire of attitudes to give substance to the anxieties of an era.

The brutality that runs through Schiele”s work is to be understood as a reaction to a sclerotic society that stifles the individual.

His empty backgrounds give off a dreamlike impression reminiscent of the period”s interest in dreams (Freud, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Trakl), but far from the hedonistic world of the Viennese Secession, Egon Schiele pushes back the ornamental veil that a Klimt, in his quest for harmony, tries to cast over the harsh social realities and the malaise of the Belle Époque in Austria-Hungary.

The dead city, a very “fin de siècle” theme in Europe (Gabriele D”Annunzio, Georges Rodenbach), appears in the 1911-1912 series as the symbol of “an era in decay”, “of decline or of dangers to come”. Moreover, the expressionist aesthetics of fragmentation, asymmetrical rictus, tetanized bodies reaching the tragic by their stripping or their ugliness would embody the sufferings of a whole society and would participate in the denunciation of bourgeois conventions. In the portraits and especially the self-portraits, the theme of the double as well as an unfaithful representation in the realistic sense can represent “the modern tearing apart of the person” and refer, as in Freud, Ernst Mach or Robert Musil, to the crisis of the subject, to an identity that has become problematic in an elusive disenchanted world.

Less rebellious than a Kokoschka, Egon Schiele is not the anarchist that many critics wanted to see. He reflects the spirit of the Viennese avant-garde, which, without wanting to revolutionize art from top to bottom, rather reclaims a tradition that it considers to have been led astray by academicism. In the wake of the Secession, Schiele was convinced that the arts were the only way to halt the cultural decay and materialistic tendencies of Western civilization, of which modern life, social misery and then the horror of the First World War seemed to him to be the direct consequences: he made no room for them in his work, not out of nostalgia but in a kind of hope of aesthetic redemption.

“Schiele”s nascent career, which is so much a product of his time, ends with the period that allowed it to blossom.” Moving from the allegorical symbolism of Klimt to a more brutal modernism, he completes the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. In a more innovative environment, perhaps he would have taken the step towards abstraction.

Egon Schiele became convinced at an early age that art, and art alone, can overcome death.

It is possible that he first found in art a way to free himself from the various authorities and constraints that he could not bear. His work nevertheless asks existential questions about life, love, suffering and death.

His predilection for the self-portrait can be explained by the fact that it is the only artistic genre “capable of touching all the essential areas of human existence”. Like his deserted cities and blind facades, Schiele”s landscapes, his spindly trees, his withered flowers, offer an image of the human condition and its fragility beyond their decorative aspect. His ugly children, his melancholic mothers give off an impression of total solitude, “he paints and draws them as if he wanted to signify once and for all that his work is not to show man in his splendor, but in his deepest misery.

“I am a man, I love death and I love life,” he wrote in one of his poems around 1910-1911, and they are combined in his work. If, like Arthur Schnitzler or Alfred Kubin, Schiele conceives life as a slow, mortal illness, he feels an impetus towards it and towards nature that is counterbalanced by his fear of losing himself in it, and translates his ambivalence by corseting this overabundance of impulsive energy “in a sort of plastic straitjacket”. Roessler said that in his nudes he had “painted death under the skin”, convinced that “everything is dead-alive”. And in a self-portrait like The Seers of Themselves, the double representing death seems to be looking at it with fear while he tries to immobilize the living. Each painting would then become “like a conjuration of death by the meticulous, timid, analytical, fragmented re-appropriation of bodies” and of nature. The work is for Schiele a true incarnation: “I will go so far,” he said, “that one will be seized with terror before each of my ”living” works of art.”

“Through his life and work, Egon Schiele embodies in an emblematic way the story of a young man who comes of age and inexorably struggles to reach something that never ceases to elude him. Schiele”s art,” says Reinhard Steiner, “offers no way out for man, who remains a defenseless puppet delivered to the omnipotent game of the forces of affect. Philippe Comar also thinks that “never has a work shown so forcefully the impossibility of grasping human truth in a unified soul and body”. Jane Kallir nevertheless concludes that “objective precision and philosophical depth, the personal and the universal, naturalism and spirituality finally coexist organically in his latest creations.

It seems that in 1918 he was planning – perhaps following a commission and preparing studies of women – a mausoleum where interlocking chambers would have followed on the themes of “earthly existence”, “death” and “eternal life”.

Egon Schiele”s international recognition was neither immediate nor linear, but came first in the Anglo-Saxon world and especially after the Second World War. The subversive spirit emanating from his tortured bodies began to haunt other artists in the 1960s. Although he is present in the great museums of the world, with Vienna holding the most important public collections, most of his works, which are now highly prized, are privately owned.

Fortune of the work

Schiele”s consecration as a leading artist was slower in France than in other countries.

The chronological census of his works is not simple. They are usually dated and signed, in a kind of cartouche with a changing graphic influenced by the Jugendstil: but the painter, who did not always give them titles and often dated them from memory in his lists, was occasionally mistaken. Hundreds of forgeries also began to spread, perhaps as early as 1917-1918, while some documented works were lost. Several specialists therefore successively undertook catalogs raisonnés: Otto Kallir in 1930 and then in 1966, Rudolf Leopold in 1972, Jane Kallir, Otto”s granddaughter, in 1990 – she undertook, among other things, to list the drawings – and then again in 1998, with the Kallir Research Institute putting its catalog online twenty years later, after the Taschen publishing house published Tobias G. Netter”s in 2017.

By the time of his death, Egon Schiele was a recognized painter in the German-speaking world, but more for his drawings and watercolors than for his oil paintings – at least outside of Vienna, where a portfolio of reproductions had appeared in 1917 and where he was regularly exhibited in the 1920s. During the Nazi period, his works were considered degenerate art: while several Austrian Jewish collectors emigrated with part of their acquisitions, many of Schiele”s works were despoiled – such as the small Portrait of Wally Neuzil painted on wood in 1912 – or destroyed. It was not until after the war that his work was shown again in Austria, West Germany, Switzerland, London and the United States.

Apart from Rudolf Leopold, whose modern art collections served as the basis for the museum of the same name, the gallery owner and art historian Otto Kallir (1894-1978) played a key role in Schiele”s rise to prominence within and outside the German cultural sphere. In 1923, he opened his Neue Galerie (“New Gallery”) in Vienna, located near St. Stephen”s Cathedral (Stephansdom), with the first major posthumous exhibition of Egon Schiele”s paintings and drawings, of which he drew up a first inventory in 1930. Forced to leave Austria after the Anschluss, he opened a gallery in Paris, which he named “St. Etienne” and which was soon transferred to New York under the name of Galerie St. Etienne. From 1939 onwards, he worked to bring Schiele”s works to the United States: thanks to him, they began to be exhibited in American museums during the 1950s and to be the subject of exhibitions during the following decade.

In France, Austrian art has long been considered essentially decorative and therefore secondary. Until the 1980s, the national museums did not possess a single painting by Schiele, nor even by Klimt, who was nevertheless considered the “pope” of Viennese Art Nouveau. The 1986 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris marked a turning point: under the direction of Jean Clair, this event entitled “Vienna. 1880-1938: Birth of a Century” exhibited only Viennese artists, without including the French avant-gardes. Twenty years later, the Grand Palais exhibition “Vienna 1900: Klimt, Schiele, Moser, Kokoschka”, curated by Serge Lemoine, brought the painter and decorator Koloman Moser out of the shadows, but above all consecrated the other three as a “sort of triumvirate of painting in Vienna” from the end of the 19th century to 1918: with 34 works, Schiele is the most represented.

While he has long been studied primarily for his more or less shocking subjects (symbolic, sexual, etc.), the exhibition held at the Fondation d”entreprise Louis-Vuitton, in Paris, for the centenary of his death, attempts a formal, technical approach to the work, around the line, and not by genre or subject.

Since the last quarter of the 20th century, artists of all kinds have been referring to Egon Schiele, whose value is rising on the art market.

Some forty years after his death, his impudent and anguished nudes, reflecting his refusal of the Austro-Hungarian moral straitjacket, had an influence on the rebellious Viennese Actionist movement, which placed the body at the heart of its performances: “The memory of Egon Schiele”s painful bodies emerges in the photographs of Rudolf Schwarzkogler (1940-1969), as well as in the radical actions of Günter Brus (b. 1938),” says art critic Annick Colonna-Césari. Since the 1980s, various exhibitions at the Leopold Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Winterthur have shown that Schiele, on the one hand, and Schwarzkogler, Brus, the feminist artist Valie Export, the neo-expressionist painter Maria Lassnig, and, in the case of the younger artists, Elke Krystufek and others, express “the same obsession with the body, the same taste for provocation, and the same existential questioning,” using different means.

Perhaps because the first Egon Schiele retrospective outside Austria and Germany was held there, it is in the United States and to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom that his influence is strongest: Francis Bacon”s grimacing figures follow in his wake while photographer Sherrie Levine appropriates eighteen of his self-portraits in her work After Schiele. Jean-Michel Basquiat didn”t claim to be a Schiele fan any more than Cy Twombly did in his day: but he knew his work, which is why the Fondation Vuitton is mounting Schiele and Basquiat exhibitions in parallel in 2018. The artist Tracey Emin claims this filiation, and says she discovered Schiele through the album covers of David Bowie inspired by some self-portraits. Finally, in several choreographies by Christian Ubl or Léa Anderson, the dancers” movements seem to be modelled on the postures of the Austrian painter”s models.

Schiele”s nudes continue to cause offence: in 2017, during a campaign announcing the events planned in Vienna for the centenary of his death, the municipalities of London, Cologne and Hamburg demanded that posters reproducing nudes, such as the Seated Male Nude of 1910 or the Standing Nude with Red Stockings of 1914, be crossed out with a blindfold masking the sexual parts and inscribed with the words “Sorry! 100 years old but still too daring today! 100 years old but still too daring today!)

Schiele”s value has nonetheless increased since the beginning of the 21st century. As an example, a modestly sized oil painting, a Fishing Boat in Trieste from 1912, is estimated in 2019, prior to its sale at Sotheby”s, to fetch between 6 and 8 million pounds (between 6 and 8.8 million euros), while a small drawing discovered by chance in a Queens yard sale is valued at between $100,000 and $200,000 (90,000 to 180,000 euros). Already in 2011, in order to be able to keep the Portrait of Walburga Neuzil (Wally) by compensating its rightful owners for the $19 million set after a long legal battle, the Leopold Museum put the landscape Houses with colored laundry of 1914 up for sale: the painting went for more than $32 million (more than 27 million euros), beating the record of $22.4 million (more than 19 million euros) achieved five years before by another, as Schiele”s landscapes are rare on the market.

Museum area

Apart from acquisitions by the world”s major museums, the most important public collections of Egon Schiele”s works are to be found in Austrian museums, four in Vienna and one in Tulln an der Donau.

In addition to sketchbooks and a large archive, the Graphische Sammlung Albertina, the Albertina”s graphic collection, contains more than 150 drawings and watercolors from those purchased by the Vienna National Gallery in 1917, supplemented by works acquired from the collections of Arthur Roessler and Heinrich Benesch, as well as by donations from August Lederer”s son Erich.

The Leopold Museum contains more than 40 oil paintings and 200 drawings by Schiele, collected from 1945 onwards and over a period of almost forty years by Rudolf Leopold, who was particularly interested in buying back the works of Austrian Jews who had emigrated because of Nazism.

The Belvedere Gallery”s extensive Gustav Klimt collection includes important works of Austrian Expressionism, including many of Schiele”s most famous paintings, such as The Girl and Death, The Embrace, The Family, Mother with Two Children and the Portrait of Otto Koller.

As for the Vienna Museum, a group of historical museums in the capital, it holds works mainly from the collection of Arthur Roessler, such as his portrait or that of Otto Wagner, still lifes, etc.

Finally, the Egon Schiele Museum, opened in 1990 in the artist”s birthplace, focuses on his youth and his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, through original works and reproductions.

1908 : Klosterneuburg, Kaisersaal de la maison religieuse.1909 : ” Internationale Kunstschau Wien “, Vienne ; ” Neukunstgruppe “, Vienne, galerie Pisko.1910 : ” Neukunstgruppe “, Prague.1911 : ” Egon Schiele “, Vienne, galerie Miethke ; ” Buch und Bild “, Munich, galerie Hans Goltz.1912 : ” Frühlingsausstellung “, Sécession de Munich et Vienne, Hagenbund.1913 1914 : ” Exhibition Prize Competition Carl Reininghaus : Works of Painting “, Vienne, galerie Pisko ; ” International Exhibition “, Kunsthalle de Brême.1915 : ” Collective Exhibition : Egon Schiele, Vienna “, Vienne, galerie Arnot.1917 : ” Österrikiska Konstutställningen “, Stockholm, Liljevalchs konsthall.1918 : ” XLIX. Exhibition of the Association of Visual Artists of Austria “, Vienne, Palais de la Sécession.

1919 : ” The Drawing : Egon Schiele “, Vienne, Gustav Nebehay Art Shop.1923 : ” Egon Schiele “, Vienne, New Gallery. 1925-1926 : ” Egon Schiele “, Vienne, Kunsthandlung Würthle.1928 : ” Memorial exhibition Egon Schiele “, Vienne, Neue Galerie et Hagenbund.1939 : ” L”Art autrichien “, Paris, Galerie Saint-Étienne ; ” Egon Schiele “, New York, Galerie St. Etienne.1945 : ” Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka “, Vienne, Neue Galerie.1948 : 24e Biennale de Venise ; ” Egon Schiele : Memorial exhibition “, Vienne, Albertina Graphic Collection ; ” Egon Schiele : Memorial exhibition on the 30th anniversary of his death “, Vienne, Neue Galerie. 1956 : ” Egon Schiele : Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings, Graphic Art “, Berne, Gutekunst & Klipsetin.1960 : ” Egon Schiele ” : Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art ; New York, Galerie St. Etienne ; Louisville (Minneapolis Institute of Art.1964 : ” Egon Schiele : Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings, Londres, Marlborough Fine Arts ; ” Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Exhibition “, New York, Galerie St. Etienne.1965 : ” Gustav Klimt & Egon Schiele “, New York, Musée Solomon R. Guggenheim.1967 : ” 2e Internationale der Zeichnung “, Darmstadt, Mathildenhöhe.1968 : ” Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele : ” To commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death “, Vienne, Graphische Sammlung Albertina et musée d”histoire de l”art ; ” Egon Schiele : Life and Work “, Vienne, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere ; ” Egon Schiele : Paintings ” et ” Egon Schiele (1890-1918) : Watercolours and Drawings “, New York, Galerie St. Etienne.1969 : ” Egon Schiele : Drawings and Watercolours, 1909-1918 “, Londres, Marlborough Fine Art.1971 : ” Egon Schiele and the Human Form : Drawings and Watercolours “, Des Moines Art Center.1972 : ” Egon Schiele : Oils, Watercolours and Graphic Work “, Londres, Fischer Fine Art.1975 Egon Schiele, Munich, Haus der Kunst, Egon Schiele: Oils, Watercolours and Graphic Work, Londres, Fischer Fine Art, 1978 Egon Schiele as He Saw Himself, New York, Serge Sabasky Gallery, 1981 Experiment Weltuntergang, Vienna, 1900, Kunsthalle de Hambourg, Egon Schiele: Drawings and Watercolors “, musée historique de la ville de Vienne ; Linz, Neue Galerie ; Munich, Villa Stuck ; Hanovre, Kestnergesellschaft.1985 : ” Dream and Reality “, Vienne, Künstlerhaus (Maison des artistes).1986 : ” Otto Kallir-Nirenstein : A pioneer of Austrian art “, musée historique de la ville de Vienne ; ” Vienne, 1880-1938. L”Apocalypse joyeuse “, Paris, Centre Pompidou. 1989 : ” Egon Schiele and his time : Austrian paintings and drawings from 1900 to 1930, from the Leopod Collection “, Kunsthaus de Zurich ; Vienne, Kunstforum ; Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung.

1990: “Egon Schiele in der Albertina. Die Zeichnungen und Aquarelle aus eigenem Besitz”, Vienna, Albertina; “Egon Schiele: A centennial retrospective”, Nassau County Museum (“Egon Schiele: frühe Reife, ewige Kindheit”, Vienna City History Museum.1991: “Egon Schiele: a centerary exhibition”, London, Royal Academy.1995: “Schiele”, Martigny, Gianadda Foundation; “Egon Schiele. Die Sammlung Leopold”, Kunsthalle Tübingen; Düsseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen; Kunsthalle de Hambourg; Paris, Musée National d”Art Moderne.2001: “La Vérité nue: Gerstl, Kokoschka, Schiele, Boeckl”, Musée Maillol, Paris.2003: “Egon Schiele, entre érotisme et angoisse”, Musée d”Art Moderne, Lugano.2004 2004: “Egon Schiele: Landscapes”, Vienna, Leopold Museum.2005: “Egon Schiele: liefde en dood”, Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum.2005-2006: “Klimt, Schiele, Moser, Kokoschka, Vienna 1900”, Paris, Grand Palais.2018-2019: “Egon Schiele”, Paris, Fondation Louis Vuitton.2020: “Hundertwasser-Schiele. Imagine Tomorrow”, Vienna, Leopold Museum.

Schiele”s poetry translated into French

Also read, biographies – Rosa Luxemburg

Selective bibliography in French

: document used as a source for the writing of this article.

External links

Sources