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    Egon Schiele
    Egon Schiele
    Egon Schiele
    Ebook241 pages1 hour

    Egon Schiele

    By Esther Selsdon and Jeanette Zwingenberger

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    Egon Schiele’s work is so distinctive that it resists categorisation. Admitted to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts at just sixteen, he was an extraordinarily precocious artist, whose consummate skill in the manipulation of line, above all, lent a taut expressivity to all his work. Profoundly convinced of his own significance as an artist, Schiele achieved more in his abruptly curtailed youth than many other artists achieved in a full lifetime. His roots were in the Jugendstil of the Viennese Secession movement. Like a whole generation, he came under the overwhelming influence of Vienna’s most charismatic and celebrated artist, Gustav Klimt. In turn, Klimt recognised Schiele’s outstanding talent and supported the young artist, who within just a couple of years, was already breaking away from his mentor’s decorative sensuality. Beginning with an intense period of creativity around 1910, Schiele embarked on an unflinching exposé of the human form – not the least his own – so penetrating that it is clear he was examining an anatomy more psychological, spiritual and emotional than physical. He painted many townscapes, landscapes, formal portraits and allegorical subjects, but it was his extremely candid works on paper, which are sometimes overtly erotic, together with his penchant for using under-age models that made Schiele vulnerable to censorious morality. In 1912, he was imprisoned on suspicion of a series of offences including kidnapping, rape and public immorality. The most serious charges (all but that of public immorality) were dropped, but Schiele spent around three despairing weeks in prison. Expressionist circles in Germany gave a lukewarm reception to Schiele’s work. His compatriot, Kokoschka, fared much better there. While he admired the Munich artists of Der Blaue Reiter, for example, they rebuffed him. Later, during the First World War, his work became better known and in 1916 he was featured in an issue of the left-wing, Berlin-based Expressionist magazine Die Aktion. Schiele was an acquired taste. From an early stage he was regarded as a genius. This won him the support of a small group of long-suffering collectors and admirers but, nonetheless, for several years of his life his finances were precarious. He was often in debt and sometimes he was forced to use cheap materials, painting on brown wrapping paper or cardboard instead of artists’ paper or canvas. It was only in 1918 that he enjoyed his first substantial public success in Vienna. Tragically, a short time later, he and his wife Edith were struck down by the massive influenza epidemic of 1918 that had just killed Klimt and millions of other victims, and they died within days of one another. Schiele was just twenty-eight years old.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherParkstone International
    Release dateJan 17, 2012
    ISBN9781783102846
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      Book preview

      Egon Schiele - Esther Selsdon

      Authors:

      Esther Selsdon And Jeanette Zwingerberger

      Layout:

      Baseline Co. Ltd

      61A-63A Vo Van Tan Street

      4th Floor

      District 3, Ho Chi Minh City

      Vietnam

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Selsdon, Esther.

         Egon Schiele / Esther Selsdon, Jeanette Zwingerberger. - 2nd ed. p. cm.

         Includes index. 1. Schiele, Egon, 1890-1918. I. Schiele, Egon, 1890-1918. II. Zwingerberger, Jeanette. III. Title. N6811.5.S34S45 2011 759.36-dc23 2011023924

      1. Schiele, Egon, 1890-1918. I. Schiele, Egon, 1890-1918. II. Zwingerberger, Jeanette. III. Title.

         N6811.5.S34S45 2011

         759.36-dc23

                          2011023924

      © Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA

      © Parkstone Press International, New York, USA

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers, artists, heirs or estates. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

      ISBN: 978-1-78310-284-6

      Esther Selsdon

      Jeanette Zwingerberger

      Egon Schiele

      Contents

      His life

      Schiele’s Childhood

      The Favourite Sister, Gerti

      Vienna at the Turn of the Century

      Gustav Klimt, the Father Figure

      Schiele’s Models

      Expressive Art Process

      Encounter with the Mirrored Image

      First Exhibitions

      Vienna Art Scene

      Schiele’s Close Circle of Friends

      Wally, his first love

      Self-Portrait as Nude Study

      Schiele, the Man of Pain

      Fascination with Death

      Phantom-Like Creatures

      Body Perspectives

      Vampire-Like Trait of Sex

      Disgust and Allure

      The Age of the Pornographic Industry

      Schiele’s Arrest

      International Artist

      Schiele’s Socially Advantageous Marriage

      The Bourgeois Schiele

      Schiele, a Celebrated Artist

      His work

      SUNFLOWER I

      PORTRAIT OF THE PAINTER ANTON PESCHKA

      PORTRAIT OF OTTO WAGNER

      SEATED NUDE GIRL

      SEATED FEMALE NUDE WITH RAISED RIGHT ARM (GERTRUDE SCHIELE)

      KNEELING GIRL IN ORANGE-RED DRESS

      THE DEAD MOTHER I

      SCHIELE DRAWING A NUDE MODEL IN FRONT OF A MIRROR

      FEMALE NUDE

      MOTHER AND CHILD

      RECLINING GIRL IN A DARK BLUE DRESS

      PORTRAIT OF THE PUBLISHER EDUARD KOSMACK

      THE PAINTER MAX OPPENHEIMER, THREE-QUARTER LENGTH

      PORTRAIT OF ARTHUR ROESSLER

      SEATED MALE NUDE (SELF-PORTRAIT)

      NEWBORN BABY

      THE POET (SELF-PORTRAIT)

      TWO LITTLE GIRLS

      GROUP OF THREE GIRLS

      THE DANCER MOA

      MOA

      OBSERVED IN A DREAM

      TWO GIRLS (LOVERS)

      SEATED GIRL, FACING FRONT

      AUTUMN TREES

      PROCESSION

      PROPHETS (DOUBLE SELF-PORTRAIT)

      AGONY

      HINDERING THE ARTIST IS A CRIME, IT IS MURDERING LIFE IN THE BUD

      AUTUMN SUN I (SUNRISE)

      CARDINAL AND NUN (CARESS)

      SELF-PORTRAIT WITH CHINESE LANTERN PLANT

      PORTRAIT OF WALLY (VALERIE NEUZIL)

      PORTRAIT OF IDA ROESSLER

      HOLY FAMILY

      WOMAN IN BLACK STOCKINGS (VALERIE NEUZIL)

      DOUBLE PORTRAIT (CHIEF INSPECTOR HEINRICH BENESCH AND HIS SON OTTO)

      SEATED FEMALE NUDE, ELBOWS RESTING ON RIGHT KNEE

      BLIND MOTHER

      YOUNG MOTHER

      NUDE WITH GREEN TURBAN

      TWO GIRLS (LOVERS)

      PORTRAIT OF FRIEDERIKE MARIA BEER

      SELF-PORTRAIT AS ST. SEBASTIAN (POSTER)

      TWO GIRLS LYING ENTWINED

      COITUS

      KRUMAU TOWN CRESCENT (THE SMALL CITY V)

      DECAYING MILL (MOUNTAIN MILL)

      DEATH AND MAIDEN (MAN AND GIRL)

      PORTRAIT OF AN OLD MAN (JOHANN HARMS)

      PORTRAIT OF HEINRICH BENESCH

      SEATED WOMAN IN UNDERWEAR, BACK VIEW

      EMBRACE (LOVERS II)

      SITTING WOMAN WITH BENT KNEE

      MOTHER WITH TWO CHILDREN III

      RECLINING FEMALE NUDE

      FOUR TREES

      EDGE OF TOWN (KRUMAU TOWN CRESCENT III)

      PORTRAIT OF THE PAINTER PARIS VON GÜTERSLOH

      THE FRIENDS (ROUND TABLE), SMALL

      THE FAMILY (SQUATTING COUPLE)

      Biography

      Index of Works

      Egon Schiele, 1914.

      Photo.

      His life

      In 1964, Oskar Kokoschka evaluated the first great Schiele Exhibition in London as pornographic. In the age of discovery of modern art and the loss of subject, Schiele responded that for him there existed no modernity, but only the eternal. Schiele’s world shrank into portraits of the body, locally and temporally non-committal. Self-discovery is expressed in an unrelenting revelation of himself as well as of his models. The German art encyclopaedia, compiled by Thieme and Becker, described Schiele as an eroticist because Schiele’s art is an erotic portrayal of the human body. Furthermore, Schiele studied both male and female bodies. His models express an incredible freedom with respect to their own sexuality, self-love, homosexuality or voyeurism, as well as skilfully seducing the viewer.

      For Schiele, the clichéd ideas of feminine beauty did not interest him. He knew that the urge to look is interconnected with the mechanisms of disgust and allure. The body contains the power of sex and death within itself. A photograph of Schiele on his deathbed depicts the twenty-eight-year-old looking asleep, his gaunt body completely emaciated, his head resting on his bent arm; the similarity to his drawings is astounding. Because of the danger of infection, his last visitors were able to communicate with the Spanish flu-infected Schiele only by way of a mirror, which was set up on the threshold between his room and the parlour.

      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 foresight, of his nearing death? Did his individual fate fuse collectively with the fall of the old system, that of the Habsburg Empire? Schiele’s productive life scarcely extended beyond ten years, yet during this time he produced 334 oil paintings and 2,503 drawings. He painted portraits and still lifes of land and townscapes; however, he became famous for his draftsmanship. While Sigmund Freud exposed the repressed pleasure principles of upper-class Viennese society, which put its women into corsets and bulging gowns and granted 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 or her own sexuality.

      Schiele’s Childhood

      In modern industrial times, with the noise of racing steam engines and factories and the human masses working in them, Egon Schiele was born in the railway station hall of Tulln, a small, lower Austrian town on the Danube on 12 June 1890. After his older sisters Melanie (1886-1974) and Elvira (1883-1893), he was the third child of the railway director Adolf Eugen (1850-1905) and his wife Marie (born Soukoup) (1862-1935). The shadows of three male stillbirths were a precursor for the only boy, who in his third year of life would lose his ten-year-old sister Elvira. The high infant mortality rate was the lot of former times, a fate that Schiele’s later work and his pictures of women would characterise. In 1900, he attended the grammar school in Krems. But he was a poor pupil who constantly took refuge in his drawings, which his enraged father burned.

      Self-Portrait with Hand to Cheek, 1910.

      Gouache, watercolour and charcoal,

      44.3 x 30.5 cm.

      Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.

      Self-Portrait with Black Clay Vas

      and Spread Fingers, 1911.

      Oil on canvas, 27.5 x 34 cm.

      Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien,

      Vienna.

      In 1902, Schiele’s father sent his son to the regional grammar and upper secondary school in Klosterneuburg. The young Schiele had a difficult childhood marked by his father’s ill health. He suffered from syphilis, which, according to family chronicles, he

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