The first time I recall seeing an Egon Schiele work in the flesh was in Copenhagen in 2002, at a mesmerizing exhibition of Klimt's and Schiele's erotic drawings. I remember encountering there a hunched man, of otherwise sophisticated bearing, awkwardly sloping through the gallery in a vain attempt to conceal the erection in his pants. At that moment, I arrived at a philosophy of aesthetic experience: Art should viscerally affect the viewer; if it doubles him over with a debilitating boner, even better.
I recently picked up this postcard of Schiele's "Lovers" (1914) after seeing the painting at the Neue Galerie in New York. It could have just been the six dollar cup of coffee I had in the museum cafe-- so high-class they only fill the tasse 3/4 of the way--or the brief apoplectic fit it inspired, but I was in an exalted mood. Staring at this colossal painting in the cool, wood-sconced gallery while the city outside melted in its own summer soup, I was flooded with memories of my past Schiele experiences.
For me, this is one of the great, though admittedly self-absorbed, pleasures of coming across the work of a familiar artist in a gallery. The work serves as a kind of thematic memory portal. I can see my own biography strung together by a series of vignettes consisting of those particular moments in which Schiele was in my mental orbit. The postcard is the souvenir, the reminder of not just one visit to a particular museum but of an entire catalog of memories in which the creations of this strange mind from a strange time embedded their way into my life. There's my initial memory, the one captured by the postcard, and then there's my deeper memories branching off that memory, and all these memories are wrapped like ivy around the trunk of this foreign object called Egon Schiele.
My first Schiele vignette dates from sophomore year in college, a course called "Freud's Vienna." A ruddy-cheeked professor of German literature, a nervous, tweed-clad cherub wrapped in a bow tie, lecturing in fitful sentences about the fin-de-siècle anxiety of sex. Me, silently calibrating which of my classmates would, without clothes, best approximate the languid femme fatales of Klimt's paintings, while, at the same time, feeling more of an artistic affinity for the rough expressiveness of Kokoschka and Schiele.
There was my own crude copy, executed that year, of Schiele's "Seated Female Nude with Black Stockings" (1910). I had captured the unnerving aged-girlish face, but had not left enough room for the bottom half of the figure, which contained the two key ingredients of the work: the eponymous black-stockings and the trademark vermillion vagina (though that phrase sounds far too delicate and Latin for Schiele's brute, Germanic portrayal of genitals; 'red gash' would be more accurate). I solved my spacing problem by incorporating both the black stockings and the wiry-haired labia as font graphics into some homespun, highly ungrammatical German text beside the figure's face. A thorough disaster, fit for the dorm-room wall.
I later learned that Schiele's 'red gash' approach to female anatomy had an empirical basis.
He had spent the better part of 1910 drawing studies of patients at a Viennese gynecological clinic, an apprenticeship that no doubt colored his pathological depictions of the human form. Can you imagine: "Good morning, Frau Blücher, itchiness and discharge for the last five days, eh? Well, hop up in the stirrups and let's have a look. Oh, yes, I nearly forgot, this is Egon. He will be painting your vagina."
Schiele was notoriously unorthodox in his selection of models. In addition to gynecology patients, he frequently did nude portraits of his sister Gertrude. Even more controversial was his practice of painting the sons and daughters of his neighbors-- particularly the young adolescent working-class girls whose lithe gauntness fit his ectomorph ideal. Needless to say, this did not go over well in small town Austria, where in 1912 the local court sentenced Schiele to 3 days imprisonment for showing erotic material to minors. Lucky for us he is not a contemporary artist and this is all the fascinating lore of history, or else we would be gazing at Schiele not in museums but on the latest episode of "To Catch a Predator."
After college, while living in Prague as an apathetic teacher of English and aspiring artist of some kind, I made a Schiele pilgrimage to the fairytale Bohemian town of Cesky Krumlov-- the artist's onetime home (he knew it as Krumlau) and current home to the Egon Schiele Art Centrum. We stayed in a tapestried hotel that served a four-course breakfast with coffee that made my forehead sweat. I bought a fancy graphite pencil at the Schiele Centrum that I used the rest of that Czech autumn to draw naked ladies and write ideas for grandiose literary projects that I was too lazy and afraid to start.
Schiele started fast right out of the gates. By sixteen he had been accepted to Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts-- the same school that would deny Adolf Hitler admission the following year. At seventeen, he befriended Klimt, the high priest of Austrian modernism, and quickly became an associate of the Secession movements throughout Central Europe. It's a good thing he started early, because by 1914 he was scooped up into the Austro-Hungarian imperial army. Drawing his way into cushy clerical posts, Schiele made it through the war unscathed, only to be cut down by Spanish flu in 1918, three days after watching his pregnant wife succumb to the sickness. He was 28.
Schiele's art, like that of his contemporaries Max Beckmann and Otto Dix, occupies the bleeding borders of aesthetic categories, where the beautiful and the sublime converge at the grotesque. One senses this confluence even in his landscape paintings. The trees, the village, the land--all have the look of affliction, that distinctly haunting beauty that marks his diseased figures. I remember visiting the Belvedere in Vienna and realizing that "Cardinal and Nun" (1912)-- a painting of a man and woman of the cloth locked in erotic ecclesiastical embrace, another Schiele postcard in my collection-- evoked the same tense and morbid eroticism of some of his tree landscapes.
These days I'm slightly less moved and titillated by Schiele's penchant for shock than I was upon my first encounter with him in college. My jaw drops more over his sense of color and composition than it does over two clergymen making out. But I still appreciate the irreverence of a painting like "Cardinal and Nun," and it's easy to see it, along with Schiele himself, as a synedoche for the anxiety-charged cultural climate of Europe, especially Vienna, in the twilight years before World War One. Like his fellow Austrian and near doppelgänger, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Schiele marks a new breed of man for the twentieth century, agonizingly self-aware and attuned to despair.
For me, this is one of the great, though admittedly self-absorbed, pleasures of coming across the work of a familiar artist in a gallery. The work serves as a kind of thematic memory portal. I can see my own biography strung together by a series of vignettes consisting of those particular moments in which Schiele was in my mental orbit. The postcard is the souvenir, the reminder of not just one visit to a particular museum but of an entire catalog of memories in which the creations of this strange mind from a strange time embedded their way into my life. There's my initial memory, the one captured by the postcard, and then there's my deeper memories branching off that memory, and all these memories are wrapped like ivy around the trunk of this foreign object called Egon Schiele.
My first Schiele vignette dates from sophomore year in college, a course called "Freud's Vienna." A ruddy-cheeked professor of German literature, a nervous, tweed-clad cherub wrapped in a bow tie, lecturing in fitful sentences about the fin-de-siècle anxiety of sex. Me, silently calibrating which of my classmates would, without clothes, best approximate the languid femme fatales of Klimt's paintings, while, at the same time, feeling more of an artistic affinity for the rough expressiveness of Kokoschka and Schiele.
There was my own crude copy, executed that year, of Schiele's "Seated Female Nude with Black Stockings" (1910). I had captured the unnerving aged-girlish face, but had not left enough room for the bottom half of the figure, which contained the two key ingredients of the work: the eponymous black-stockings and the trademark vermillion vagina (though that phrase sounds far too delicate and Latin for Schiele's brute, Germanic portrayal of genitals; 'red gash' would be more accurate). I solved my spacing problem by incorporating both the black stockings and the wiry-haired labia as font graphics into some homespun, highly ungrammatical German text beside the figure's face. A thorough disaster, fit for the dorm-room wall.
I later learned that Schiele's 'red gash' approach to female anatomy had an empirical basis.
He had spent the better part of 1910 drawing studies of patients at a Viennese gynecological clinic, an apprenticeship that no doubt colored his pathological depictions of the human form. Can you imagine: "Good morning, Frau Blücher, itchiness and discharge for the last five days, eh? Well, hop up in the stirrups and let's have a look. Oh, yes, I nearly forgot, this is Egon. He will be painting your vagina."
Schiele was notoriously unorthodox in his selection of models. In addition to gynecology patients, he frequently did nude portraits of his sister Gertrude. Even more controversial was his practice of painting the sons and daughters of his neighbors-- particularly the young adolescent working-class girls whose lithe gauntness fit his ectomorph ideal. Needless to say, this did not go over well in small town Austria, where in 1912 the local court sentenced Schiele to 3 days imprisonment for showing erotic material to minors. Lucky for us he is not a contemporary artist and this is all the fascinating lore of history, or else we would be gazing at Schiele not in museums but on the latest episode of "To Catch a Predator."
After college, while living in Prague as an apathetic teacher of English and aspiring artist of some kind, I made a Schiele pilgrimage to the fairytale Bohemian town of Cesky Krumlov-- the artist's onetime home (he knew it as Krumlau) and current home to the Egon Schiele Art Centrum. We stayed in a tapestried hotel that served a four-course breakfast with coffee that made my forehead sweat. I bought a fancy graphite pencil at the Schiele Centrum that I used the rest of that Czech autumn to draw naked ladies and write ideas for grandiose literary projects that I was too lazy and afraid to start.
Schiele started fast right out of the gates. By sixteen he had been accepted to Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts-- the same school that would deny Adolf Hitler admission the following year. At seventeen, he befriended Klimt, the high priest of Austrian modernism, and quickly became an associate of the Secession movements throughout Central Europe. It's a good thing he started early, because by 1914 he was scooped up into the Austro-Hungarian imperial army. Drawing his way into cushy clerical posts, Schiele made it through the war unscathed, only to be cut down by Spanish flu in 1918, three days after watching his pregnant wife succumb to the sickness. He was 28.
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| Wittgenstein |
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| Schiele |
For that reason, the perverse embrace of "Cardinal and Nun" remains a good antidote to the all-too-palatable and ubiquitous image of Klimt's "The Kiss" plastered onto the coasters and lunch boxes hocked in museum gift stores. And Schiele remains a valuable image in my collection of postcards and memories.
