The provocative world of Egon Schiele: Emotion, Eroticism and Expression

The text below is the excerpt of the book Egon Schiele (ISBN: 9781783102846), written by Esther Selsdon and Jeanette Zwingenberger, published by Parkstone International.

Schiele, the Man of Pain

The discrepancy between Schiele’s external appearance and his repulsively ugly self-portraits is astonishing. Gütersloh described Schiele as “exceptionally handsome”, of well-maintained appearance, “someone who never had even a day-old beard”, an elegant young man, whose good manners contrasted strangely with his reputedly unpalatable manner of painting. Egon Schiele, on the other hand, painted himself with a long high forehead, wide-opened eyes deep in their sockets and a tortured expression, an emaciated body, which he sometimes mutilated up to its trunk, with spider-like limbs. The bony hands tell of death at work. His body reflects the sallow colours of decay. In many places, he painted himself with a skull-like face. Schiele admitted in a verse: “everything is living dead”. Just as Kokoschka maintained, Schiele soliloquized with death, his counterpart. Trakl wrote of Egon Schiele, “and surrounded by the flattery of decay, he lowers his infected lids.”

At the same time, Egon Schiele perceived himself as a man of pain: “That I am true I only say, because I […] sacrifice myself and must live a martyr-like existence.” If contemporary art banished religious themes from its field of vision, the artist now incarnated these himself. In a letter to Roessler, the Christ-likeness becomes clearer still: “I sacrificed for others, for those on whom I took pity, those who were far away or did not see me, the seer.” His fate as an outsider led to the ideal of the artist as world redeemer. In the programme of the New Artists he explains: “Fellow men feel their results, today in exhibitions. The exhibition is indispensable today […] the great experience in the existence of the artist’s individuality.” For him, however, this no longer concerned illustration, rather it was a representation of his soul’s inner life. The nude study is a revealing study. Thereby, the work in its expressive self-staging becomes a study of his life.

Fascination with Death

The Viennese at the turn of the century lived with a longing for death and romanticised the “beautiful corpse”. “How ill everything coming into being does seem to be,” wrote Trakl, who in 1914 found death on the front. Schiele shared with Osen, who had himself locked away in a Steinhof insane asylum where he might study the behaviour of the patients, an interest in pathologic pictures of disease. In the clinic of the gynaecologist Erwin von Graf, he studied and drew sick and pregnant women and pictures of new and stillborn infants. Egon Schiele was fascinated by the devastation of the foul suffering, to which these innocents were exposed. Astonished, he saw unusual changes in the skin in whose sagging vessels thin, watery blood and tainted fluids trickled sluggishly, he marvelled also at light-sensitive green eyes behind red lids, the slimy mouths and the soul in these unsound vessels, reported Roesseler. Therein he resembled Oskar Kokoschka, also known as the “soul slasher” and of whom it was said “painting hand and head, he lay bare in a ghostly manner the spiritual skeleton of her whom he portrayed”. To the colour lithograph of his drama, Murder Hope of Women, he commented: “The man is bloody red, the colour of life, but he lies dead in the lap of a woman, who is white, the colour of death.” Man and woman in the dance of life and death.

Phantom-Like Creatures

With a few lines, Egon Schiele sketched the outlines of the body on paper. A thigh is reduced to two lines. The stroke is dynamic, grows fainter, following the structural ductility of a fast thrown-in movement. Jagged, with hard angles he loves the bone structure. Schiele’s strokes are like calligraphy, which captures the body’s expression in just a few lines. In contrast to the reluctant, bony aspect of the shoulders and pelvis is the round diffraction of the chest. Orange nipples and vulva become wounds. The physiognomy of his models, however, remains anonymously phantom-like; the button eyes could sooner belong to a doll, which could be any woman. The body posture is directed at the gaze of the viewer, before whom she exhibits her genitals. The splayed gesture of the hands is peculiar: these appear intractably hard and call to mind the hands of Egon Schiele.

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