Schiele. Ashley Bassie
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wayward psyche – to break out of the straitjacket, as it were. Sigmund Freud’s research into the unconscious and the processes of repression – whereby painful memories or unacceptable impulses are consigned to the unconscious – only appeared to confirm the existence of a powerful and conflict-ridden “inner life.”
Portrait of the Painter Anton Peschka
1909
Oil and metallic paint, 110.2 × 100 cm
Private collection
In attempting to give expression to repressed aspects of the psyche, Expressionist art, literature, theatre, dance and music therefore tended to emphasise what was unruly, violent, chaotic, ecstatic or even demonic. Eros and Thanatos, sex- and death-drives, were recurrent underlying themes. This kind of excavation of the psyche was especially marked in the radical new art that started to emerge from Austria around 1910. As Vienna’s definitive satirist Karl Kraus, put it, “form is not the dress of thought, but its flesh.”
Portrait of Gerti Schiele
1909
Oil, silver, gold-bronze paint and pencil on canvas, 139.5 × 140.5 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Purchase and partial gift of the Lauder family, New York
Thus, 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.
Self-Portrait with Spread Fingers
1909
Oil and metallic paint on canvas, 71.5 × 27.5 cm
Private collection, New York
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. Futhermore, 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.
Leopold Museum, Vienna
Self-Portrait
1910
Gouache, watercolour and black pencil
44.3 × 30.6 cm
Schiele’s Childhood
In modern industrial times, with the noise of racing steam engines and factories and the human masses working within 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, (née Soukoup) (1862–1935).
Kneeling Girl in Orange-Red Dress
1910
Gouache, watercolour and black pencil on paper
44.6 × 31 cm
Leopold Museum, Vienna
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 which 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. In 1902, Schiele’s father sent his son to the regional grammar and upper secondary school in Klosterneuburg.
Seated Female Nude with Raised Right Arm (Gertrude Schiele)
1910
Gouache, watercolour and black pencil on paper
45 × 31,5 cm
Wien Museum, Vienna
The young Schiele had a difficult childhood marked by his father’s ill health. He suffered from syphilis, which, according to family chronicles, he is said to have contracted while on his honeymoon as a result of a visit to a bordello in Triest. His wife fled from the bedroom during the wedding night and the marriage was only consummated on the fourth day, on which he infected her also. Despair characterised Schiele’s father, who, retired early and sat at home dressed in his service uniform, in a state of mental confusion. In the summer of 1904, stricken by increasing paralysis, he tried to throw himself out of a window.
Nude Girl with Folded Arms (Gertrude Schiele)
1910
Watercolour and black pencil on paper, 48.8 × 28 cm
Albertina, Vienna
He finally died after a long period of suffering on New Year’s Day 1905. The father, who during a fit of insanity burned all his railroad stocks, left his wife and children destitute. An uncle, Leopold Czihaczek, chief inspector of the imperial and royal railway, assumed joint custody of the fifteen-year-old Egon, for whom he planned the traditional family role of railroad worker. During this time, young Schiele wore second-hand clothing handed down from his uncle and stiff white collars made from paper. It seems that Schiele had been very close to his father for he, too, had possessed a certain talent for drawing, had collected butterflies and minerals and was drawn to the natural world.
Self-Portrait Pulling Cheek
1910
Gouache, watercolour and pencil
44.3 × 30.5 cm
Albertina, Vienna
Years later, Schiele wrote to his sister: “I have, in fact, experienced a beautiful spiritual occurrence today, I was awake, yet spellbound by a ghost who presented himself to me in a dream before waking, so long as he spoke with me, I was rigid and speechless.” Unable to accept the death of his father, Schiele let him rise again in visions. He reported that his father had been with him and spoken to him at length. In contrast, distance and misunderstanding characterised his relationship with his mother who, living in dire financial straits, expected her son to support her; in return, the older sister would work for the railroad.
Reclining Male Nude with Yellow Pillow
1910
Gouache, watercolour and black pencil on paper
31.1 × 45.4 cm
Private collection
However, Schiele, who had been pampered by women during childhood, claimed to be “an eternal child”. By a stroke of fate, the painter Karl Ludwig Strauch (1875–1959), instructed the gifted youth in draftsmanship; the artist Max Kahrer of Klosterneuburg looked after the boy as well. In 1906, at the age of only sixteen, Schiele passed the entrance examination for the general