Here is a text I wrote a month ago. It's an "art memoir" and interpretation of a painting by the Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele. It's about an 8 minute read and I am really happy about how it turned out, even though I took a bit of creative liberty with the geographic references of Vienna. I hope you enjoy it.
Egon Schiele: Burning, not lit from the outside
It is about a month now since I’ve returned from the Eastern foothills of the Austrian Alps, the small town at the feet of vineyards and pine forests, just about a 40-minute train ride south of Vienna. I still call it home, even though our paths have departed over 7 years ago. For the first few years I commuted, stepping onto the train that would find its way around the slopes of the Viennese forests until we had reached the sight of the historicist façades of Vienna, the city of Beethoven, Freud, Klimt, and Schiele. It was there I was a student.
About 12 blocks East of my destination (the high school for graphical arts and design) is the four-story renaissance building that houses the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, the school of Egon Schiele. About 12 decades ago, in 1906, it was him stepping onto a train, one that would make its way down through the narrow openings on the other side of the city. Schiele grew up in Tulln, the “garden city” about 20 nautical miles upstream the Danube. The vicious adolescent, bursting under the urge for unraveling confrontation and artistic self-expression was the youngest pupil ever to be accepted by the Academy.
Vienna, around the turn of the 20th century, felt for the Viennese, as the art historian Tamar Avishai so beautifully frames it, “like the end of an era, wrestling with the onset of industrialization on their Habsburgian classical decadence.” Karl Kraus described the city as “an isolation cell where no one was allowed to scream;” where there were “our raw interiors against the beautifully gilded surfaces.”
It does not come by surprise that it was this period in time that gave birth to psychoanalysis, with Freud’s works recognizing the value of one’s own subjectivity and narcissistically celebrating its flaws. And it was also the time of Gustav Klimt, whos' gilded masterpieces are, on first sight, everything but a distancing from the Habsburgian decadence, but, upon closer inspection, wave in an unraveling reflection upon its anxiety and isolation, holding up a mirror to these beautifully gilded surfaces from the empire that had passed. Take his famous “The Kiss” for example: On one hand, a glamorous mosaic of two lovers placed in a garden of golden bloom, his long fingers and crooked nose gliding over her face, their bodies merging into one vibrant figure. But on the other hand, a sense of sexual anxiety with her face turning away from his desiring neck and erection pushed against her waist.
Klimt, Gustav. The Kiss. Oil and gold leaf on canvas. 180cm x 180cm. 1907-1908, Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.
Klimt was also the leader of an artistic collective named “Secession.” A movement known for a spirit of freedom, the practice of Freud inspired self-scrutiny and investigation, their intellectual liberation from the previous generation and the celebration of spring, with “Ver Sacrum” (Holy Spring) being the title of their publication. On the cover of its first issue, “Naked Truth”, Klimt hands the drawn female nude on display a mirror facing the reader. And he quotes Schiller: “You cannot please everyone by your doing and your work of art. Please a few. Fallen to many is bad.” This was a magazine in a city still hiding behind its façades of the Habsburgian conservatism! But it is exactly what the “Secession” was coming at when talking about freedom. Their motto is displayed above the entrance to the art nouveau structures that exhibits their work: “To the age its art. To the art its freedom.” The monumental building is named after the collective, “Secession” and located in the first district of Vienna, right behind the renaissance housing of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.
Egon Schiele had a hard time at this Academy, a historic institution with long-standing traditions, so in 1907 he approached Klimt, whom he had admired for his uncompromising approach to find freedom in art and asked him to be his mentor. (This is in the same year as another young Austrian, Adolf Hitler, was denied a place at the Academy). With Klimt generously taking the young painter under his supervision (teaching practices, trading pieces, sharing his studio and supposedly lovers), Schiele came of age in a world of psychoanalytical experimentation and a masterful practice of the arts.
Although Schiele “was drawn to his mentors’ attitude, he broke away rather quickly from his decorative art nouveau style of painting,” (Avishai). His friendship with Max Oppenheimer and the discovery of Van Gogh’s expressionism at the international art fair of 1909 had to be somewhat of an epiphany on his understanding of art. He parted from Klimt’s gilded ornaments and patterns of beauty and cut down to a distilled, raw, and intense intimacy beneath the surface. Now, Schiele’s confident linework of the physical curves counteract not only the mental vulnerability of his subjects but depict a sense of the intimacy between him and the sitter, the unbroken eye-contact, his focus, his intention. A great example for his piercing observations that removed every most subtle attempt of a façade can be felt in his portrait of Wally Neuzil, his spouse and lover at that time, where “he isn’t just rendering her shape, but this very stuff of her essence,” (Avishai again).
Schiele, Egon. Portrait of Wallie. Oil and body colour on canvas. 33cm x 40cm. 1912, private collection.
This intimacy becomes most powerful when he turns his fierce stare away from the sitter and towards the reflection of his own body. Schiele drew himself in ways that were unprecedented; Tortured, castrated and masturbating, his bared skin carrying the artifacts of whipped horses and beaten meat. He twists himself to impossible poses; often intensely sexual and accompanied by shame. He is looking into the mirror of Klimt and Freud, removing all superficiality of his predecessors to truly understand the distilled figure in front of him.
“Bodies have their own light, which the consume to live. They burn, they are not lit from the outside.” – Egon Schiele.
There is a counterpart to the portrait of Wally, one of those powerful self-portraits of his. He painted them simultaneously, with oil and body colour, in the Fall of 1912. After some turbulent years that had brought the young artist quite the reputation, Egon and Wally took the train out West and moved to the small town of Neulengbach in search for a bigger studio and the melancholy of nature. “Self-portrait with lantern-fruits” depicts the artist at the height of his creation. A flawed expressionist. Burning, not lit from the outside.
Schiele, Egon. Self-portrait with lantern fruit. Oil and body colour on canvas. 33cm x 40cm. 1912, Leopold Museum, Vienna.
Schiele continued to paint for the next 6 years of his life, until he died in 1918, the same year as his mentor Klimt, three days after his pregnant wife, all of the Spanish Flu. He, like every other artist, was shaped by his context, before attempting to shape it into something new.
I am now only a visitor at these places around the Eastern foothills of the Austrian Alps. But last month, as my train found its way around the slopes of the Viennese forest, passing the historicist façades of Vienna to drop me off at the airport from where I would fly back to New York, I realized that I still call them home, these places. That we are closer than ever, even though our paths have departed over 7 years ago.
