The Eros in Egon Schiele’s Portraits

The Eros in Egon Schiele’s Portraits

Schiele’s body of work in late 19th-century Vienna

Egon Schiele’s art represents a breaking point from 19th-century Austrian and European tradition, and it finds itself involved in a conflicting and revolutionary cultural storm: that of fin-du-siècle Wien, which coincides with the dawn of the Hapsburg civilization. Censored for obscenity in the depiction of his models, Egon Schiele lived his very short yet intense existence in a conservative and reactionary society influenced by bourgeois and conformist ideals, the same ideals that the artist had to face in the domestic context.

 

The psychoanalytic interpretation of the earliest portraits

Born in 1890 in Tulln an der Dosnau, a small town in southern Austria, Schiele begins manifesting a strong interest for art and especially for drawing; an interest that prompts him, at 16 years of age or so, to study at the Fine Arts Academy of Wien. The earliest portraits represent his two sisters, Gertrude and Melanie Schiele, both youngsters with great loveliness and beauty that he keeps portraying also in the following years.

A traumatic event affects the artist’s youth: the death of his father in 1906 that makes him, together with his sisters, move to Zirkusgasse in Wien, where his uncle, a railway engineer like his father, took on the role of tutor for the youngsters. The artworks realized by Schiele in those years prompt Reinhard Steiner to interpret the father’s death in a psychoanalytic key. Steiner recovers an interpretative model of Jacques Lacan and in this way offers a possible reading of the numerous self-portraits of that period. “The self-portrait, drawn or painted” Steiner asserts, “was the best, though narcissistic, way of replacing the fatherly idealized and by now lost image”.

 

The Scandal

The portraits of young women and self-portraits, especially those realized since 1910, have had a strong impact on the conformist society of Wien between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. In particular, they must have had a relevant weight on the interruption that occured to the painter’s artistic production in 1912, when he was about 22 years old. Following this phase was a brief detention in the jail of St. Polten, based on the accusation of kidnapping a minor for libidinous purposes. The accusation soon proved itself to be unfounded and the young Egon was sentenced to only three days of imprisonment for “diffusing obscene drawings”, drawings that some minors had seen in his atelier; one of the numerous drawings, discovered and confiscated, was symbolically burned by the judge publicly. The detention in jail anyway affected Schiele’s work: his painting style, bound to the Secession but at the same time anticipatory of Expressionism, appeared as one of the decisive episodes of early 20th-century art.

 

Schiele and Klimt

In order to comprehend the meaning of Schiele’s “erotic” work, which caused much sensation throughout the society of the epoch, it is necessary to consider the cultural spirit of Wien during the earliest years of 1900. Robert Weissenberger, art historian and director of the Wien Museum, describes the city at the end of the century as follows: “In Wien, the bourgeoisie held the actual political power, it was not time for the fourth State yet. While analyzing the situation of Wien at the end of the century, you cannot perceive a positive image. Do not let the suggestions that  figurative art of this age provides blind us. Like art and literature in general, it has very little to do with social conditions”. Weissenberger refers in particular to Gustav Klimt’s artworks, which covered the exhibition rooms in shiny gold during those years, and to the decorations of the Austrian Jugendstil. Schiele, on the contrary, analyzes on purpose suburban environments and city peripheries, capturing their essences in portraits of children and teenagers with emaciated faces and worn-out clothes, as in the artwork Vorstadtkinder. The troubled and rebellious 17-year-old Schiele came in contact with Klimt, who was almost 45 years old at the time, during the years of the Academy, and maintained this friendship until his death. In spite of the emotional bond between the two, Schiele keeps his independence and stylistic coherence, and carries his research on towards the human figure in an Expressionist way.

 

The erotic works

Schiele’s erotic works are characterized by the unmistakably nervous contour lines and by the Expressionist bright colors: any hint of chiaroscuro is absent, and light is conceived exclusively as color. The way of conceiving forms and colors differs greatly from the drawing traditions he had to follow during the years at the Academy, which he considered controversial and which he finally decides to quit in 1909. Since Schiele has detached himself from the academic tradition and has founded the “Neukunstgruppe” with other dissidents, his presence in the visual culture scenery becomes constant. In April-May 1911, the Miethke gallery holds his first, though modest, retrospective exhibition.

Pushed by a constant existential zeal, the artist decides to move to Krumau an der Moldau, his mother’s native city, where he paints urban and nature landscapes mainly in an imaginary and visionary character. In Krumau, he lives with his sister and his Viennese model Wally Neuzil, four years younger, who becomes his muse and lover. Wally, who appears in many of Schiele’s paintings, is a decisive female figure for his life, before his marriage with Edith Harms. During his stay in Krumau, his concubinage with Wally creates rumors in town to such an extent that he decides to move to Neulengbach, a small town near Vienna. His artistic career seems to begin successfully when, in 1912, he is summoned to court for the sequestration of a minor, a happening that represents a real breaking point in his biography. Jane Kallir, curator and author of one of the most important monographs about Egon Schiele, highlights the peculiarity of the painter’s attitude towards teenagers, his favorite models, both male and female. According to Kallir, Schiele was not “a pervert or a pornographer, but his way of seeing sexuality, as an eros free from the conditions imposed by society, could have made the intolerant and limited society generate censorship on his works”.

The last years

In 1915, to end all slanders, he leaves with immense sorrow his beloved Wally and marries Edith Harms, a youngster from a small bourgeois family; in memory of that separation, the artist creates some his most famous artworks, such as “The Hug” of 1917, where the bodies of the two lovers unify in one single tangle of muscles on an acid yellow background. Four days after the wedding with Edith, he leaves for military service. On the 31st of October 1918, Schiele dies, a few days after the death of his pregnant wife, during the Spanish flu epidemic. He is just about 28 years old, but his nudes and his lovers become icons in the history of art.

The various phases of Schiele’s compendium of works are summarized in ten splendid lithographs on Japanese paper published by Siedler Wien in 1990 in a valuable portfolio, and are also available for purchase individually on Wallector.com.