Art e Dossier

When he did this self-portrait the twenty-year old Schiele had already left the Vienna Academy where he had enrolled in 1906, and had already met Gustav Klimt. He rented a studio in the Mediling district near Schönbrunn a quiet suburb where he became a voluntary recluse and did a series of unsettling self-portraits manifesting an innate tendency for tortured self-analysis. His body became the actor in a desperate, uncontrollable pantomime where merciless realism coincided with the utmost in alienation. The self-portraits, about one hundred drawings in which Schiele reveals his contracted body, are characterized by an anguish that borders on hysteria.

This is one of the preparatory drawings for the portrait of Schiele’s younger sister, Gertrud to whom he was very close. She was his first model and had the type of body the artist would continue to seek in the girls who later posed for him. Gertrud, in a dreamily modest pose with the exaggeratedly elongated limbs, recalls the Kneeling Boy by George Minnie that was shown at the International Kunstschau Wien in 1909. As with the other nudes, critics has emphasized the influence of Kokoschka and the famous Nude Self-portrait that Richard Gersti painted shortly before his death by suicide (1908).

This painting that was displayed at the Hagenbund exhibition in Vienna in 1919 belonged to the writer Arthur Roessler who received it from the artist around the end of 1910. Even Schiele himself considered it one of the best works he had done up to then. It is, indeed, one of the young painter’s most intense and dramatic works, capable of conveying the mournful tenderness that links the mother to the unborn child even after death. The painting is articulated on three well-connected levels: the knobby hand, the child and the woman. It is a vortex around the central nucleus of the fetus in the amniotic fluid; membranes and cartilage still pulse with life against the deathly paleness of the mother struck down by death in a protective gesture.

This, an expressionist paraphrase of Klimt’s famous Kiss, is almost a parody of the theme of sexual attraction, accentuating the most external features of erotic urgency. A polyphony of reds and blacks, the colors of love, ecstasy and death replace Klimt’s allusive reticence, the brilliant chromatics, and precious gold background. In the almost puppet-like features of the cardinal and nun (that are portraits of himself and his lover, Walli Neuzil) he exasperates the eternal dialectic of longing and feigned rejection. Klimt’s soft, ambiguous atmosphere is transformed into a violent indictment of the era’s repressive morality. The painting was preceded by several preparatory drawings.

Walli Neuzil, Klimt’s former model was Schiele’s companion from 1911. She is the person who helped him at the most difficult times, when he had to leave Krumau because of his neighbors’ hostility, when he was arrested at Neulengbach and then during the three weeks of the trial at Sankt Pölten when he was accused of having seduced a minor. She was with him until 1915 when he married Edith Harms. Wally left for the front as a Red Cross nurse and died at Split in 1917 ninth months before Egon and Edith passed away. Walli was the lover par excellence: with her colored garters and hard look she was the model for countless erotic drawings.

This painting went from the collection of Friederike Maria Beer (Vienna and later New York) to Marlborough Fine Art Ltd. of London that recently sold it. The subject, one of the daughters of the owner of two famous Viennese meeting places, was introduced to the Wiener Werkstätte and hence Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, by a friend, Hans Böhler. Both Schiele and Klimt painted her in 1914 and 1916. Eliminating the background and all hints at psychological study, Schiele focused his attention on the pose that through a daring associative process picks up the geometric pattern of the dress. As we can see from the drawings, the woman’s body was originally face downwards, but in the painting she is vertical and when she asked the artist about the best way to hang it, he replied, “from the ceiling.”

The theme of the eternal conflict between Eros and Thanatos, love and death that is so deeply rooted in German culture often appears in Schiele’s works in a more or less allegorical key. In this picture he grasps the profound bond and the latent dynamics of attraction-repulsion that clutches these primeval forces of the human soul in an inextricable magma. The woman, whom we can recognize as Wally Neuzil, holds the man in pathetic, desperate grasp while he violently grabs her tawny hair, almost as if to suck its life-blood. Exalted by the brightness of the draping, the chromatic register of the couple meets specific symbolic and expressive needs. In the allegory of the destructive aspect of love we also see the sense of guilt towards the lover who is about to be abandoned, the fear for the future. When her relationship with the artist ended Walli left for the front as a Red Cross nurse and died in 1917.

Two figures in a short tunic (both self-portraits of the artist) rise from the ground and fluctuate almost weightless in space, against a rocky expanse with flowers and grass. The expression of the first figure whose feet still touch the ground is suffering and haunted, while the second, suspended between the sky and earth, manifests the signs of a deep coma in both the flesh and the gaze. Interpreted in a theosophical and spiritual key as an allegory of the impossible redemption of man even after death, the theme of the painting has rightly been linked to the artist’s psychological state on the eve of his marriage and the world war, painfully swinging between life and death. The painting is also known as the Transfiguration or The Blind Men.

Begun in 1917 on the basis of many preparatory studies, this painting went to Hans Böhler the following year and then to its present location. This is one of Schiele’s most famous works. It seems to portray the family he never had: the wife Edith Harms an educated and austere middle class woman whom he married in 1915 died of Spanish flu during the sixth month of her pregnancy, and Schiele passed away three days later on 31 October 1918. Actually, the canvas is an allusive allegory to a further stage of love following the impetuous gesture of The Embrace. The colors are also probably symbolic, from the chrome yellow of the man to the orange pink of the woman the brilliant pale flesh tones of the child. Notwithstanding the summary treatment of the background and the unfinished state of some details (the left hand of the parents, the lower band) the painting is one of the most convincing of Schiele’s late works because of the carefully measured psychological characterizations of the three figures: the active, alert man, the more passive and melancholy woman, and the fragile, defenseless child wriggling between his mother’s knees with uncontainable energy.

The perfect symbiosis with which the lines, colors and impasto come together to create the form attenuates the psychological impact between the artist and subject, cooling the emotional tension in the picture. The result is a need for stylistic and structural self-control released of all lyricism that seems to govern the style of Schiele’s later manner. There are various studies that may be related to the painting and a preparatory drawing for the entire composition that is in the Albertina in Vienna.

This theme of the embrace that he had already tackled with highly dramatic tones in Death and the Maiden (1915) returns in The Embrace. The profound tone remains unchanged, but the reality of feeling and the concrete presence of the body replace the allegorical theater. Probably inspired by Oskar Kokoscha’s Sposa del vento (1914) he translated the expressionistic and visionary future into loose, elegant linearity. The anatomy is outstanding in the superb modeling of the male body.