The short but agitated life of Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele, Self portrait, 1911, Leopold Museum, Vienna.

The Viennese society of 1900 had two obsessions: sex and death. Whereas Vienna is better known for the latter, Egon was deeply interested in the first. He created emaciated, twisted, satanic bodies that scared the society. Schiele was simply ahead of his time, especially in the frankness of his approach to his themes.

As Richard Avedon said: You can’t get at the thing itself, the real nature of the sitter, by stripping away the surface. The surface is all you’ve got. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface. All that you can do is to manipulate that surface—gesture, costume, expression—radically and correctly. And I think Schiele understood this in a unique, and original way. Rather than attempting to abandon the tradition of the performing portrait (which is probably impossible anyway), it seems to me that Schiele pushed it to extremes. (...) He shattered the form by turning the volume up to a scream.

Schiele was almost forgot in the 30s because of the Nazi censorship. He was part of the “degenerate art”. Seems curious how nowadays the popular opinion would confer him the same title. Nevertheless he was rediscovered after the Second World War and his narcissistic personality attracted similar egos, like David Bowie and James Dean.

But why is it, despite the sordid figures, so beautiful? The answer might be his technique. He took the line from bold and aggressive stroke, to the caress. From tension to delicacy. Interrupted, changing lines pay tribute to the adage “A picture is worth a thousand words”.

While painting involves space, color and texture, drawing talks a whole different language. It’s about saying as much as possible with the minimum stroke of a pen. Egon Schiele compressed a whole TED talk into a tweet. A whole personality and story into a few charcoal strokes and some drops of gouache or watercolor. Sometimes both.

Enjoy the video below, featuring some of his great artwork.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/78feed_69a5264f38db4b9ab27a9e63df768963/360p/mp4/file.mp4

Dedicated with all my love to my dearest friend Laura.