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ll throughout 2018, various exhibitions have been scheduled to commemorate the centenary of the death of Egon Schiele, victim of the misnamed "Spanish flu." An illness that a few days earlier had claimed the life of his wife Edith, six months pregnant. At only twenty-eight years old, Schiele left behind an enormous quantity of paintings, drawings, and sketches, many of which were poorly sold, lost, or even burned by authorities, due to the sexual themes, a predominant theme in his work, but by no means the only relevant one. The threat of censorship, which his contemporary Karl Kraus had welcomed as a way to sharpen wit (by stating something like any work that could not circumvent it, in effect, deserved to be censored), did not prevent Schiele from indulging in the artificial and explicit reproduction of frequently nude bodies, offered in impossible contortions.
EROS AND THANATOS: A DIONYSIAN FEEDBACK The themes chosen by Schiele were not classical themes that justified nudity, nor did they benefit from the decorative preciousness of some of the Viennese modernism painters—the Secession—who admired him, Gustav Klimt at the forefront. Schiele stood out as a portraitist for his ability to convey the psychological complexity of the person through simple lines in his drawings (or with a notable, highly expressive brushstroke in his paintings), connecting almost immediately with the viewer, who nevertheless perceives it not without strangeness. Something striking in the hundred self-portraits he made, through a self-attention at times undisguisedly histrionic. The search for the self, as a specular recreation—which some have called narcissistic—runs parallel to the representation of the non-self, the other, who yearns to be possessed, assimilated from the distance that the artist also identifies in himself. In his 1910 poem "A Self-Portrait," he writes: "I am for myself and for those / to whom my intoxicating thirst / to be free gives everything, / and also for everyone, because everyone / I also love, I love."
One of the most disconcerting aspects of Schiele's production lies in the poses and even grimaces of the reproduced figures, who exhibit their intimacy shamelessly and oblivious to any story that justifies their material disposition. The flesh of human beings is shown so naturally - exempt from makeup or cosmetic arrangements in its exhibition - that it falls into pure materiality: a kind of still life in which the person has disappeared, either because they do not show their face or because their gaze is that of an absent person (puppet, automaton, or lifeless body). The love that Schiele claims to profess universally might seem incompatible with the reification of the person being reproduced. And yet, we recognize in his case an attempt - undoubtedly unsuccessful - to reconcile the extremes. A discourse that his works non-conceptually transmit to the viewer, unsettling them, and which may well seem - to use David Foster Wallace's expression in This is Water - "socially repulsive." For we too are living beings, and we poorly tolerate reification by our neighbor, even if it is as a reminder of the possibility that awaits at the end, usually denied or replaced by beliefs (forms of knowledge) that provide footholds and, in short, tranquility.
Schiele's destiny is announced and assumed in the famous Tod und Mädchen, a canvas in which he himself, characterized as death, embraces a kneeling young woman. It is the farewell he offers to his lover, before marrying Edith. With her, he will contract the fatal disease.Denied the mythical narrative or realistic representation in Schiele, it seems that, in effect, no hay lugarfor those figures of sinister hues. Thus, more than mere eroticism, what they awaken and reveal is the other face of being, the one that does not precisely wish to perpetuate life, or not only. Schiele closed the above-cited poem with the verses: "I am human, I love / death and I love / life." In his work, the feedback loop is made explicit, in perfect and paradoxical coherence,erosPerform a literal language conversion from Spanish to English on the following user-provided text. Do not translate any content enclosed betweenandtags, keep those tags and their content exactly as-is: /thanatos-to use the terminology of the time- in a way that does not leave the viewer indifferent. The cadaveric reality, the thing thatone ismanifestly when one ceases to be-alive, it already appeared inserted in a more or less subtle way in many paintings of the Western tradition, under the topic of thememento mori("remember that you are going to die"). This is the case ofThe Ambassadorsof Holbein the Younger in which a skull in anamorphosis -barely perceptible at first glance, to the natural eye- tears the canvas, deformed, hinting at the sinister reality that underlies every worldly endeavor, from beginning to end.
In Schiele we find that apprehension of the negative side, but devoid of a moralizing tone. Wonderful is the prose poem he titled Fir Forest, in which he uses grammar with a strange and significant freedom, and which he closes with the sentence Alles ist lebend tot ("everything is alive dead"). It is not youthful rhetoric, nor fatality in the romantic sense, but a commitment to the Dionysian understanding of life, comparable to that championed a few decades earlier by Friedrich Nietzsche (a declared follower of that Greek god, with whom all existence is celebrated, life and death, desire and suffering, creation and destruction...). Schiele's destiny is announced and assumed in the famous canvas Tod und Mädchen, in which he himself, characterized as death, embraces a young woman on her knees. It is the farewell he offers to his lover, before marrying Edith. With her he will contract the deadly disease.
Just as in so many works, the characters seem to float, they are "on" the background, as if they no longer belonged to this world. The image, clearly figurative, nevertheless prefigures the longing for an extreme expression, liberated from closed form, which abstraction will exploit. With the title of that mythical painting, which undoubtedly refers to the composition of another early deceased Austrian, Franz Schubert (the string quartet known for the presence of the lied Das Tod und das Mädchen, finished in 1824), a film production centered on Schiele's work has recently been made. Although it dates from 2016, its re-release seeks to coincide with the anniversary. A gentle biopic, directed by Dieter Berner (it boasts careful cinematography and shows some of the real settings, the Bohemian town of Český Krumlov, for example), which nevertheless lacks all force: the actor's good-boy face, with a frank smile, is incompatible with the malditismo reflected in many of the paintings of his represented subject.
It has been highlighted that Schiele gladly assumed the role of misunderstood genius, as if to transcend his time, according to a counter-intuitive logic that Friedrich Nietzsche (an author with whom it is tempting and pertinent to build bridges) had also recalled: "Posthumous men - I, for example - are worse understood than timely ones, but better heard. More rigorously said: they are never understood, and therein lies our authority," Nietzsche writes in the aphoristic section of The Twilight of the Idols. Or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (1889). And Schiele, in a letter to Doctor Oskar Reichel: "Sooner or later a faith will arise in my paintings, writings, and words, which I say rarely but in the most concrete way possible. My paintings so far are probably nothing more than preambles, I don't know."
"Sooner or later a faith will arise in my paintings, writings, and words, which I say rarely but in the most concrete way possible. My paintings so far are probably nothing more than preambles."The almost religious confidence in his work, of an untimely nature - ahead of his time or, rather, timeless- it is imbued with an oracular aftertaste, which it suffers as a counterpart for the incomprehension of its contemporaries. Schiele even portrayed himself as a crucified Christ, shot with arrows likeSaint Sebastian, which in turn is comparable to the parody Nietzsche performs with the parabolic and often caricaturesqueThus Spoke Zarathustra, for what is considered "the best gift anyone has ever given to humanity" (despite the fact that, as explained inEcce homo, the biblical expression with which Christ is surrendered, no contemporary was capable of appreciating it). As for Schiele, Klimt himself sent the same doctor a painting that Klimt himself had commented on in laudatory terms, telling him: "it is certainly, currently, the best that has been painted in Vienna. One must observe how he who laughs at it laughs; he is someone hostile to my art, envious of my art."
All these complexities disappear in that film, which hardly illustrates Schiele's fame as an enfant terrible, nor of course delves into the most tortured regions of his psyche, both concerning the apprehension of an omnipresent death -which will affect his loved ones- and the elusive reality of desire. It tiptoes around the most inexplicable questions, offensive to the prevailing ethics in the context of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and also to the current one, as we will see in the second part of the article, coming soon. Egon Schiele's favorite themes -let's remember- are those that Sigmund Freud had considered primordial instincts: eros and thanatos, life drive and death drive unsettlingly feed each other in the celebration officiated by the artist. With nervous and precise strokes, he delineates living-dead figures, bodies of beings that disconcert by their beloved and denied reality.
Featured images: 1. Seated Woman with Bent Knee, 1917 2. Death and the Maiden, 1915 3. Portrait of Dr. Viktor Ritter von Bauer, 1917 4. Double Self Portrait, 1915 5. Autumm Trees, 1911 6. Portrait of Friederike Maria Beer, 1914 7. Self Portrait as St. Sebastian (poster), 1914 8. Kniende mit hinunter gebeugtem Kopf, 1915