How Klimt transforms Schiele: an exhibition in London

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he relationship between Klimt and Schiele is fascinating, despite the great age difference between them: Klimt was 28 years older than Schiele, but they shared the same artistic ideas, which revolved around avant-garde art and embraced the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, a total art form that encompassed architecture, sculpture, painting, design, and decorative arts, among others. In addition, both artists studied the expression of human bodies in their drawings, focusing on gesticulations and extreme postures, and emphasizing decorative and ornamental lines. On the occasion of the centenary of Schiele's death, Jacobo Zabalo offered us a magnificent text from the window of The New Barcelona Post.

The Royal Academy of Arts in London (RA), on the centenary of the deaths of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, has chosen to honor these two great modernists with a touring exhibition that brings together drawings and sketches from different stages of their lives: Klimt / Schiele. Drawings from the Albertina Museum, Vienna. The exhibition can be visited until February 3, 2019. Admission costs around €15.

It is unclear when these two artists met in person: Schiele said it was in 1907, but at that time he was a completely unknown student. In contrast, Klimt had already been at the center of scandal for The Faculty Paintings" in 1894, when he was commissioned to create three large paintings for the University of Vienna, which caused public outrage among Viennese due to the nude figures that could be seen, some of which can be seen in sketches and studies in room number two of the exhibition hosted by the Royal Academy of Arts.

During those years, Klimt was also the co-founder and first president of the artistic group called the Vienna Secession, founded in 1897, which aimed to rejuvenate Austrian visual arts and find an alternative to the historicist aesthetic of the Ringstraße that surrounded the old and conservative core of Vienna. Throughout the RA exhibition, a variety of drawings related to the movement can be seen, which, despite having a short life, Klimt wanted to champion.

The next major project Klimt decided to embark on, also before meeting Schiele, was the homage to Beethoven at the fourteenth Secession exhibition, which had over 60,000 visitors. Klimt, influenced by Japanese art, participated with the Beethovenfries, a mural measuring 2.15x34 meters. To create it, he based it on the Ninth Symphony and represented the temptation of humanity in the search for happiness through mythological iconography. In the exhibition Drawings from the Albertina Museum, Vienna, one can see the sketches titled Studie für das Liebespaar im Beethovenfries, where Klimt worked on the culminating part of the mural and showed the realm of ideal happiness, a reflection of Friederich Schiller's Ode to Joy, incorporated into the choral singing at the end of the Ninth Symphony. This drawing was also the study for his very famous painting The Kiss (original title, Der Kuss).

"I walked through Klimt until March. Today I believe I am completely different," said Egon Schiele

A year later, in 1909, Schiele participated in the second Kunstschau at Klimt's invitation. His admiration for him is evident, and the exchanges of drawings and sketches between the two artists must have increased their creative connection. Schiele's fascination would continue to grow until 1910, when he found his own artistic voice after spending a few months living outside Vienna, and he said: "I walked through Klimt until March. Today I believe I am completely different."

PORTRAITS AND EROTICISM: OVERCOMING THE TABOO

In the third room of the exhibition, one of the most representative genres of both artists is clearly appreciated: portraiture. The vast majority of Klimt's portraits are oil paintings, in the square format that so characterized him, and are commissions from personalities of Viennese society, especially women. In contrast, Schiele, considered an emerging artist for almost his entire life, did not manage to follow this path. He had to settle for having friends and family as models until the last year of his life, when he did receive large commissions. In the exhibition, some of these works can be seen, among them two portraits of Friederike Maria Beer, one of the very few people who were painted by both artists. Unlike Klimt, Schiele did have a special interest in self-portraits, and some are present in the RA exhibition. Schiele identified with Saint Francis of Assisi and said that he saw art as a spiritual calling, against the materialism of modern capitalist society.

Another of the most important themes, common to both artists, is eroticism. In the exhibition, a very important role is given to this issue, dedicating an entire room with numerous drawings by both Klimt and Schiele. Sexuality is recurrent in their drawings and paintings: both felt a great need to understand the body and the human form through their painting. Both painted "taboo" subjects at that time, such as masturbation or homosexuality: Klimt did so from a more sensual perspective and Schiele seeking a more direct and provocative effect.

In 1911, Schiele began to achieve success and held his first solo exhibition at Vienna's Galerie Miethke. A year later, on April 13, 1912, he was denounced for child seduction and immorality and was imprisoned for 24 days. The judge confiscated 125 paintings, burned as punishment for not having kept the erotic paintings in a "sufficiently safe place." During his short stay in prison, Schiele painted a series of watercolors, some of which are present in the exhibition: we can appreciate a clear difference between those he painted in the first days of incarceration - more structured - and those of the last days - which approach delirium with, for example, a chair levitating above the floor.

In 1916, these two figures once again shared space in the Wiener Kunstschau exhibition in Berlin, where their paintings were hung facing each other. Two years later, in January 1918, Klimt was hospitalized and died of pneumonia on February 6: Schiele painted three final drawings of Klimt in the morgue. A month later, Schiele would be invited to organize the 49th edition of the Secession exhibition, where he presented a drawing in which a table full of artists can be seen with an empty chair, reserved for Klimt. This drawing is also part of the Drawings from the Albertina Museum, Vienna exhibition at the RA in London. That same July 1918, Schiele rented Klimt's old studio with the intention of turning it into an art school, but a few months later, the artist contracted Spanish flu and died on October 31.