Egon Schiele: a graphic virtuoso

rescued from the wilderness

His candid and erotic nudes shocked Vienna, and his untimely
death left him unregarded for 50 years. But his portraits reveal a
top-ranking draughtsman and bold and sensual artist

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William Boyd

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The Guardian, Friday 10 October 2014 16.30 BST

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Seated Female Nude With Raised Right Arm, 1910. Photograph: Scala

In 1964, the publishers Methuen brought out a hefty and authoritativeDictionary of Modern
Painting I still have my dog-eared copy. The book started with "Apollinaire" and ended with
"Zandomeneghi" and was a highly respectable work of scholarship compiled by some 30
renowned specialists, the latest word on 100 years of art history. But, intriguingly, there is no
entry for Egon Schiele. Klimt has an entry, of course, and so does Schiele's exact contemporary,
Oskar Kokoschka, and so does the Vienna Secession movement, in which Schiele was a
significant figure. Yet the only mention of the artist's name occurs in the page on Klimt where it is
noted that: "Klimt was much admired by E Schiele." What this reference to E Schiele might have
meant to anyone in 1964 is something of a mystery.
In June 2011, at Sotheby's, London, a fairly good 1914 Egon Schiele townscape, Huser mit
bunter Wsche (Vorstadt II), went under the hammer. It was bought, anonymously, for 24.7m.
Even by the crazy standards of today's art market this staggering re-evaluation of an artist's worth
takes some beating, rivalling Van Gogh's dizzying ascent. The trajectory of Schiele's posthumous

reputation from almost total anonymity to ubiquitous global fame, with a price tag to match,
occurred in the space of 50 years.
Less than 50, in fact, when one considers the details. I can remember Schiele suddenly arriving
on the scene in the early 1970s, when I was at university. Almost at once you could buy postcard
reproductions of his works everywhere; posters were available of the newly familiar paintings and
drawings. I bought a small pocket-sized monograph that fleshed out the details of his short,
tormented life. Who was this artist we'd never heard about?
Schiele's rediscovery was almost singlehandedly the work of Rudolf Leopold (1925-2010), an
ophthalmologist from Vienna who, in the years following the second world war, started buying up
every Schiele painting and drawing he could find for very modest sums of money. Leopold was
not a rich man, just uncannily prescient. He loved the work of the Vienna Secession and in
particular Schiele. Fairly speedily, Leopold came to possess the largest collection of Schiele
works in the world. And then in 1972, he issued a catalogue raisonn and the global boom in the
artist began and has never stopped. Gratifyingly, the Austrian government recognised Leopold's
heroic obsession and built him a gallery in the Museumsquartier in Vienna. It is one of the world's
great art galleries and the key destination for those who wish to see Schiele's work.

Egon Schiele in Vienna in

about 1910. Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images

It's hard to explain, nonetheless, the void of silence that Schiele and his reputation fell into, in the
decades after his death, aged just 28, in 1918. He was well known, not to say notorious, in
Viennese artistic circles in the early years of the 20th century and his prodigious gifts as an artist
were widely recognised. The explanation may be a simple consequence of his early death
(caused by the Spanish flu pandemic) or the subsequent fame of Klimt, Kokoschka and others
overshadowing his reputation. It is a bizarre period of neglect because, in many ways, Schiele
and his work best reflect that astonishing period of sociocultural history when, over the last years
of the 19th century, and leading up to the outbreak of war in 1914, Vienna was the world's most
fascinating city.
This compact, beautiful, bourgeois, capital was the cynosure of many currents of modernism. If
one begins to list the artists Schiele, Klimt, Kokoschka; then the musicians Mahler,
Schnberg, Berg, Webern one is already marvelling. Throw in the architects and designers
Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos and the writers Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, Karl Kraus, Rilke (and

Kafka close at hand in Prague) and the brew seems almost too rich. But also in Vienna before
the first world war were some resident, some passing through those malign and unhinged
empire builders Adolf Hitler, Trotsky and Stalin. Add a garnish of Ludwig Wittgenstein and
Sigmund Freud and one begins to understand why the city of Vienna itself, during those early
years of the century, was regarded as a gesamtkunstwerk, a "total work of art". There was
nowhere like it on the planet. I don't think such a rich congruence of ideas, of politics, of art,
literature, music and revolutionary thinking has been repeated in recent centuries. Perhaps only
Renaissance Florence runs Vienna close.
Schiele was born in 1890 in Tulln, a small town on the Danube about 20 miles west of Vienna.
His father was a stationmaster who, significantly, died of tertiary syphilis when Schiele was 14.
The boy showed a talent for drawing and in 1906 secured a place in Vienna's highly prestigious
Akademie der Bildenden Knst (an institution that would reject the application of another wouldbe local artist, Hitler, twice, a little later).
A precociously gifted student, Schiele soon attracted the attention of Gustav Klimt, the preeminent artist of the Secession movement an artistic revolution that covered many art forms, all
driven by the basic aim of rejecting Beaux-Arts classicism and stuffy Salon mediocrity. By the age
of 20, Schiele was being recognised as the heir to Klimt and indeed Klimt's early influence on
Schiele's graphic style is very obvious and understandable.
Schiele's work was already expressionistic and daring, taking Klimt's safely decorative eroticism a
bold leap further with his figurative distortions, mannered elongations and sexual frankness. He
was swiftly attracting notoriety with his explicit nude studies. Reportedly, the emperor himself,
Franz Joseph, commented when confronted by a life-sized Schiele nude: "That is absolutely
hideous!" In 1910, a selection of Schiele's drawings was removed from an exhibition because of
their "obscene nature".

Kneeling Nude with

Raised Hands (Self-Portrait), 1910. Photograph: The Leopold Museum, Vienna

This notoriety drove Schiele from Vienna to the small town of Krumau, where he lived with one of
Klimt's former models, Valerie "Wally" Neuzil. Wally became a favourite subject. But being an
uncompromising modern artist living in a small provincial town is a risky business, and the locals
were outraged when Schiele was seen drawing a naked Wally in the garden of the house he was
renting. He left Krumau for another small town, Neulengbach, where he used local children as
studies for his drawings. One of these children, a 13-year-old girl, ran away from home and
sought refuge in Schiele's studio. Police raided the house and arrested Schiele, charging him with
kidnapping, statutory rape and public immorality. The first two charges were dropped but Schiele
was convicted of the third as the police had found a large quantity of "obscene" drawings and
alleged that the children he used as models would have seen these.
He was sent to prison, where he served a sentence of 24 days, an experience that traumatised
him. Schiele returned to Vienna where he lived in some poverty, even though he continued to
exhibit. The outbreak of the first world war saw the beginning of his relationship with Edith Harms

 Wally, faithful but working class, was rejected. Schiele married Edith before he was called up
and drafted into the Austrian army in 1915. He never saw combat and spent most of his military
service as a guard in prisoner-of-war camps. In his off-duty hours, he continued to paint and draw
and new dealers began to take more interest in his work.
In 1918, Klimt died at the age of 55 and Schiele was generally perceived to be his natural
successor in the world of Viennese painting. And, finally, financial success appeared to be
following artistic recognition his last exhibition was sold out. The triumph was shortlived,
however. In October 1918, a month before the end of the war, Edith Schiele, six-months pregnant
with their first child, died of Spanish influenza. Schiele, having also contracted the virus, lasted
another three days before dying early in the morning of 31 October.

Standing Nude with

Stockings, 1914. Photograph: Monika Runge Fotografenmeisterin

Such is the familiarity with Schiele's paintings and drawings these days that it requires something
of a thought experiment to imagine the visceral shock that a first viewing of them would have
generated. The famousSeated Male Nude (1910) is a case in point. Probably a self-portrait, it is a

gaunt, life-sized full-frontal nude with a skin-tone of bilious marshy green and orange nipples and
one baleful, red, staring eye. The effect is all the more stylised and otherworldy as Schiele has
left off the nude's feet; the shins end in abrupt stumps. The resulting painting is as disturbing and
powerful as a Francis Bacon or a Lucien Freud. One wonders what the good burghers of Vienna
must have made of this in 1910. Recoil, feigned outrage secret fascination?
The social hypocrisy of Austro-Hungarian Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century was the
same as existed in Victorian London. Repressive cultures and public prohibitions stimulate an
underworld that is the inverse, sexually and behaviourally, of the values and attitudes enshrined
in the public face of these societies. Schiele found himself surrounded and attacked by this social
climate and his work is, among many other things, an effort to strip away the lies and surface
pretences at large in the city in which he lived.
To a degree this explains the charged and explicit eroticism of much of his work though it
should be noted that Schiele also painted landscapes throughout his working life. But he returned
again and again to the posed naked figure, male and female the ultimate test and validation, so
the critic Robert Hughes has stated, of any artist's merit and painterly ability. Yet there is an
undeniable near-pornographic intensity in many of Schiele's drawings and they clearly acted as a
sexual stimulus for him as he also made many self-portrait studies of himself in the act of
masturbation. He was one of the most photographed artists, creating poses that even today have
an astonishing contemporary feel.
A great self-portraitist, a superb colourist, a daring manipulator of composition and possessed of
a subversive and challenging vision of his art all these epithets apply and combine to make
Schiele one of the most significant European artists of the 20th century. However, in my opinion,
what lifts him truly into the first rank are his astonishing powers as a draughtsman. Schiele can be
spoken of in the same terms as other phenomenal draughtsmen Rembrandt, Ingres, Degas,
Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Picasso, Klee, Sutherland and, in our own time, Michael Andrews
and David Hockney. I believe that that you can't be a truly great painter if you're not an excellent
draughtsman. And yet hugely famous and successful artists who draw as well, or as badly, as a
10-year-old are everywhere acclaimed, particularly in the post-second world war era. You can tell
relatively easily from an examination of their work that there is something fundamentally
lacking. Jackson Pollock, to name but one giant of modernism, is a pre-eminent example he
was a shockingly inept draughtsman but there are dozens of others.

Crouching Woman with

Green Kerchief, 1914. Photograph: Manfred Thumberger

It's an important point. One of the key aspects of being able to draw is that it teaches you to see,
as Hockney has observed in a recent interview; what's more, drawing from life teaches you to see
in minute and particular detail. Schiele was superabundantly gifted in that regard.
It's a matter of cultural shame in this country that none of our great public art galleries has any
significant work by Schiele. Clearly, the various curators took their eye off the ball and by the time
the 1970s came round, and everyone was suddenly talking about him, it was far too late and the
works were far too expensive. Consequently, if you want to see Schiele's work, you have to go to
Vienna or wait until an exhibition is mounted in London. And they do arrive, luckily, from time to
time. Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude opens soon at the Courtauld; three years ago, the Richard
Nagy Gallery in Bond Street, London, had a large and superb exhibition of Schiele's drawings.
I was fortunate enough to see this show and spend some hours contemplating the works on
display. The key aspect of Schiele's drawings is the confident emphasis of the line. I studied
these drawings at the closest possible range my eyes a few centimetres from the paper
surface. There is no evidence of the preliminary tentative mark, of the initial hesitant touch of the
pencil or crayon that would allow the artist to get his bearings and select the position for the first
expressive line. And the line is drawn with real pressure whether crayon, pencil or charcoal
hard, dark and jagged. It's very different from Klimt's wispy, sketchy delineation. You can clearly
see the speed and assurance of Schiele's execution, the uninhibited flow of the hand, denoting
in a few quick seconds of activity tumbling curls of hair or crumpled fabric, or the fluid

confluence of flank and hip and thigh. It is, above all else, a display of unparalleled graphic
virtuosity.
The same could be said of Schiele's use of composition, of "framing" in the cinematic sense.
Heads and arms are left outside the drawing surface, cut off by the paper's edge. The figures are
placed high in the paper's rectangle or dramatically to one side, the blank space of the undrawnon surface as much a key to the overall composition as the drawn figure itself. This has the effect
of making the figurative drawing more abstract, paradoxically, neutralising the shock effect of the
splayed limbs, the proffered genitalia, the immediate sexual context of artist and model.
Also, as a matter of artistic practice, Schiele would add colour to these drawings afterwards. The
effect of this is to further de-eroticise the image, however explicit. Flat blocks of watercolour or
scumbled guache counterpose the three-dimensionality of the drawing. If there is an initial urge to
stimulate erotically, it becomes defused or dissipated by the semi-abstraction of the juxtaposed
colour. In all the explicitly sexual poses xthat he draws, Schiele introduces this element: time and
again one senses him looking for the artistic dividend after the primal sensual motivation,
searching for the way to make these intensely personal studio drawings function more properly as
works of art.
Like all great artists who die very young, Schiele's premature death makes one wonder what
might have happened had he lived longer and ponder what direction his artistic course might
have taken. Long productive lives are not necessarily a boon to artists think of Kokoschka or
Andr Derain, for example. It's another intriguing thought experiment: if Schiele had lived to be
70, and died, say, in the 1960s (Kokoschka died in 1980, aged 93), then perhaps his paintings
would not be selling for millions of pounds today and we would not be discussing him in the way
we are. The intensity and the brilliance of those last 10 years or so of his short life, early in the
20th century, are his real legacy. The work he made still has tremendous power and reveals the
magnificent generosity of his gifts as an artist.
Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude is at the Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House, London,
WC2R 0RN from 23 October