Egon Schiele

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SUZANNE PAGÉ PREFACE

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SCHIELE_EN_BAT_270818_v2.indd 10-11

Echoing its contemporary collection, the exhi- powerful and lasting impact, tied to the corrobition Keys to a Passion, held at the Fondation sive intensity of a drawing practice where lines in 2015, revealed the historical roots of the four appear directly connected to a raw and open major axes that give it structure and the artistic nervous system. commitments of our program. These engagements focus on contemplation, an interest in Dieter Buchhart, the curator, has highlighted music and sound, a Pop sensibility, and an erup- “four existential lines” that run through the tive and invincible vision, that of the subjective exhibition. He literally follows the evolution of expression of the artist. In that first exhibition, a line that is initially ornamental, in the wake of the iconic presence of Edvard Munch, Alberto Jugendstil and still under the guidance of Klimt, Giacometti, and Francis Bacon prevailed. who would remain in all respects the artist’s mentor and major point of reference. Schiele’s Today, in dedicating a major presentation to line then becomes more angular and tortuous, Egon Schiele, we are cultivating this expres- broken by the vigor of his effusive expressionsionist line and turbulent spirit with our first ism. Then, the line searching for a new balance monograph of an artist belonging to the history leads to a group of works produced either of modern art. Simultaneously, the work of during or immediately after his imprisonment Jean-Michel Basquiat, well represented in our of 1912 and infused with the premonitory collection, is being exhibited. Spanning one end anguish of approaching war. Later, during his of the twentieth century to the other, from fin- last years, his previously fragmented line de-siècle Vienna and the Secession to 1980s recombines as he returns to a certain modeling New York, these are two periods, two cultures, of forms. and two continents that offer striking echoes of one another in their indomitable singularity. The “existential” nature of this line can also be Both were meteors that exploded in full flight, appreciated metaphorically as an outline that sharing a common precociousness, a frenetic links, though not impermeably, the painter, his pace of life, and an enormous productivity in models, and his own experience: his father’s which the body was the driving force of a raw dementia, his refusal to follow a well-traced sensibility, manifested by an obsessional prac- career after his feted entry to the Academy and tice of drawing. his subsequent decision to leave it, his various love affairs, the painful episode of his imprisonFor Schiele—from the start resentful of any aca- ment for an accusation from which he was demicism, and who, not without a degree of acquitted, and then the very gripping shadow narcissism, tackled head-on both sexuality and of war and death. A tortured line continuously death—a great painter was a “painter of figures.” raises worrying questions: those of a penetratPortraits and self-portraits are at the heart of ing observer who dares to face the rawest issues this exhibition, which brings together some head-on, especially sexuality, through unhundred or so graphic works and a few paint- wavering introspection and a merciless gaze ings. These are supplemented by a selection of focused first on himself, and then on the models landscapes and still lifes essential to an appre- with whom he identified. More than erotic, ciation of the progression and detours of his this gaze combines clarity and dread. In 1911, oeuvre. Tracing Schiele’s incredibly rapid Schiele had written to his uncle: “I shall arrive career from his coming of age in 1908 to his at a point where the magnitude of each of my death in 1918 entails questions much deeper living works will be a source of fright.” His decthan the reactions of dismissal sparked by the larations do not conceal his awareness of an only—and inescapably misleading—images almost Christ-like mission. His exceptional virtransmitted today by advertisements. The pri- tuosity allowed him to achieve it rapidly: only mary virtue of this exhibition is to allow visi- ten years passed between his breaking away tors to be “exposed” to the works and their from the Academy in 1909 and his death in 1918.

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1. Self-Portrait, 1910 (cat. 33).

27/08/2018 20:30


SUZANNE PAGÉ PREFACE

1

10

SCHIELE_EN_BAT_270818_v2.indd 10-11

Echoing its contemporary collection, the exhi- powerful and lasting impact, tied to the corrobition Keys to a Passion, held at the Fondation sive intensity of a drawing practice where lines in 2015, revealed the historical roots of the four appear directly connected to a raw and open major axes that give it structure and the artistic nervous system. commitments of our program. These engagements focus on contemplation, an interest in Dieter Buchhart, the curator, has highlighted music and sound, a Pop sensibility, and an erup- “four existential lines” that run through the tive and invincible vision, that of the subjective exhibition. He literally follows the evolution of expression of the artist. In that first exhibition, a line that is initially ornamental, in the wake of the iconic presence of Edvard Munch, Alberto Jugendstil and still under the guidance of Klimt, Giacometti, and Francis Bacon prevailed. who would remain in all respects the artist’s mentor and major point of reference. Schiele’s Today, in dedicating a major presentation to line then becomes more angular and tortuous, Egon Schiele, we are cultivating this expres- broken by the vigor of his effusive expressionsionist line and turbulent spirit with our first ism. Then, the line searching for a new balance monograph of an artist belonging to the history leads to a group of works produced either of modern art. Simultaneously, the work of during or immediately after his imprisonment Jean-Michel Basquiat, well represented in our of 1912 and infused with the premonitory collection, is being exhibited. Spanning one end anguish of approaching war. Later, during his of the twentieth century to the other, from fin- last years, his previously fragmented line de-siècle Vienna and the Secession to 1980s recombines as he returns to a certain modeling New York, these are two periods, two cultures, of forms. and two continents that offer striking echoes of one another in their indomitable singularity. The “existential” nature of this line can also be Both were meteors that exploded in full flight, appreciated metaphorically as an outline that sharing a common precociousness, a frenetic links, though not impermeably, the painter, his pace of life, and an enormous productivity in models, and his own experience: his father’s which the body was the driving force of a raw dementia, his refusal to follow a well-traced sensibility, manifested by an obsessional prac- career after his feted entry to the Academy and tice of drawing. his subsequent decision to leave it, his various love affairs, the painful episode of his imprisonFor Schiele—from the start resentful of any aca- ment for an accusation from which he was demicism, and who, not without a degree of acquitted, and then the very gripping shadow narcissism, tackled head-on both sexuality and of war and death. A tortured line continuously death—a great painter was a “painter of figures.” raises worrying questions: those of a penetratPortraits and self-portraits are at the heart of ing observer who dares to face the rawest issues this exhibition, which brings together some head-on, especially sexuality, through unhundred or so graphic works and a few paint- wavering introspection and a merciless gaze ings. These are supplemented by a selection of focused first on himself, and then on the models landscapes and still lifes essential to an appre- with whom he identified. More than erotic, ciation of the progression and detours of his this gaze combines clarity and dread. In 1911, oeuvre. Tracing Schiele’s incredibly rapid Schiele had written to his uncle: “I shall arrive career from his coming of age in 1908 to his at a point where the magnitude of each of my death in 1918 entails questions much deeper living works will be a source of fright.” His decthan the reactions of dismissal sparked by the larations do not conceal his awareness of an only—and inescapably misleading—images almost Christ-like mission. His exceptional virtransmitted today by advertisements. The pri- tuosity allowed him to achieve it rapidly: only mary virtue of this exhibition is to allow visi- ten years passed between his breaking away tors to be “exposed” to the works and their from the Academy in 1909 and his death in 1918.

11

1. Self-Portrait, 1910 (cat. 33).

27/08/2018 20:30


2

Compared to the century to come, this decade environment in his contribution to this catain Vienna was one of the longest, in view of the logue. My gratitude is also due to Jane Kallir, war but also of the astounding dynamism of the author of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, thought and creation and the cultural upheav- who has devoted her exceptional expertise to als that would determine the history of art in the preparation of this exhibition. As for the twentieth century. When Schiele entered Alessandra Comini, whose writings have been the Academy in Vienna in 1906, the Fauves in key to spreading awareness of Schiele’s oeuvre, France and the Expressionist group Die Brücke she has focused on the artist’s most fascinating had already shaken Europe. In 1911, Kandinsky subject: his self-portraits, omnipresent here. produced his first abstract watercolors. Until the outbreak of war, the avant-garde groups Schiele wanted his paintings to be shown in followed hard on one another’s heels. Still, “buildings like temples.” The many public and Schiele’s production belonged to a particular private collectors that we approached heard his setting, that of the capital of the Austro- plea and have loaned us, for the period of this Hungarian Empire at the start of the twentieth exhibition, the rare pieces in their possession. century, which was subjected to a rhythm We offer them our very special thanks. The genrightly summed up by Jean Clair in his ambigu- erosity of each and every one is all the more ous expression “skeptical modernity” in his appreciated since during this centenary of groundbreaking 1986 exhibition in Paris, Schiele’s death, the Viennese institutions, whose Vienne 1880-1938. L’apocalypse joyeuse. collections are among the richest in this respect, have not been able to allow their works to travel I am particularly grateful to him for having in view of the celebration taking place in the returned Egon Schiele to this “effervescent” artist’s own country.

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SCHIELE_EN_BAT_270818_v2.indd 12-13

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2. Moa, 1911 (cat. 51). 3. Reclining Nude Girl in Striped Smock, 1911 (cat. 55). 4. Self-Portrait with Chinese Lantern Plant, 1912 (cat. 56).

We are all the more appreciative of the confi- I would like to express my indebtedness to dence they have shown in our project to pres- Dieter Buchhart for having succeeded in mainent, in Paris, the monograph of a unique artist, taining a rigorous and lucid approach and for one who is still as fierce and topical today as having accomplished, with his collaborator ever, one hundred years after his passing. Anna Karina Hofbauer and the assistance of Lexie Jordan, the particularly difficult task of Curator Dieter Buchhart has, quite rightly, bringing together all these works, which are placed the inevitable emotional response to often less well-known. Schiele’s work to the side. The boldness of the artist’s unflinching gaze combined with the Olivier Michelon, curator at the Fondation, with harsh economy of his line has ensured the his assistant Camila Souyri, made a decisive ardent perpetuity of his oeuvre. contribution to the presentation in Paris of this exhibition, designed by architect Jean-François Suzanne Pagé Bodin with a talent that has often been seen Artistic director of the Fondation Louis Vuitton here, assisted by Hélène Roncerel. Conscious of the very special dedication that this project has required, I wish to express my warm gratitude to one and all. S. P.

13

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2

Compared to the century to come, this decade environment in his contribution to this catain Vienna was one of the longest, in view of the logue. My gratitude is also due to Jane Kallir, war but also of the astounding dynamism of the author of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, thought and creation and the cultural upheav- who has devoted her exceptional expertise to als that would determine the history of art in the preparation of this exhibition. As for the twentieth century. When Schiele entered Alessandra Comini, whose writings have been the Academy in Vienna in 1906, the Fauves in key to spreading awareness of Schiele’s oeuvre, France and the Expressionist group Die Brücke she has focused on the artist’s most fascinating had already shaken Europe. In 1911, Kandinsky subject: his self-portraits, omnipresent here. produced his first abstract watercolors. Until the outbreak of war, the avant-garde groups Schiele wanted his paintings to be shown in followed hard on one another’s heels. Still, “buildings like temples.” The many public and Schiele’s production belonged to a particular private collectors that we approached heard his setting, that of the capital of the Austro- plea and have loaned us, for the period of this Hungarian Empire at the start of the twentieth exhibition, the rare pieces in their possession. century, which was subjected to a rhythm We offer them our very special thanks. The genrightly summed up by Jean Clair in his ambigu- erosity of each and every one is all the more ous expression “skeptical modernity” in his appreciated since during this centenary of groundbreaking 1986 exhibition in Paris, Schiele’s death, the Viennese institutions, whose Vienne 1880-1938. L’apocalypse joyeuse. collections are among the richest in this respect, have not been able to allow their works to travel I am particularly grateful to him for having in view of the celebration taking place in the returned Egon Schiele to this “effervescent” artist’s own country.

12

SCHIELE_EN_BAT_270818_v2.indd 12-13

4

3

2. Moa, 1911 (cat. 51). 3. Reclining Nude Girl in Striped Smock, 1911 (cat. 55). 4. Self-Portrait with Chinese Lantern Plant, 1912 (cat. 56).

We are all the more appreciative of the confi- I would like to express my indebtedness to dence they have shown in our project to pres- Dieter Buchhart for having succeeded in mainent, in Paris, the monograph of a unique artist, taining a rigorous and lucid approach and for one who is still as fierce and topical today as having accomplished, with his collaborator ever, one hundred years after his passing. Anna Karina Hofbauer and the assistance of Lexie Jordan, the particularly difficult task of Curator Dieter Buchhart has, quite rightly, bringing together all these works, which are placed the inevitable emotional response to often less well-known. Schiele’s work to the side. The boldness of the artist’s unflinching gaze combined with the Olivier Michelon, curator at the Fondation, with harsh economy of his line has ensured the his assistant Camila Souyri, made a decisive ardent perpetuity of his oeuvre. contribution to the presentation in Paris of this exhibition, designed by architect Jean-François Suzanne Pagé Bodin with a talent that has often been seen Artistic director of the Fondation Louis Vuitton here, assisted by Hélène Roncerel. Conscious of the very special dedication that this project has required, I wish to express my warm gratitude to one and all. S. P.

13

27/08/2018 20:30


DIETER BUCHHART EXHIBITION CURATOR

EGON SCHIELE AND THE EXISTENTIAL LINE

1

EVERYTHING IS LIVING DEAD. Egon Schiele, 1910

As Wassily Kandinsky defines it, the “line … is “the anchoring of content in form” in the “limthe track made by the moving point; that is, its inal experience of the line.” Schiele’s outlines product. It is created by movement—specifically can be read as ambivalent. They describe the through the destruction of the intense self- most extreme positions of oppressive, comcontained repose of the point. Here, the leap out pressing spatial forces and at the same time of the static into the dynamic occurs.”1 Thus refer to the line of demarcation behind which “force” is “the original source of every line,”2 the the body has been reduced to its bare ­existence.3 force of the artist’s hand that allows the tip of the pencil to glide, pull, push, or press its way He places geometric and free lines with miniacross the surface of the paper almost without mal pressure or increases the pressure on the resistance. The line becomes the trace of the drawing utensil and the intensity of the resultmovement of a hand and the expression of the ing line with a sure hand, scribbling, repeating, cross-hatching, scrawling, crossing out, conartist’s physical body. structing, correcting, and marking. His generThe line of the brilliant draftsman Egon Schiele, ally curved “free wave-like” lines emerge from its unparalleled emergence in the act of draw- an interplay of forces, of “positive and negative” ing, defined his artistic practice. Werner pressure with irregular alternation, an “espeHofmann, for example, sees Schiele’s work as cially temperamental struggle between the two

14

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forces.”4 It is the free interplay of the forces, the work with the differentiating of flow that defines Schiele’s drawings of the body, landscapes, buildings, trees, and sunflowers.

of Lola Lola in The Blue Angel; these are more like inspired graffiti from some public lavatory frequented by old men with the taste for nameless, art nouveau experiences.5

The drawn, partly scribbled self-portraits and depictions of people, some masturbating or making love, caused art critic Keith Roberts to comment in The Burlington Magazine, on the occasion of an exhibition of Schiele’s works in 1964 at Marlborough Fine Art:

Roberts saw parallels between public toilet graffiti and Schiele’s erotic portrayals, which, showing men and women masturbating, seem to test the limits of pornography. For the critic, the drawings—clearly interpreted as lewd— with their incisiveness and sure stroke, evoked graffiti. This shows how critical viewers continued to question Schiele’s place in art history even decades after the artist’s death.6

There is not the slightest doubt that Schiele had great talent … But Schiele remains … an unfulfilled artist … His most typical works are the sketches and watercolours of girls, lolling about in various states of calculated undress and reminding one, in their erotic impassivity,

15

Schiele’s ultimate international breakthrough took place posthumously, in the 1980s, when artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat7 and

1. Sherrie Levine, After Egon Schiele, 1982, seven gelatin silver and eleven chromogenic prints; edition 2/2, 35.6 × 27.9 cm each (unframed), 175.26 × 307.34 cm (installed), Art Institute of Chicago.

27/08/2018 20:30


DIETER BUCHHART EXHIBITION CURATOR

EGON SCHIELE AND THE EXISTENTIAL LINE

1

EVERYTHING IS LIVING DEAD. Egon Schiele, 1910

As Wassily Kandinsky defines it, the “line … is “the anchoring of content in form” in the “limthe track made by the moving point; that is, its inal experience of the line.” Schiele’s outlines product. It is created by movement—specifically can be read as ambivalent. They describe the through the destruction of the intense self- most extreme positions of oppressive, comcontained repose of the point. Here, the leap out pressing spatial forces and at the same time of the static into the dynamic occurs.”1 Thus refer to the line of demarcation behind which “force” is “the original source of every line,”2 the the body has been reduced to its bare ­existence.3 force of the artist’s hand that allows the tip of the pencil to glide, pull, push, or press its way He places geometric and free lines with miniacross the surface of the paper almost without mal pressure or increases the pressure on the resistance. The line becomes the trace of the drawing utensil and the intensity of the resultmovement of a hand and the expression of the ing line with a sure hand, scribbling, repeating, cross-hatching, scrawling, crossing out, conartist’s physical body. structing, correcting, and marking. His generThe line of the brilliant draftsman Egon Schiele, ally curved “free wave-like” lines emerge from its unparalleled emergence in the act of draw- an interplay of forces, of “positive and negative” ing, defined his artistic practice. Werner pressure with irregular alternation, an “espeHofmann, for example, sees Schiele’s work as cially temperamental struggle between the two

14

SCHIELE_EN_BAT_270818_v2.indd 14-15

forces.”4 It is the free interplay of the forces, the work with the differentiating of flow that defines Schiele’s drawings of the body, landscapes, buildings, trees, and sunflowers.

of Lola Lola in The Blue Angel; these are more like inspired graffiti from some public lavatory frequented by old men with the taste for nameless, art nouveau experiences.5

The drawn, partly scribbled self-portraits and depictions of people, some masturbating or making love, caused art critic Keith Roberts to comment in The Burlington Magazine, on the occasion of an exhibition of Schiele’s works in 1964 at Marlborough Fine Art:

Roberts saw parallels between public toilet graffiti and Schiele’s erotic portrayals, which, showing men and women masturbating, seem to test the limits of pornography. For the critic, the drawings—clearly interpreted as lewd— with their incisiveness and sure stroke, evoked graffiti. This shows how critical viewers continued to question Schiele’s place in art history even decades after the artist’s death.6

There is not the slightest doubt that Schiele had great talent … But Schiele remains … an unfulfilled artist … His most typical works are the sketches and watercolours of girls, lolling about in various states of calculated undress and reminding one, in their erotic impassivity,

15

Schiele’s ultimate international breakthrough took place posthumously, in the 1980s, when artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat7 and

1. Sherrie Levine, After Egon Schiele, 1982, seven gelatin silver and eleven chromogenic prints; edition 2/2, 35.6 × 27.9 cm each (unframed), 175.26 × 307.34 cm (installed), Art Institute of Chicago.

27/08/2018 20:30


4

Sherrie Levine engaged with his oeuvre. In Levine’s appropriation series After Egon Schiele from 1982 (fig. 1), the artist photographed eighteen self-portraits by Schiele from book reproductions, thus confronting the viewer with questions of authorship, repetition, and authenticity. On Schiele, Levine noted: “There is something in his eroticism that strikes a chord. Partly it’s the self-conscious representation of his own narcissism.”8

2

THE ORNAMENTAL LINE At only sixteen, Schiele was accepted as the youngest student in the in 1906 class of historical painter Christian Griepenkerl at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. The following year, in opposition to his conservative teacher, Schiele began painting works such as Sailing Ship with Reflection in the Water (fig. 3). Executed in Trieste’s harbor, in it he imitated the ornamental line of Art Nouveau and of Gustav Klimt (whom he met during his studies), to allude to the reflections in the water and emphasized the effect using wavy lines that he scratched into the wet oil paint with a pencil. In 1908, with works such as Nude Boy Lying on Patterned Blanket (cat. 16), Schiele “had turned entirely to Art Nouveau.”9 Against the gilded bronze backdrop, the nude boy, with both hair and pubic hair green, lies on a dark blanket adorned with gold. Similar to Klimt’s clear contours in works such as the painting cycle Beethoven Frieze from 1902 (fig. 2), with Head of a Woman (1908, cat. 19), and his other allegorical women, Schiele sought to allude to the ornamental in the texture of the facial skin and the cramped

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fingers of the figure’s hand, held in a defensive gesture. With works such as Danaë (cat. 17) in 1909, the year of the founding of the Neukunstgruppe (New Art Group), the “Klimt guy”10 reached the zenith of his oeuvre influenced by the older artist.11 Although like Klimt, Schiele placed his Danaë against the ornamental metallic grounds, back and fore, he disrupted the harmony of the older artist’s Danaë (fig. 5, p. 30), embedding her balanced bodily form in the ornament via the dark tentacles overlapping her body. Here, the “uninterrupted transformation of Viennese Art Nouveau to Expressionism,” which according to Rudolf Leopold was “Schiele’s significance to art history,” seems to reveal itself.12 As Schiele himself noted in 1910: “I was immersed in Klimt until March. Now, I think I’m someone quite different.”13 In contrast to Klimt’s allegorical works and portraits of Viennese high society, Schiele began drawing “proletarian” children, women, and houses, also influenced by the Oberwildling (chief savage)14 Oskar Kokoschka’s radical rejection of Art Nouveau (fig. 4).15 Kokoschka had already rendered partially colored nudes of young women in 1907/08, (fig. 5) where the clear contours and exaggerated gestures set the figures themselves apart from the void of the sheet. Schiele, however, began by contrasting Kokoschka’s rough pencil lines and shadings with clearer modeling of the face and hair (cat. 24). Schiele’s line is still a searching line, one that counters the largely realistic depiction of Carl Reininghaus’s face, one that describes the corporeal volume of the subject. Apart from several color accents,

3

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SCHIELE_EN_BAT_270818_v2.indd 16-17

2. Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze (detail), 1902, mixed media, 215 × 344 cm. Secession, Vienna. 3. Egon Schiele, Sailing Ship with Reflection in the Water, 1908, oil and pencil on cardboard, 23.5 × 17 cm. Private collection. Kallir P. 115.

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4. Oskar Kokoschka, Pietà (poster for Murderer, Hope of Women), 1909, lithograph, 122.7 × 78.6 cm. MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, Vienna. 5. Oskar Kokoschka, Two Girls Dressing Themselves, 1908, pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper, 44 × 30.8 cm. Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.

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4

Sherrie Levine engaged with his oeuvre. In Levine’s appropriation series After Egon Schiele from 1982 (fig. 1), the artist photographed eighteen self-portraits by Schiele from book reproductions, thus confronting the viewer with questions of authorship, repetition, and authenticity. On Schiele, Levine noted: “There is something in his eroticism that strikes a chord. Partly it’s the self-conscious representation of his own narcissism.”8

2

THE ORNAMENTAL LINE At only sixteen, Schiele was accepted as the youngest student in the in 1906 class of historical painter Christian Griepenkerl at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. The following year, in opposition to his conservative teacher, Schiele began painting works such as Sailing Ship with Reflection in the Water (fig. 3). Executed in Trieste’s harbor, in it he imitated the ornamental line of Art Nouveau and of Gustav Klimt (whom he met during his studies), to allude to the reflections in the water and emphasized the effect using wavy lines that he scratched into the wet oil paint with a pencil. In 1908, with works such as Nude Boy Lying on Patterned Blanket (cat. 16), Schiele “had turned entirely to Art Nouveau.”9 Against the gilded bronze backdrop, the nude boy, with both hair and pubic hair green, lies on a dark blanket adorned with gold. Similar to Klimt’s clear contours in works such as the painting cycle Beethoven Frieze from 1902 (fig. 2), with Head of a Woman (1908, cat. 19), and his other allegorical women, Schiele sought to allude to the ornamental in the texture of the facial skin and the cramped

5

fingers of the figure’s hand, held in a defensive gesture. With works such as Danaë (cat. 17) in 1909, the year of the founding of the Neukunstgruppe (New Art Group), the “Klimt guy”10 reached the zenith of his oeuvre influenced by the older artist.11 Although like Klimt, Schiele placed his Danaë against the ornamental metallic grounds, back and fore, he disrupted the harmony of the older artist’s Danaë (fig. 5, p. 30), embedding her balanced bodily form in the ornament via the dark tentacles overlapping her body. Here, the “uninterrupted transformation of Viennese Art Nouveau to Expressionism,” which according to Rudolf Leopold was “Schiele’s significance to art history,” seems to reveal itself.12 As Schiele himself noted in 1910: “I was immersed in Klimt until March. Now, I think I’m someone quite different.”13 In contrast to Klimt’s allegorical works and portraits of Viennese high society, Schiele began drawing “proletarian” children, women, and houses, also influenced by the Oberwildling (chief savage)14 Oskar Kokoschka’s radical rejection of Art Nouveau (fig. 4).15 Kokoschka had already rendered partially colored nudes of young women in 1907/08, (fig. 5) where the clear contours and exaggerated gestures set the figures themselves apart from the void of the sheet. Schiele, however, began by contrasting Kokoschka’s rough pencil lines and shadings with clearer modeling of the face and hair (cat. 24). Schiele’s line is still a searching line, one that counters the largely realistic depiction of Carl Reininghaus’s face, one that describes the corporeal volume of the subject. Apart from several color accents,

3

16

SCHIELE_EN_BAT_270818_v2.indd 16-17

2. Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze (detail), 1902, mixed media, 215 × 344 cm. Secession, Vienna. 3. Egon Schiele, Sailing Ship with Reflection in the Water, 1908, oil and pencil on cardboard, 23.5 × 17 cm. Private collection. Kallir P. 115.

17

4. Oskar Kokoschka, Pietà (poster for Murderer, Hope of Women), 1909, lithograph, 122.7 × 78.6 cm. MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, Vienna. 5. Oskar Kokoschka, Two Girls Dressing Themselves, 1908, pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper, 44 × 30.8 cm. Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.

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Schiele juxtaposes the colored skin of the represented figure with the clothing’s contours, still evoking Klimt’s ornamental line. THE EXPRESSIVE LINE Even after Schiele had distanced himself from the “Klimt imitators,”16 he remained faithful to figuration, giving his works an ostensibly outdated quality. Jacques Le Rider has discussed the “antimodern” character of Viennese Modernism, understanding this as a foundation for the subject’s “identity crisis” that anticipated the “postmodern culture” of the 1970s and 1980s, which found its decisive expression in, among other things, Basquiat’s oeuvre.17 As art historian Werner Hofmann explains, “The Viennese fin de siècle was shaped by people who knew how to productively use their contradictions. Their scale of empathy was intellectually and artistically not only open to polyvocality, but borne by it.”18 In this article, Hofmann was reacting to Carl E. Schorske’s studies on the fin de siècle. Schorske describes the crisis and transformations in Vienna around 1900 using the example of the painters Klimt and Kokoschka as proponents of the Secessionist and Expressionist positions. For Hofmann, the “retreat” of the “publicly engaged” painter Klimt to aesthetic rules after the rejection of his Faculty Paintings marked an attempt to aesthetically compensate for the identity crisis of the bourgeoisie.19 In Schorske’s view, as a representative of Expressionism, Kokoschka embodied the truth postulate of modernism and with a new, drastic language, which expressed the life of drives and psychological truth.20

this period. In Portrait of Doctor X (cat. 25), the body of the main figure is reduced largely to its outline, like a silhouette, while the face and hands are colored as expressive bearers of gesture, mimicry, and spirit. The extended, bony fingers of the left hand point passively downward, in contrast to the cramped pose of the right hand, as if making a rhetorical gesture. The doctor’s head, turned to the side as a counter-movement to the hand and body posture, fixes the artist/viewer with his gaze. Schiele reduces the depiction to that of human expression and communication. Again, in Standing Boy in Striped Shirt (cat. 21) the artist counters the ornamentation of the striped shirt by shaping the boy’s pants with gestural, painterly brushstrokes, thus introducing into his practice expressive style as an artistic device. The figure of the boy stands on its own and is reduced to itself. The outline becomes a line of demarcation, separating the emptiness of the sheet and the bare existence of the body. Schiele’s line now differs markedly from Klimt’s regularly flowing, harmonious contours, by varying its force decisively, sometimes offsetting it, to better express fragility, threat, and difference. The white brushstroke, both an outline and undulating membrane, strengthens this line of struggle between inside and outside, as in SelfPortrait (fig. 6) and Portrait of Eduard Kosmack, Frontal with Clasped Hands (cat. 27). Schiele associates the white of the outer marking with that of Kosmack’s irises, like lights penetrating from the outside. The eye becomes an additional threatening intersection between inside and outside, between seeing and being seen.

The inclusion of Schiele and “polymorphism” as a great paradigm of modernism characterizes the differences between the considerations of Schiele’s continuous engagement with figuraHofmann and those of Schorske.21 Wolfgang tion does not indicate a reactionary attachment Welsch understands the polyvocality of fin-de- to the no-longer contemporary, but rather the siècle Vienna as a “postmodern phenomenon.”22 logical continuation of his artistic exploration, But Jean Clair 23 and Kirk Varnedoe argued for a defined by fragility, displacement, and permureevaluation of modernism, especially of the tation, expressed in part by the distortions of Viennese situation around 1900. The latter in exaggerated poses and anatomically impossible particular was against terms like “decadence body positions. The line thus becomes a liminal and genius” or “embattled modernist avant- experience between life and death, forming the garde,” which he rejected as worn-out clichés line of demarcation of human existence against about the era.24 Hofmann sees Schiele, who was external “pressing spatial forces.”26 In 1910, largely ignored in Schorske’s comments, as a Schiele ended a poem with the words: “focal point that symbolizes the period,” a period “EVERYTHING IS LIVING DEAD.”27 Fatal threat that was marked by “fatal threats and decay,” and decay, “a sure becoming and passing,”28 is already present in the artist’s works dating inherent in the works and his expressive line. from before the First World War.25 The line can also indicate the moment of violence: in Self-Portrait, Head from 1910 (cat. 34), Schiele’s turn from his ornamental line can Schiele separates his head from his body, the be seen in two works from 1910, which also gaze, at once maniacal and empty, the slightly reflect the polyvocality and contradictions of open lips, the wild hair exaggerated by a white

18

SCHIELE_EN_BAT_270818_v2.indd 18-19

6

7

framing that mercilessly emphasizes the pencil line of the severed head, the clear cut on the artist’s neck. The line becomes an existential demarcation between life and death. Following his aggressive attack on physical integrity, for Schiele everything remains living dead. The drawings record the being, the human presence in “a life that should be understood as inexorable weathering,”29 whether threatened by social norms, censorship, or the horror of the imminent First World War.

l­ iberation and opening” that took place in painting and music at around the same time.34 Schiele’s break with tradition is based on the anti-modern character of his various visual motifs and the dissonances resulting from their combination. The depiction of a world full of contrasts is defined by the tension between modern and anti-modern and borne by the polyvocality of the paradigm of modernism and postmodernism. Thus, his signature and the fabric patterns in works such as Kneeling Girls Embracing (fig. 7) still evoke the ornamentation Hofmann notes the decisive innovation in the of Art Nouveau, while the subject, the eroticizformal language after the turn of the century ing emphasis on the genitalia, the mouths with and before the start of the war in the visual arts red paint, and the raised skirts, breaks with the and in music, architecture, and literature. His past. The depictions of boys and girls from reflections on the scandal over Adolf Loos’s 1910 (cats. 38, 41–43, 45, 47), colored in part Michaelerhaus could also apply to Schiele’s with coarse brushstrokes, are expressive works fragmentations and distortions.30 “A whole is against tradition, expanding the harmonic lanpresented where the parts remain not only guage by embracing dissonance. The clear posiautonomous but seem to reject one another. tioning of Schiele’s work in the zeitgeist of the There are relationships, but they appear dis- first decade of the century in Vienna and the turbed.”31 This brings Hofmann to the emanci- unique iconography underscore the central pation of dissonance,32 a term coined by Arnold position of the artist as a radical innovator in a Schoenberg, that “seems to offer itself as a sig- postmodern Viennese Modernism. His line libnature of the years around 1910.”33 The author erated itself from ornamentation in the sense of sees the expansion of the artistic concept from Loos’s manifesto “Ornament and Crime”35 and consonance to dissonance as a “process of evolved to become expressive.

19

6. Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait, 1910, gouache, watercolor, and charcoal with white heightening on paper, 45 × 30 cm. Private collection. Kallir D. 711. 7. Egon Schiele, Kneeling Girls Embracing, 1911, gouache, watercolor and pencil on paper, 47.2 × 31.5 cm. Private collection. Kallir D. 887a.

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Schiele juxtaposes the colored skin of the represented figure with the clothing’s contours, still evoking Klimt’s ornamental line. THE EXPRESSIVE LINE Even after Schiele had distanced himself from the “Klimt imitators,”16 he remained faithful to figuration, giving his works an ostensibly outdated quality. Jacques Le Rider has discussed the “antimodern” character of Viennese Modernism, understanding this as a foundation for the subject’s “identity crisis” that anticipated the “postmodern culture” of the 1970s and 1980s, which found its decisive expression in, among other things, Basquiat’s oeuvre.17 As art historian Werner Hofmann explains, “The Viennese fin de siècle was shaped by people who knew how to productively use their contradictions. Their scale of empathy was intellectually and artistically not only open to polyvocality, but borne by it.”18 In this article, Hofmann was reacting to Carl E. Schorske’s studies on the fin de siècle. Schorske describes the crisis and transformations in Vienna around 1900 using the example of the painters Klimt and Kokoschka as proponents of the Secessionist and Expressionist positions. For Hofmann, the “retreat” of the “publicly engaged” painter Klimt to aesthetic rules after the rejection of his Faculty Paintings marked an attempt to aesthetically compensate for the identity crisis of the bourgeoisie.19 In Schorske’s view, as a representative of Expressionism, Kokoschka embodied the truth postulate of modernism and with a new, drastic language, which expressed the life of drives and psychological truth.20

this period. In Portrait of Doctor X (cat. 25), the body of the main figure is reduced largely to its outline, like a silhouette, while the face and hands are colored as expressive bearers of gesture, mimicry, and spirit. The extended, bony fingers of the left hand point passively downward, in contrast to the cramped pose of the right hand, as if making a rhetorical gesture. The doctor’s head, turned to the side as a counter-movement to the hand and body posture, fixes the artist/viewer with his gaze. Schiele reduces the depiction to that of human expression and communication. Again, in Standing Boy in Striped Shirt (cat. 21) the artist counters the ornamentation of the striped shirt by shaping the boy’s pants with gestural, painterly brushstrokes, thus introducing into his practice expressive style as an artistic device. The figure of the boy stands on its own and is reduced to itself. The outline becomes a line of demarcation, separating the emptiness of the sheet and the bare existence of the body. Schiele’s line now differs markedly from Klimt’s regularly flowing, harmonious contours, by varying its force decisively, sometimes offsetting it, to better express fragility, threat, and difference. The white brushstroke, both an outline and undulating membrane, strengthens this line of struggle between inside and outside, as in SelfPortrait (fig. 6) and Portrait of Eduard Kosmack, Frontal with Clasped Hands (cat. 27). Schiele associates the white of the outer marking with that of Kosmack’s irises, like lights penetrating from the outside. The eye becomes an additional threatening intersection between inside and outside, between seeing and being seen.

The inclusion of Schiele and “polymorphism” as a great paradigm of modernism characterizes the differences between the considerations of Schiele’s continuous engagement with figuraHofmann and those of Schorske.21 Wolfgang tion does not indicate a reactionary attachment Welsch understands the polyvocality of fin-de- to the no-longer contemporary, but rather the siècle Vienna as a “postmodern phenomenon.”22 logical continuation of his artistic exploration, But Jean Clair 23 and Kirk Varnedoe argued for a defined by fragility, displacement, and permureevaluation of modernism, especially of the tation, expressed in part by the distortions of Viennese situation around 1900. The latter in exaggerated poses and anatomically impossible particular was against terms like “decadence body positions. The line thus becomes a liminal and genius” or “embattled modernist avant- experience between life and death, forming the garde,” which he rejected as worn-out clichés line of demarcation of human existence against about the era.24 Hofmann sees Schiele, who was external “pressing spatial forces.”26 In 1910, largely ignored in Schorske’s comments, as a Schiele ended a poem with the words: “focal point that symbolizes the period,” a period “EVERYTHING IS LIVING DEAD.”27 Fatal threat that was marked by “fatal threats and decay,” and decay, “a sure becoming and passing,”28 is already present in the artist’s works dating inherent in the works and his expressive line. from before the First World War.25 The line can also indicate the moment of violence: in Self-Portrait, Head from 1910 (cat. 34), Schiele’s turn from his ornamental line can Schiele separates his head from his body, the be seen in two works from 1910, which also gaze, at once maniacal and empty, the slightly reflect the polyvocality and contradictions of open lips, the wild hair exaggerated by a white

18

SCHIELE_EN_BAT_270818_v2.indd 18-19

6

7

framing that mercilessly emphasizes the pencil line of the severed head, the clear cut on the artist’s neck. The line becomes an existential demarcation between life and death. Following his aggressive attack on physical integrity, for Schiele everything remains living dead. The drawings record the being, the human presence in “a life that should be understood as inexorable weathering,”29 whether threatened by social norms, censorship, or the horror of the imminent First World War.

l­ iberation and opening” that took place in painting and music at around the same time.34 Schiele’s break with tradition is based on the anti-modern character of his various visual motifs and the dissonances resulting from their combination. The depiction of a world full of contrasts is defined by the tension between modern and anti-modern and borne by the polyvocality of the paradigm of modernism and postmodernism. Thus, his signature and the fabric patterns in works such as Kneeling Girls Embracing (fig. 7) still evoke the ornamentation Hofmann notes the decisive innovation in the of Art Nouveau, while the subject, the eroticizformal language after the turn of the century ing emphasis on the genitalia, the mouths with and before the start of the war in the visual arts red paint, and the raised skirts, breaks with the and in music, architecture, and literature. His past. The depictions of boys and girls from reflections on the scandal over Adolf Loos’s 1910 (cats. 38, 41–43, 45, 47), colored in part Michaelerhaus could also apply to Schiele’s with coarse brushstrokes, are expressive works fragmentations and distortions.30 “A whole is against tradition, expanding the harmonic lanpresented where the parts remain not only guage by embracing dissonance. The clear posiautonomous but seem to reject one another. tioning of Schiele’s work in the zeitgeist of the There are relationships, but they appear dis- first decade of the century in Vienna and the turbed.”31 This brings Hofmann to the emanci- unique iconography underscore the central pation of dissonance,32 a term coined by Arnold position of the artist as a radical innovator in a Schoenberg, that “seems to offer itself as a sig- postmodern Viennese Modernism. His line libnature of the years around 1910.”33 The author erated itself from ornamentation in the sense of sees the expansion of the artistic concept from Loos’s manifesto “Ornament and Crime”35 and consonance to dissonance as a “process of evolved to become expressive.

19

6. Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait, 1910, gouache, watercolor, and charcoal with white heightening on paper, 45 × 30 cm. Private collection. Kallir D. 711. 7. Egon Schiele, Kneeling Girls Embracing, 1911, gouache, watercolor and pencil on paper, 47.2 × 31.5 cm. Private collection. Kallir D. 887a.

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14

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12

signs and make what is to come palpable, for “EVERYTHING IS LIVING DEAD” 37 on the threshold of the First World War.

illusory space, stretched with the format and the surface of the paper. His contorted bodies balance out in the composition. The orange becomes a colorful accent and a round shape in 1912 was a dramatic year for Schiele, during the structure of the visual architecture and the which he was forced to spend twenty-four days writing and his signature become a part of the in prison for the “unsafe custody of erotic image. And when Schiele argues, against the nudes.”38 In his thirteen prison drawings, he backdrop of the unspectacular picture of his engaged with fundamental and formal issues in cell with two chairs and barely sketched stove, tandem with his “shattered” self.39 Comparable that “ART CANNOT BE MODERN. ART IS to his poems “Pine Forest” and “A Self-Portrait” PRIMORDIALLY ETERNAL” (see fig. 1, p. 37), from 1910 and the names added to some of his then he is referring to the inviolability of physworks, such as “SÄNGER VAN OSEN,” (fig. 10) ical and natural laws, of being per se, that find “KOSMACK,” and “MOA,” or titles such as The their reflection in art. It is not the subject, but Blind Woman, words and text become elements rather its unique artistic line that indicates our in his prison drawings. “THE SINGLE ORANGE existence and Schiele’s art, the demarcation WAS THE ONLY LIGHT!” (fig. 12): this was true line of the form in itself: from cell chair, the for the prisoner both in artistic terms and person- oranges, “TWO OF MY HANDKERCHIEFS” ally. The object of the orange served as surface of (fig. 15), landscapes, buildings, and flowers to projection for “MY WANDERING PATH LEADS nudes, lovers, masturbators, and his own self. OVER ABYSSES” (fig. 13), or, in the pencil drawing of three oranges on a patterned blanket, an Schiele dedicated himself to “cognition through occasion where “ALL THINGS BALANCE OUT the flesh”40 and the expressive deformation of PHYSICALLY MOST SURELY” (cat. 64). By the body per se against the absence of space. using the term “physically,” he was indicating The “ORGANIC MOVEMENT” of his objects gravity or rather its overcoming, its balance, in and the drastic contortions of his figures share his drawings. Thus, he drew the “ORGANIC mechanical aspects. Self-Portrait in Jerkin with MOVEMENT OF CHAIR AND PITCHER” Right Elbow Raised (cat. 81) shows not only the (fig. 14), divorced from space and the force of mask-like distortion of his own face, but also a gravity, much like his nudes from the back of rectangular, puppet-like body language. The 1910 (cats. 28–31). In the latter, the artist eccentric gestures and grotesque body laninscribes figures detached from and contrary to guage refer to Schiele’s love of puppetry. 41

13

22

SCHIELE_EN_BAT_270818_v2.indd 22-23

12. Egon Schiele, The Single Orange was the Only Light!, April 19, 1912, gouache, watercolor, and pencil on japan paper, 31.9 × 48 cm. Albertina, Vienna. Kallir D. 1179. 13. Egon Schiele, My Wandering Path Leads over Abysses, April 27, 1912, gouache, watercolor, and pencil on japan paper, 31.8 × 48 cm. Albertina, Vienna. Kallir D. 1191.

23

14. Egon Schiele, Organic Movement of Chair and Pitcher, April 21, 1912, watercolor and pencil on japan paper, 31.8 × 48 cm. Albertina, Vienna. Kallir D. 1184. 15. Egon Schiele, Two of My Handkerchiefs, April 21, 1912, watercolor and pencil on japan paper, 48.2 × 31.7 cm. Albertina, Vienna. Kallir D. 1182.

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15

12

signs and make what is to come palpable, for “EVERYTHING IS LIVING DEAD” 37 on the threshold of the First World War.

illusory space, stretched with the format and the surface of the paper. His contorted bodies balance out in the composition. The orange becomes a colorful accent and a round shape in 1912 was a dramatic year for Schiele, during the structure of the visual architecture and the which he was forced to spend twenty-four days writing and his signature become a part of the in prison for the “unsafe custody of erotic image. And when Schiele argues, against the nudes.”38 In his thirteen prison drawings, he backdrop of the unspectacular picture of his engaged with fundamental and formal issues in cell with two chairs and barely sketched stove, tandem with his “shattered” self.39 Comparable that “ART CANNOT BE MODERN. ART IS to his poems “Pine Forest” and “A Self-Portrait” PRIMORDIALLY ETERNAL” (see fig. 1, p. 37), from 1910 and the names added to some of his then he is referring to the inviolability of physworks, such as “SÄNGER VAN OSEN,” (fig. 10) ical and natural laws, of being per se, that find “KOSMACK,” and “MOA,” or titles such as The their reflection in art. It is not the subject, but Blind Woman, words and text become elements rather its unique artistic line that indicates our in his prison drawings. “THE SINGLE ORANGE existence and Schiele’s art, the demarcation WAS THE ONLY LIGHT!” (fig. 12): this was true line of the form in itself: from cell chair, the for the prisoner both in artistic terms and person- oranges, “TWO OF MY HANDKERCHIEFS” ally. The object of the orange served as surface of (fig. 15), landscapes, buildings, and flowers to projection for “MY WANDERING PATH LEADS nudes, lovers, masturbators, and his own self. OVER ABYSSES” (fig. 13), or, in the pencil drawing of three oranges on a patterned blanket, an Schiele dedicated himself to “cognition through occasion where “ALL THINGS BALANCE OUT the flesh”40 and the expressive deformation of PHYSICALLY MOST SURELY” (cat. 64). By the body per se against the absence of space. using the term “physically,” he was indicating The “ORGANIC MOVEMENT” of his objects gravity or rather its overcoming, its balance, in and the drastic contortions of his figures share his drawings. Thus, he drew the “ORGANIC mechanical aspects. Self-Portrait in Jerkin with MOVEMENT OF CHAIR AND PITCHER” Right Elbow Raised (cat. 81) shows not only the (fig. 14), divorced from space and the force of mask-like distortion of his own face, but also a gravity, much like his nudes from the back of rectangular, puppet-like body language. The 1910 (cats. 28–31). In the latter, the artist eccentric gestures and grotesque body laninscribes figures detached from and contrary to guage refer to Schiele’s love of puppetry. 41

13

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SCHIELE_EN_BAT_270818_v2.indd 22-23

12. Egon Schiele, The Single Orange was the Only Light!, April 19, 1912, gouache, watercolor, and pencil on japan paper, 31.9 × 48 cm. Albertina, Vienna. Kallir D. 1179. 13. Egon Schiele, My Wandering Path Leads over Abysses, April 27, 1912, gouache, watercolor, and pencil on japan paper, 31.8 × 48 cm. Albertina, Vienna. Kallir D. 1191.

23

14. Egon Schiele, Organic Movement of Chair and Pitcher, April 21, 1912, watercolor and pencil on japan paper, 31.8 × 48 cm. Albertina, Vienna. Kallir D. 1184. 15. Egon Schiele, Two of My Handkerchiefs, April 21, 1912, watercolor and pencil on japan paper, 48.2 × 31.7 cm. Albertina, Vienna. Kallir D. 1182.

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The line surrounds his condensed bodily representations as well as his renderings of ruins within a landscape. In Landscape (The Weitenegg Ruins) (cat. 100), he contrasts the density of heavily modeled, fragmented passages with the emptiness of the sheet. The representation itself becomes a remnant of what is seen in a time shaken by war (fig. 20). The serious faces of his protagonists and the shattered bodies, sometimes in seemingly impossible poses and movements, reflect his disintegrating world during the First World War. The right thigh of the model in Seated Woman in Violet Stockings (fig. 21) seems almost separate from the body, appended to rather than a part of it. Equally so, the arms and legs in Female Torso in Underwear and Black Stockings (cat. 108) seem amputated, rather than simply left out by the artist. The extent to which Schiele was affected by his era can be read from his last words, just before his

own life line was broken, as recorded by his sister-in-law Adele Harms: “The war is over—and I must go.”46 Scarcely any other artist devoted himself with such virtuosity and intensity to the line and to drawing. With astonishing radicalness, he achieved the emancipation of ­dissonance—comparable to Schoenberg’s abandoning of major-minor tonality to develop the twelve-tone technique as a decisive foundation for New Music—to expand art from consonance to dissonance. Using his “art of the shock,”47 Schiele appropriated the line as a sign of his art and existence and, ultimately, freed it from its dependence on the object. In this way, in his development from the ornamental to the expressionist, to the subsequent combined line, to a line capable of modeling in three dimensions, and finally, to a fragmented, amputated line, he enabled a dissonant, diverging liminal experience of the line as the sign of human existence.

1. Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane: Contribution to the Analysis of the Pictorial Elements, trans. Howard Dearstyne and Hilla Rebay (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1947), p. 57.

9. Rudolf Leopold, Egon Schiele: Meisterwerke aus dem Leopold Museum (Cologne: Walther König, 2017), p. 28.

19. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), pp. 208–278.

10. Arthur Roessler, “Neukunstgruppe: Ausstellung im Kunstsalon Pisko,” ArbeiterZeitung, December 7, 1909.

20. Ibid., pp. 322–375.

21

20

2. Ibid., p. 92. 3. See Werner Hofmann, “Egon Schiele,” Experiment Weltuntergang Wien um 1900 (Munich: Prestel, 1981), pp. 150–151. 4. Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, p. 86.

13. Letter from Egon Schiele to Dr. Josef Czermak, November 5, 1910. Quoted in Christian M. Nebehay, Egon Schiele: Leben und Werk (Salzburg: Residenz, 1980), p. 63.

6. Wolfgang G. Fischer, “Egon Schiele’s Rise to Posthumous Fame,” Egon Schiele: The Complete Works, ed. Jane Kallir (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998), pp. 247–255.

14. Ludwig Hevesi, “Kunstschau 1908 (May 31, 1908),” Altkunst – Neukunst. Wien 1894–1908 (Vienna: Konegen, 1909), p. 313.

8. Jeanne Siegel, “After Sherrie Levine” (interview with Sherrie Levine), in Art Theory and Criticism: An Anthology of Formalist, Avant-Garde, Contextualist and PostModernist Thought, ed. Sally Everett (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1995), p. 268.

26

SCHIELE_EN_BAT_270818_v2.indd 26-27

12. Leopold, “Einführung in das Werk von Egon Schiele,” in Egon Schiele. Meisterwerke aus dem Leopold Museum, p. 14.

5. Keith Roberts, “Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions,” The Burlington Magazine 106, no. 741 (December 1964): p. 584.

7. We know from eyewitnesses that Basquiat was familiar with Schiele’s works, but we have no evidence that he saw any originals. Conversation between the author and Stephen Torton, March 6, 2014.

20. Egon Schiele, Dr. Othmar Fritsch, 1917, watercolor, colored crayon, and pencil on paper, 44 × 27.8 cm. Private collection. Kallir D. 2096. 21. Egon Schiele, Seated Woman in Violet Stockings, 1917, gouache and black crayon on paper, 29.6 × 44.2 cm. Private collection. Kallir D. 1992.

11. See Kallir, Egon Schiele: The Complete Works, 287, P. 148.

15. Wieland Schmied, Berührungen: Von Romako bis Kokoschka (Salzburg: Residenz, 1991), p. 87. 16. Arthur Roessler, “Neukunstgruppe – Ausstellung im Kunstsalon Pisko.” 17. Jacques Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, trans. Rosemary Morris (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1993), p. 27. 18. 25 Jahre freies Österreich (May 10/11, 1980).

21. Werner Hofmann, “Zur Postmoderne.” Quoted in Wolfgang Welsch, Unsere postmoderne Moderne (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), p. 193. 22. Welsch, Unsere postmoderne Moderne, p. 177. 23. Jean Clair, “Une modernité sceptique,” Vienne 1880-1938. L’apocalypse joyeuse (exh. cat. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1986), pp. 46–57. 24. Kirk Varnedoe, Vienna 1900: Art, Architecture and Design (exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1986), p. 17. 25. Werner Hofmann, “Oskar Kokoschka,” Experiment Weltuntergang. Wien um 1900 (exh. cat. Hamburg: Hamburger Kunsthalle, 1981), p. 150.

1910 and 1912, now widely regarded as one of the central examples of Viennese Modernism, initially caused shockwaves throughout the city for its radical departure from both the historicism common at the time and its rejection of the ornamental elements of the Viennese Secession. 31. Werner Hofmann, “Die Emanzipation der Dissonanz,” Adolf Loos 1870-1933. Raumplan – Wohnungsbau, ed. Dietrich Worbs (exh. cat. Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1983), p. 103. Hofmann quotes Das Kröner - Musiklexikon, which describes dissonance as the “sound quality of intervals where the pitches move away from one another or have a low tendency to fuse together because they are similar to one another in subject to complex relationships of vibration.” 32. Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), p. 323.

26. Ibid., pp. 150–151. 27. Reproduced in Egon Schiele: Meisterwerke aus dem Leopold Museum (exh. cat. Vienna: Leopold Museum, 2017), p. 12. 28. Egon Schiele in a letter to Oskar Reichel, September 1911, in Nebehay, Egon Schiele: Leben und Werk. p. 96.

33. Hofmann, “Die Emanzipation der Dissonanz,” p. 103. 34. Ibid., p. 106. 35. Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, ed. Adolf Opel, trans. Michael Mitchell (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1998).

29. Ibid. 30. Also known as the Looshaus, the building, erected between

36. Reproduced in Egon Schiele: Meisterwerke aus dem Leopold Museum, p. 13.

37. Ibid., 12. 38. See Klaus Albrecht Schröder, “Biografie,” Egon Schiele (Munich: Prestel, 2005), p. 23. 39. Letter from Schiele to Arthur Roessler, May 18, 1912: “Ich bin noch ganz zerrüttet.” Quoted in Leopold, “Biografie von Egon Schiele,” p. 291.

46. Adele Harms, November 1918. Quoted in Christian M. Nebehay, Egon Schiele, 1890-1918: Leben, Briefe, Gedichte (Salzburg: Residenz, 1979), p. 487. 47. Roland Barthes, “The Wisdom of Art,” The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard, p. 189.

40. Werner Hofmann, “Das Fleisch erkennen,” Ornament und Askese: Im Zeitgeist des Wien der Jahrhundertwende, ed. Alfred Pfabigan (Vienna: Brandstätter, 1985), p. 123. 41. Katharina Sykora, “Performative Selbstinszenierung und Geschlechterirritation bei Egon Schiele,” in Egon Schiele, Inszenierung und Identität, ed. Pia Müller Tamm (Cologne: DuMont, 1995), pp. 45–65. 42. Egon Schiele in a letter to Oskar Reichel, September 1911. Quoted in Nebehay, Egon Schiele. Leben und Werk, p. 96. 43. Hermann Bahr, Expressionismus (Munich: Delphin, 1916), p. 123. 44. A letter from Schiele to his brother-in-law Anton Peschka, March 2, 1917. Quoted in Nebehay, Egon Schiele: Leben und Werk, p. 181. 45. Roland Barthes, “Cy Twombly: Works on Paper,” The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard, (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc., 1985).

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The line surrounds his condensed bodily representations as well as his renderings of ruins within a landscape. In Landscape (The Weitenegg Ruins) (cat. 100), he contrasts the density of heavily modeled, fragmented passages with the emptiness of the sheet. The representation itself becomes a remnant of what is seen in a time shaken by war (fig. 20). The serious faces of his protagonists and the shattered bodies, sometimes in seemingly impossible poses and movements, reflect his disintegrating world during the First World War. The right thigh of the model in Seated Woman in Violet Stockings (fig. 21) seems almost separate from the body, appended to rather than a part of it. Equally so, the arms and legs in Female Torso in Underwear and Black Stockings (cat. 108) seem amputated, rather than simply left out by the artist. The extent to which Schiele was affected by his era can be read from his last words, just before his

own life line was broken, as recorded by his sister-in-law Adele Harms: “The war is over—and I must go.”46 Scarcely any other artist devoted himself with such virtuosity and intensity to the line and to drawing. With astonishing radicalness, he achieved the emancipation of ­dissonance—comparable to Schoenberg’s abandoning of major-minor tonality to develop the twelve-tone technique as a decisive foundation for New Music—to expand art from consonance to dissonance. Using his “art of the shock,”47 Schiele appropriated the line as a sign of his art and existence and, ultimately, freed it from its dependence on the object. In this way, in his development from the ornamental to the expressionist, to the subsequent combined line, to a line capable of modeling in three dimensions, and finally, to a fragmented, amputated line, he enabled a dissonant, diverging liminal experience of the line as the sign of human existence.

1. Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane: Contribution to the Analysis of the Pictorial Elements, trans. Howard Dearstyne and Hilla Rebay (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1947), p. 57.

9. Rudolf Leopold, Egon Schiele: Meisterwerke aus dem Leopold Museum (Cologne: Walther König, 2017), p. 28.

19. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), pp. 208–278.

10. Arthur Roessler, “Neukunstgruppe: Ausstellung im Kunstsalon Pisko,” ArbeiterZeitung, December 7, 1909.

20. Ibid., pp. 322–375.

21

20

2. Ibid., p. 92. 3. See Werner Hofmann, “Egon Schiele,” Experiment Weltuntergang Wien um 1900 (Munich: Prestel, 1981), pp. 150–151. 4. Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, p. 86.

13. Letter from Egon Schiele to Dr. Josef Czermak, November 5, 1910. Quoted in Christian M. Nebehay, Egon Schiele: Leben und Werk (Salzburg: Residenz, 1980), p. 63.

6. Wolfgang G. Fischer, “Egon Schiele’s Rise to Posthumous Fame,” Egon Schiele: The Complete Works, ed. Jane Kallir (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998), pp. 247–255.

14. Ludwig Hevesi, “Kunstschau 1908 (May 31, 1908),” Altkunst – Neukunst. Wien 1894–1908 (Vienna: Konegen, 1909), p. 313.

8. Jeanne Siegel, “After Sherrie Levine” (interview with Sherrie Levine), in Art Theory and Criticism: An Anthology of Formalist, Avant-Garde, Contextualist and PostModernist Thought, ed. Sally Everett (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1995), p. 268.

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12. Leopold, “Einführung in das Werk von Egon Schiele,” in Egon Schiele. Meisterwerke aus dem Leopold Museum, p. 14.

5. Keith Roberts, “Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions,” The Burlington Magazine 106, no. 741 (December 1964): p. 584.

7. We know from eyewitnesses that Basquiat was familiar with Schiele’s works, but we have no evidence that he saw any originals. Conversation between the author and Stephen Torton, March 6, 2014.

20. Egon Schiele, Dr. Othmar Fritsch, 1917, watercolor, colored crayon, and pencil on paper, 44 × 27.8 cm. Private collection. Kallir D. 2096. 21. Egon Schiele, Seated Woman in Violet Stockings, 1917, gouache and black crayon on paper, 29.6 × 44.2 cm. Private collection. Kallir D. 1992.

11. See Kallir, Egon Schiele: The Complete Works, 287, P. 148.

15. Wieland Schmied, Berührungen: Von Romako bis Kokoschka (Salzburg: Residenz, 1991), p. 87. 16. Arthur Roessler, “Neukunstgruppe – Ausstellung im Kunstsalon Pisko.” 17. Jacques Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, trans. Rosemary Morris (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1993), p. 27. 18. 25 Jahre freies Österreich (May 10/11, 1980).

21. Werner Hofmann, “Zur Postmoderne.” Quoted in Wolfgang Welsch, Unsere postmoderne Moderne (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), p. 193. 22. Welsch, Unsere postmoderne Moderne, p. 177. 23. Jean Clair, “Une modernité sceptique,” Vienne 1880-1938. L’apocalypse joyeuse (exh. cat. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1986), pp. 46–57. 24. Kirk Varnedoe, Vienna 1900: Art, Architecture and Design (exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1986), p. 17. 25. Werner Hofmann, “Oskar Kokoschka,” Experiment Weltuntergang. Wien um 1900 (exh. cat. Hamburg: Hamburger Kunsthalle, 1981), p. 150.

1910 and 1912, now widely regarded as one of the central examples of Viennese Modernism, initially caused shockwaves throughout the city for its radical departure from both the historicism common at the time and its rejection of the ornamental elements of the Viennese Secession. 31. Werner Hofmann, “Die Emanzipation der Dissonanz,” Adolf Loos 1870-1933. Raumplan – Wohnungsbau, ed. Dietrich Worbs (exh. cat. Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1983), p. 103. Hofmann quotes Das Kröner - Musiklexikon, which describes dissonance as the “sound quality of intervals where the pitches move away from one another or have a low tendency to fuse together because they are similar to one another in subject to complex relationships of vibration.” 32. Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), p. 323.

26. Ibid., pp. 150–151. 27. Reproduced in Egon Schiele: Meisterwerke aus dem Leopold Museum (exh. cat. Vienna: Leopold Museum, 2017), p. 12. 28. Egon Schiele in a letter to Oskar Reichel, September 1911, in Nebehay, Egon Schiele: Leben und Werk. p. 96.

33. Hofmann, “Die Emanzipation der Dissonanz,” p. 103. 34. Ibid., p. 106. 35. Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, ed. Adolf Opel, trans. Michael Mitchell (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1998).

29. Ibid. 30. Also known as the Looshaus, the building, erected between

36. Reproduced in Egon Schiele: Meisterwerke aus dem Leopold Museum, p. 13.

37. Ibid., 12. 38. See Klaus Albrecht Schröder, “Biografie,” Egon Schiele (Munich: Prestel, 2005), p. 23. 39. Letter from Schiele to Arthur Roessler, May 18, 1912: “Ich bin noch ganz zerrüttet.” Quoted in Leopold, “Biografie von Egon Schiele,” p. 291.

46. Adele Harms, November 1918. Quoted in Christian M. Nebehay, Egon Schiele, 1890-1918: Leben, Briefe, Gedichte (Salzburg: Residenz, 1979), p. 487. 47. Roland Barthes, “The Wisdom of Art,” The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard, p. 189.

40. Werner Hofmann, “Das Fleisch erkennen,” Ornament und Askese: Im Zeitgeist des Wien der Jahrhundertwende, ed. Alfred Pfabigan (Vienna: Brandstätter, 1985), p. 123. 41. Katharina Sykora, “Performative Selbstinszenierung und Geschlechterirritation bei Egon Schiele,” in Egon Schiele, Inszenierung und Identität, ed. Pia Müller Tamm (Cologne: DuMont, 1995), pp. 45–65. 42. Egon Schiele in a letter to Oskar Reichel, September 1911. Quoted in Nebehay, Egon Schiele. Leben und Werk, p. 96. 43. Hermann Bahr, Expressionismus (Munich: Delphin, 1916), p. 123. 44. A letter from Schiele to his brother-in-law Anton Peschka, March 2, 1917. Quoted in Nebehay, Egon Schiele: Leben und Werk, p. 181. 45. Roland Barthes, “Cy Twombly: Works on Paper,” The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard, (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc., 1985).

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Photo credits © akg-images: pp. 38 bottom left, 44 right; © akg-images/ Erich Lessing: p. 155; © Allen Phillips / Wadsworth Atheneum: p. 85 left; © Art Collection 3 / Alamy Stock Photo: p. 173; © Avi Amsalem: pp. 47 bottom right, 70; © Belvedere, Vienna: pp. 16 top, 30 bottom right, 33 right; © Belvedere, Vienna / photo Johannes Stoll: pp. 32, 204 right; © Bridgeman Images: pp. 38 right, 122, 204 left; © Bridgeman Images / © Sherrie Levine: p. 15; © Christian Øen: pp. 125, 145; © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images: p. 19 left; © classicpaintings / Alamy Stock Photo: p. 84; © Elad Sarig: pp. 163, 191; © Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images: p. 24 top right; © Galerie Würthle, Vienna, Austria / Bridgeman Images: p. 30 bottom left; © Geoffrey Clements / Corbis / VCG via Getty Images: p. 21 bottom left; © Hadiye Cangökçe: pp. 65, 92, 93, 98, 99, 141, 166, 167, 180, 181; © Heritage Image Partnership Ltd. / Alamy Stock Photo: p. 200; © Historic Collection / Alamy Stock Photo: p. 203; © Hulya Kolabas for Neue Galerie New York: pp. 90, 96; © Imagno / Getty Images: pp. 134 left, 149 right; © Jason Mandella: pp. 148, 149; © Klimt Foundation, Vienna: pp. 47 bottom left, 152, 153, 187; © Kunsthandel Giese & Schweiger, Vienna: pp. 12 right, 127; © Kunsthaus Zug / Alois Ottiger: pp. 55–58; © Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden / photo Herbert Boswank: p. 17 right; © Leopold, Private collection / photo Leopold Museum, Vienna: p. 21 right; © Leopold Museum, Vienna: pp. 13, 33 left, 43 top left, 73, 128, 129, 134 right, 146, 147, 177, 179; © MAK / Georg Mayer: pp. 17 left, 150, 151, 202; © Marc Domage: p. 137; © Mario Gastinger, München: p. 115; © Mathias Kessler, 2017: pp. 12 left, 110, 111, 116, 119, 121; © Menard Art Museum, Aichi, Japan: pp. 194, 195; © Mitro Hood: pp. 188, 189; © Museum Associates / LACMA: p. 62; © National Gallery in Prague 2018: p. 103; © Peter Infeld Private Foundation : pp. 184 top, 184 bottom; © Prallan Allsten / Moderna Museet, Stockholm: pp. 24 bottom right, 138, 139; © Private collection / All rights reserved: p. 171; © Private collection, Courtesy of Richard Nagy Ltd., London / All rights reserved: pp. 16 bottom, 19 right, 20, 21 top left, 26 right, 26 left, 85 right, 124 left, 124 bottom right124 top right; © Reinhard Haider: pp. 164, 165; © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski: p. 38 top left; © Sarinee58 / Shutterstock.com: p. 178; © Sönke Ehlert: p. 108; © Szépművészeti Múzeum – Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, 2018: p. 64; © Tel Aviv Museum of Art / Margarita Perlin: p. 69; © The Albertina Museum, Vienna: pp. 22 bottom, 22 top, 23 right, 23 left, 24 bottom left, 24 top left, 37, 41 right, 41 left, 44 left, 45 right, 45 left, 51; © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, by Elie Posner: pp. 192, 193, 209; © The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York: p. 215; © Tom Powel Imaging: p. 113; © Ugo Bozzi Editore Srl, Roma: pp. 135, 201, 205; © Wien Museum: pp. 59, 61, 67, 198; © W&K – Wienerroither & Kohlbacher, Vienna: pp. 52, 53, 63, 106, 112, 117, 158, 186; All rights reserved: pp. 29 left, 29 right, 41 centre, 43 bottom right, 47 top, 71, 82 left, 82 right, 199, 212, 216, 217; Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images: p. 140; Courtesy of Eykyn Maclean / All rights reserved: pp. 174, 175; Courtesy of Galerie St. Etienne, New York: pp. 30 top right, 88, 89, 95; Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington: pp. 77, 132, 159, 208; Courtesy of Carl Hirschmann / All rights reserved: p. 91; Courtesy of Deutsche Bank Collection / All rights reserved: p. 76; Courtesy of Ernst Ploil, Vienna / All rights reserved: cover, pp. 101, 102; Courtesy of Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz / All rights reserved: pp. 206, 207; Courtesy of Moravská galerie v Brně / Moravian Gallery in Brno / All rights reserved: pp. 210, 211; Courtesy of Mosfun Holdings Ltd / All rights reserved: p. 81; Courtesy of Nahmad Collection, Monaco / All rights reserved: p. 107; Courtesy of Sotheby’s: pp. 130, 131; Courtesy of W&K – Wienerroither & Kohlbacher: pp. 87, 118, 156, 157, 185; Courtesy Wienerroither & Kohlbacher, Vienna: p. 79; Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg: back cover, p. 183; Image supplied by Leicester City Council: pp. 104, 109; Photo by Karl Schenker / ullstein bild via Getty Images: p. 66; Photograph Courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc. © 2017: pp. 74, 75; Private collection / All rights reserved: pp. 83, 136, 154 ; Private collection, Courtesy of Galerie St. Etienne, New York: pp. 142 left, 142, 143, 168, 169, 196, 197 ; Private collection, Switzerland / All rights reserved: pp. 10, 97, 160-161.

Copyrights © Oskar Kokoschka Foundation / ADAGP, Paris, 2018, for the works of Oskar Kokoschka © Sherrie Levine, for the artist’s work All rights reserved for the works of Johannes Fischer and Reinhold Klaus

Cover Self-Portrait with Peacock Waistcoat, Standing, 1911 (cat. 35) Back cover Standing Female Nude with Blue Cloth, 1914 (cat. 87)

This catalogue is set in Replica (Lineto) and Foundry Origin (The Foundry) Paper: Magno Mat 150 g/m2 (interior) Photoengraving : Arciel Graphic Printed in September 2018 on the presses of Trento in Trento, Italy.

© Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2018 www.gallimard.fr © Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2018 www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr

Legal deposit: September 2018 ISBN: 978-2-07-280155-6 Edition number: 337923

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