Wally, his first love
Once again, schiele wanted to get away. “vienna is full of shadows, the city is black. I want to be alone [in] the bohemian woods, that i need not hear anything about myself,” he wrote in his diary. Wally (valerie neuzil), former model and lover of klimt who supposedly gave herself to schiele, accompanied him. They moved to his mother’s hometown in krumau on the moldau. The devoted lidl had procured an atelier with a garden. A very productive working phase began for schiele. Besides a few landscapes, he mainly worked on nude studies of himself and wally, his “twittering lark”. Like the diary drawings, numerous studies depict the erotic cohabitation of two bodies.
Standing Nude Girl, 1918.
Black crayon on paper, 45.7 x 29.5 cm.
Private collection, New York.
Landscape in Lower Austria, 1907.
Oil on cardboard, 17.5 x 22.5 cm.
Private collection.
Village with Mountains, 1907.
Oil on paper, 21.7 x 28 cm.
Private collection.
Pregnant Woman and Death (Mother and Death), 1911.
Oil on canvas, 100.3 x 100.1 cm.
Národní Galerie, Prague.
Grimacing Man (Self-Portrait), 1910.
Charcoal and watercolour on paper, 44 x 27.8 cm.
Leopold Collection, Leopold Museum, Vienna.
Self-Portrait with Lowered Head (study for The Hermits), 1912.
Oil on wood, 42.2 x 33.7 cm.
Leopold Collection, Leopold Museum, Vienna.
The Hermits, 1912.
Oil on canvas, 181 x 181 cm.
Leopold Museum, Vienna.
Two Girls Embracing (Friends), 1915.
Gouache, watercolour and pencil, 48 x 32.7 cm.
Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest.
Self-Portrait as Nude Study
There are approximately 100 self-portraits including several nude studies of Schiele. Study of the male nude was obligatory at the academy, psychological self-portraits, however, apart from richard gerstl in 1908, were an exception. The self-portrait as nude study positions the artist not only as a person of insight, but also in his physical being. Schiele did not act as a voyeur in baring his models, rather, he brought himself into play. The nude study depicting a rigid member in the act of masturbation went a step further and shows he was a man fascinated by his own sexuality. This reversal in passivity accompanies the setting of a new goal: to be looked at. The urge to look is indeed autoerotic from the beginning; it surely has an object but finds it in its own body. In turn, showing the genitals is well known as an apotropaic action. Accordingly, freud interprets “the showing of the penis and all its surrogates” as the following statement: “i am not afraid of you, i defy you.”
Schiele, the Man of Pain
The discrepancy between schiele’s external appearance and his repulsively ugly self-portraits is astonishing. Gütersloh described schiele as “exceptionally handsome”, of well-maintained appearance, “someone who never had even a day-old beard”, an elegant young man, whose good manners contrasted strangely with his reputedly unpalatable manner of painting. Schiele, on the other hand, painted himself with a long high forehead, wide-opened eyes deep in their sockets and a tortured expression, an emaciated body, which he sometimes mutilated up to its trunk, with spider-like limbs. The bony hands tell of death at work. His body reflects the sallow colours of decay. In many places, he painted himself with a skull-like face. Schiele admitted in a verse: “everything is living dead”. Just as kokoschka maintained, schiele soliloquized with death, his counterpart. Trakl wrote of schiele, “and surrounded by the flattery of decay, he lowers his infected lids.”
At the same time, schiele perceived himself as a man of pain: “that i am true i only say, because i […] sacrifice myself and must live a martyr-like existence.” If contemporary art banished religious themes from its field of vision, the artist now incarnated these himself. In a letter to roessler, the christ-likeness becomes clearer still: “i sacrificed for others, for those on whom i took pity, those who were far away or did not see me, the seer.” His fate as an outsider led to the ideal of the artist as world redeemer. In the programme of the new artists he explains: “fellow men feel their results, today in exhibitions. The exhibition is indispensable today […] the great experience in the existence of the artist’s individuality.” For him, however, this no longer concerned illustration, rather it was a representation of his soul’s inner life. The nude study is a revealing study. Thereby, the work in its expressive self-staging becomes a study of his life.
Reclining Nude with Black Stockings, 1911.
Watercolour and pencil, 22.9 x 43.5 cm.
Private collection.
Preacher, 1913.
Gouache, watercolour and pencil, 47 x 30.8 cm.
Leopold Collection, Leopold Museum, Vienna.
The Dancer, 1913.
Pencil, watercolour and gouache, 48 x 32 cm.
Leopold Collection, Leopold Museum, Vienna.
Seated Female Nude, 1914.
Gouache and pencil, 46.4 x 31.7 cm.
Private collection.
Seated Girl, 1914.
Pencil on paper, 43 x 30 cm.
Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich.
Standing Girl in Blue Dress and Green Stockings, Back View, 1913.
Watercolour and pencil, 47 x 31 cm.
Private collection.
Fascination with Death
The viennese at the turn of the century lived with a longing for death and romanticised the “beautiful corpse”. “how ill everything coming into being does seem to be,” wrote trakl, who in 1914 found death on the front. Schiele shared with osen, who had himself locked away in a steinhof insane asylum where he might study the behaviour of the patients, an interest in pathologic pictures of disease. In the clinic of the gynaecologist erwin von graf, he studied and drew sick and pregnant women and pictures of new and stillborn infants. Schiele was fascinated by the devastation of the foul suffering, to which these innocents were exposed. Astonished, he saw unusual changes in the skin in whose sagging vessels