Schiele. Ashley Bassie

Male Nude (Self-Portrait)

      1910

      Oil and gouache, 152.5 × 150 cm

      Leopold Museum, Vienna

      His sister Gertrude (1894–1981), called “Gerti”, four years his junior, was a compliant subject for him. In a watercolour, Gerti reclines backwards, still fully clothed with black stockings and shoes, and lifts the black hem of her dress from under which the red orifice of her body gapes. Schiele draws no bed, no chair, only the provocative gesture of his sister’s body offering itself (Reclining Girl in a Dark Blue Dress, 1910).

      Reclining Girl in a Dark Blue Dress

      1910

      Gouache, watercolour and pencil with white highlights

      45 × 31.3 cm

      Stefan T. Edlis Collection

      Incestuous fantasies? At the same time as Sigmund Freud discovered that self-discovery occurs by way of erotic experiences, and the urge to look emerges as a spontaneous sexual expression within the child, young Egon recorded confrontations with the opposite sex on paper. He incorporated erotic games of discovery and showed an unabashed interest in the genitalia of his model into his nude studies – the forbidden gaze, searching for the opened female vagina beneath the rustling of the skirt hem and white lace. Gerti with her freckled skin, the green eyes and red hair is the prototype of all the later women and models of Schiele.

      Grimacing Man (Self-Portrait)

      1910

      Charcoal, watercolour and gouache on paper

      44 × 27.8 cm

      Leopold Museum, Vienna

      Klimt’s Paternity

      Vienna was the capital city of the Habsburg monarchy, a state of multiple ethnicities consisting of twelve nations with a population of approximately thirty million. Emperor Franz Josef maintained strict Spanish court etiquette. Yet, on the government’s fortieth anniversary, he began a large-scale conversion of the city, with its approximately 850 public and private monumental structures and buildings. During this time, the influx of the rural population selling itself to the big city was increasing.

      Black-Haired Nude Girl, Standing

      1910

      Watercolour and pencil with white highlights

      54.3 × 30.7 cm

      Albertina, Vienna

      The increasing industrialisation resulted in the emergence of a proletariat in the suburbs, while the newly rich bourgeoisie settled in the exclusive Ring Street. In the writers’ cafés, Leo Trotsky, Lenin and, later, Hitler consulted periodicals on display and brooded over the beginning century.

      Just how musty the artistic climate in Vienna was is evidenced by the scandal which erupted in 1893 over Engelhard’s picture Young Girl under a Cherry Tree.

      Albertina, Vienna

      Seated Nude Girl

      1910

      Gouache and black pencil with white highlights

      44.8 × 29.9 cm

      The painting was repudiated on the grounds of “respect for the genteel female audience, which one does not wish to embarrass so painfully vis-à-vis such an open-hearted naturalistic study”. What hypocrisy, when official exhibitions of nude studies, the obligation of every artist, had long been an institution.

      In 1897 Klimt, together with his Viennese fellow artists, founded the Vienna Secession, a splinter group separate from the officially accepted conduct for artists with the motto: “To the times its art, to the art its freedom.”

      The Scornful Woman (Gertrude Schiele)

      1910

      Gouache, watercolour and charcoal with white highlights

      45 × 31.4 cm

      Private collection

      In 1898, the first exhibition took place in a building belonging to the horticultural society. It was distinguished from the usual exhibitions which usually included several thousand works by offering an elite selection of 100 to 200 works of art. The proceeds, generated by the attendance of approximately 100,000 visitors, financed a new gallery designed by the architect Olbrich. Exhibitions by Rodin, Kollwitz, Hodler, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne and Van Gogh opened the doors to the most up-to-date international art world.

      The Dead Mother I

      1910

      Pencil and oil on wood, 32.4 × 25.8 cm

      Leopold Museum, Vienna

      Visual artists worked beside renowned writers and musicians such as Rilke, Schnitzler, Alternberg, Schönberg and Alban Berg for the periodical Ver Sacrum. Here, they developed the idea of the ‘complete’ work of art which encompassed all artistic areas. Simultaneously, the Secession required the abolition of the distinction between higher and lower art, art for the rich and art for the poor and declared art common property. Yet, this demand of the art nouveau generation remained a privilege of the upper class striving for the ideal that “art is a lifestyle”, which encompassed architectural style, interior design, clothing and jewellery.

      Schiele Drawing a Nude Model in front of a Mirror

      1910

      Pencil, 55.2 × 35.3 cm

      Albertina, Vienna

      Schiele’s artistic roots were in the “Jugendstil” of the Viennese Secession movement. Like a whole generation, he came under the influence of Vienna’s most charismatic and celebrated artist, Gustav Klimt (1862–1918). In Vienna’s creative effervescence, the two major figures of Austrian expressionism, Schiele and Kokoschka, would fully expand their talents under the tutelage of Klimt.