Shortly after arriving in Vienna to study at the Academy of Art, the 17-year-old Egon Schiele encountered the 45-year-old Gustav Klimt, then the leading figure in Austrian Art Nouveau and the Vienna avant-garde. The older painter would become Schiele's lifelong friend...
[more]Shortly after arriving in Vienna to study at the Academy of Art, the 17-year-old Egon Schiele encountered the 45-year-old Gustav Klimt, then the leading figure in Austrian Art Nouveau and the Vienna avant-garde. The older painter would become Schiele's lifelong friend and mentor; his affect on Schiele is evident in a body of work that is sensually similar to Klimt's, while startlingly raw and rebellious.
Under Klimt's influence, Schiele quit the Academy in revolt against its classical methods of training and anti-modern outlook. He joined the Austrian Artists' Union, a progressive group started by Klimt in 1905 following his break with the Vienna Secession. Schiele participated in the group's second exhibition, the "Kunstschau 1909." Despite conflicts in their relationship, the two men carried on an intense artistic dialogue throughout their lives.
Klimt and Schiele's friendship created a bridge between nineteenth-century Symbolism and twentieth-century Expressionism. Symbolism, in its search for a subject matter based in the emotions, dreams, and the subconscious, had discovered a new set of icons. Chief among them was the femme fatale, an archetype of eroticism and mysticism. She appears frequently in the work of Klimt and Edvard Munch, where her figure is a combination of erotic allure and morbid repulsion. Schiele and other Expressionists picked up on this theme but made it more personal, exploring the psychological conflicts inherent in desire, and using more violent pictorial means to convey the body's painful wrenching at the hands of both Eros and Thanatos.
Schiele's early work reflects the direct transfusion of iconography from Klimt, but also the beginnings of Schiele's own personal vision. A 1909 painting of his sister Gertrude, with its self-contained body and inward-focused face, recalls Klimt's cocooned women. Yet the work is made stark by the narrowing of the figure, by its heavy outlining against a barren background, and by the replacement of Klimt's dazzling gold mosaics with a palette of black, ochers, and grays. The resulting effect is more darkly erotic than celebratory.
As Schiele's style evolved, he painted the human figure in an increasingly emaciated and angular form, again echoing but distorting the ornamental surfaces of Klimt's work. He painted nude self-portraits with contorted gestures and unrealistic hues, evoking personal conflict and torment; his naked females adopted pornographic poses, all traces of seductiveness lost in their thinness.
"The Self Seer II (Death and the Man)," which Schiele painted in 1911, hints at the possibilities of his mature style. Figures rendered in jagged brushwork emerge from a background of dissonant hues: a man, his form rigid and abstracted, stares out at the spectator, his face a constricted mask of fear. Behind him hovers Death, a ghastly apparition reaching out to embrace and enfold him, the terror of mortality practically caked onto the canvas. The specter of death was one that Schiele confronted all too soon; an uneasy anticipation of its arrival seems to hover over all of his work.
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