Esther Selsdon – Egon Schiele. Paintings Art

Автор: Esther Selsdon
Название книги: Egon Schiele. Paintings Art
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Живопись и Графический дизайн
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

In 1964, Oskar Kokoschka evaluated the first great Schiele Exhibition in London as
“pornographic”. In the age of discovery of modern art and the loss of “subject”, Schiele
responded that for him there existed no modernity, but only the “eternal”. Schiele’s world
shrank into portraits of the body, locally and temporally non-committal. Self-discovery is
expressed in an unrelenting revelation of himself as well as of his models. The German art
encyclopaedia, compiled by Thieme and Becker, described Schiele as an eroticist
because Schiele’s art is an erotic portrayal of the human body. Furthermore, Schiele
studied both male and female bodies. His models express an incredible freedom with
respect to their own sexuality, self-love, homosexuality or voyeurism, as well as skilfully
seducing the viewer.
For Schiele, the clichéd ideas of feminine beauty did not interest him. He knew that the
urge to look is interconnected with the mechanisms of disgust and allure. The body
contains the power of sex and death within itself. A photograph of Schiele on his
deathbed depicts the twenty-eight-year-old looking asleep, his gaunt body completely
emaciated, his head resting on his bent arm; the similarity to his drawings is astounding.
Because of the danger of infection, his last visitors were able to communicate with the
Spanish flu-infected Schiele only by way of a mirror, which was set up on the threshold
between his room and the parlour.
During the same year, 1918, Schiele had designed a mausoleum for himself and his
wife. Did he know, he who had so often distinguished himself as a person of foresight, of
his nearing death? Did his individual fate fuse collectively with the fall of the old system,
that of the Habsburg Empire? Schiele’s productive life scarcely extended beyond ten
years, yet during this time he produced 334 oil paintings and 2,503 drawings. He
painted portraits and still lifes of land and townscapes; however, he became famous for
his draftsmanship. While Sigmund Freud exposed the repressed pleasure principles of
upper-class Viennese society, which put its women into corsets and bulging gowns and
granted them solely a role as future mothers, Schiele bares his models. His nude studies
penetrate brutally into the privacy of his models and finally confront the viewer with his or
her own sexuality.