Egon Schiele, the widely celebrated Austrian Expressionist, had one of the shortest-ever careers in art. He was only 28 when he died in the flu pandemic of 1918, and his premature death bolstered his image as a symbol of over-the-top Viennese intensity. He is known mainly for drawings of nudes and semi-nudes that can be unnervingly explicit, and he often appears in his own work. With his stand-up hair, skinny body and long, skeletal fingers, he could pass for a contemporary of ours, a proto-punk figure who would seem at home on the Lower East Side.
But Schiele never cottoned to city life. His paintings, unlike his drawings, consist largely of landscapes — nature scenes as well as overhead views of empty Austrian villages unperturbed by artists’ models or even the decently clothed. Now, the Neue Galerie has gathered about 60 works spanning his career into the first exhibition of his landscapes.
“Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes” is a stirring, deeply engrossing show that acquaints us with a long-hidden part of the artist’s career. At a time when the Austro-Hungarian empire was in its final years, Schiele turned to landscape as if to reconstitute a disintegrating world. It’s telling that he conceived of his scenes in clearly delineated horizontal bars that give sky, earth and the Danube River an unshakable, marble-like solidity.
Born in June 1890 in countrified Tulln, Austria, Schiele was raised in humble circumstances and had a difficult childhood. He spoke of his mother as aloof and unloving and preferred the company of his “noble father,” who worked as a railroad station master and housed the family in an apartment above the Tulln station. Schiele was 14 when his father died of syphilis, not long after a suicide attempt.
The artist grew up to be rebellious and insecure in equal measure, and was prone to defensive behavior. He attended the prestigious Vienna Academy of Fine Arts but criticized the city, claiming that “everybody is envious of me and deceitful.”
He started painting at 16, and the show at the Neue Galerie opens with some of his earliest efforts. There are competent if conventional scenes of fog-laden meadows and villages silhouetted against distant skies. Most of the scenes feel far away from us, like vistas glimpsed through the dusty windows of a train.
His art took a giant step forward after he moved to Vienna and became a protégé of Gustav Klimt, who dominated the Austrian art scene and was cherished for bringing an ornamental sheen to modernism. Schiele’s “Sunflower I,” which he painted as a student in Vienna, is excitingly modern. Meaning drained of deep space. A single flower — one lone stalk — appears in sensuous close-up, its shapely leaves glowing against a pale lilac ground.
As you keep looking, the painting acquires a funereal tinge. The head of the sunflower is missing most of its yellow petals and has flopped over. It resembles a person who is staring down at the ground, blond wisps of hair falling down around her face. The leaves on the left side of the canvas are touched with a hint of late-afternoon light, the rays of a setting sun.
In the end, Schiele broke with Klimt and resisted the seductions of color. His landscapes, with their preponderance of cigar browns and oatmeal whites, are relatively dark, as if undertaken in a world where the only season is autumn. Even after he replaced Klimt as the leading portraitist in Vienna, Schiele remained a morbid personality. “Everything is dead while it lives,” he famously said.
“Stein on the Danube, Seen From the South (Large),” 1913, one of the best paintings in the show, depicts an unpeopled village at a time that feels nearly medieval. The sky and terraced hills, along with the river and buildings clustered on its banks, are rendered as thin, wobbly stripes of color that repeat rhythmically across the width of the canvas. The scene can put you in mind of a cross-section view of the earth’s geologic layers, of things that are stratified or stacked. You feel that something is accumulating slowly, perhaps time itself.
“Town Among Greenery (the Old City III),” 1917, also feels weighted with the past. Although Schiele based the painting on sketches of Krumau, his mother’s birthplace, he invented much of the topography, moving the town from its actual location into the middle of a make-believe forest. It was a nice-enough fantasy, but the finished work, with its jammed-together houses bracketed by two vertical bands of green, has the inexplicable appearance of a town sinking into the ground.
Compared with his portraits, with their wire-sharp lines cutting into nearly blank grounds, the townscapes feel like a retreat from modernism. They remain untouched by the drive toward abstraction that animated so much avant-garde art of their era. One need only recall the proto-Cubist landscapes that Georges Braque painted in the town of L’Estaque, which fragmented traditional perspective, to realize that Schiele was after something else.
He was probably more haunted than art historians have led us to believe. It has now been a generation since the Museum of Modern Art organized its landmark show “Vienna 1900: Art, Architecture and Design,” which introduced Schiele to a newly wide public as a man “concerned with adopted guises,” to quote from the catalog by Kirk Varnedoe. Schiele, he suggested, was a “role-player,” an artist in thrall to theatrical images, a Viennese Toulouse-Lautrec.
But, to judge from the current exhibition, Schiele wasn’t playing around and didn’t have any extra energy left over for irony. His quietly eccentric “Bridge,” 1913, a large, square, dirty-yellow painting, shows a rough-hewed wooden structure: the approach to a bridge slanting across the painting’s left side. But unlike bridge paintings by other artists, this one doesn’t leave you with a sense of industrial progress or of distant points connecting across space.
Instead, the bridge leads our gaze downward — to the wooden beams beneath it, and buried in the soft earth, a long brown box. At first glimpse, the box looks like nothing so much as a coffin containing a twisting skeleton. Was this Schiele’s intention? Probably. Later, perusing an essay by Kimberly A. Smith in the exhibition catalog, I stumbled upon a black-and-white photograph documenting a now-lost Schiele painting (“Resurrection”) depicting two recumbent bodies stirring in adjacent graves.
Go ahead. Call him histrionic. Or excessively death-obsessed. Or self-loathing. But, the truth is you cannot fault Schiele for his doomy sensibility when you consider the personal and collective tragedies that lay not only in his past but also in Europe’s looming future — from the flu pandemic of 1918 that took his life and that of his wife, Edith, who was six months pregnant, to the historical nightmare that befell Austria in 1938, when the country was annexed by the Nazis.
Had Schiele lived to see the Anschluss, he might have been labeled a “degenerate artist” like his fellow Expressionists and had his exhibitions shut down. As it was, during the war hundreds of his works were stolen from Jewish collectors, which is why his name keeps coming up all these years later in news articles about the return of Nazi-looted art.
The world that lay ahead of him did not look like Cezanne’s Arcadian scenes of bathers or Matisse’s views of sunny hotel rooms in Nice. It did not support the modernist belief that artists could create a new world and view historical change as a sign of progress.
The world that was coming was dark, unrelievedly so, and Schiele deserves credit for refusing to pretend otherwise.
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