The Drawings of Egon Schiele

There is a large exhibition of the drawings of Egon Schiele on at the moment over in Vienna, open until June the 18th. Schiele is one of those artists that continues to have a very powerful influence on our visual imaginations but one I sometimes have difficulty with. 
I think his drawings are much better than his paintings. By the time his images are worked up into paintings they feel overly mannered and they lose the directness of the drawings. However the 'directness' of the drawings is sometimes awkward to take, especially when he is dealing with some of his sexual inclinations. 
His view of life is one that communicates a heightened awareness of sex and death. He doesn't hide the difficult issues that he has had to face. He has this to say about children and sex. "Have adults forgotten how corrupt, sexually driven and aroused they were as children? Have they forgotten how the frightful passion burned and tortured them when they were children? I have not forgotten, for I have suffered terribly under it." This view of what it is like to be a child is very alien to the one we prefer to aspire to, but for an artist working out of Freud's Vienna it's very appropriate, an artist dealing with what were normally suppressed emotions and desires, in a city and time where you feel there was a lot of suppressed desire about. This is about an artist owning up to what actually goes on. Drawings of prepubescent and adolescent boys and girls, would come across very differently in our current moral climate. The debate surrounding the work of Sally Mann perhaps opens out some of the issues we would have with similar work now. This review of Mann's work from the New York Times is a useful contextualisation. 

There is an excellent review of the exhibition by Thomas Michelle here. Michelle can turn a good phrase and the paragraph below seems to get pretty close to my own thoughts.

"Schiele worked quick and dirty. A close examination of his surfaces reveals no erasures, and his many stylistic quirks, such as the lacerating strokes denoting musculature and the squiggles indicative of body hair, are less observational details than they are notational shorthand for the artist’s overriding attraction to/repulsion from the animalistic nature of the human body. For the most part, his nudes are rank, bristly, and bruised, animated corpses whose life force emanates from their genitals". Thomas Michelle 2017

Schiele is a difficult artist to confront, especially as his work has often been appropriated as a style and his life portrayed as another of those mythic artist narratives that have romantically distorted the idea of what an artist actually is.
One of his most quoted sayings is, "To restrict the artist is a crime. It is to murder germinating life". An interesting quote that could be a title for an essay on ethics. Is Schiele right? It seems a very difficult claim to me and could lead to all sorts of misuses. Does the artist have no moral responsibility? Is everything an artist does an attempt to portray some sort of truth? The idea of 'truth' as we have seen recently is a difficult one to define. I sometimes think that politicians want to define 'truth' for us, and in an age of 'post-truth' at least create enough of a confusion about what is right and wrong to be able to take actions, using what Naomi Klein called 'shock doctrine', while we are off balance. This age of uncertainty does ask questions of an artist. What can an artist do when the world appears to be out of balance? How can an artist operate in such a climate?
Keats put it like this:

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

He was writing about an Grecian urn, and had an idea that there was something longer lasting and deeper in the Classical ideal, a pure centre to a historically inflected concept of art. Our age seems a long way from those certainties but in order to make art we need some kind of ground on which to build our concepts. Keats is for me a welcome antidote to the current post truth debate, which I find ugly and in its total relativity unsettling and dispiriting. My own mantra for practice is, "Look hard and honestly at what is around you and reflect back what you see". Not very quotable but hopefully workable.


Find details of the exhibition at the Albertina here

See also:

Drawing and sexual politics