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Lot Essay
In 1910 Schiele crossed the threshold of artistic maturity into an independent and intensely personal style. Although Schiele's work in the previous two years displayed many competent qualities, and contained evidence of an increasingly precocious talent, the young artist's attraction to the sensual and ornamental aspects of Klimt's work tended to "soften" his own emotional and stylistic response to his subjects. Although there are many presentiments in the work of 1909, Schiele's plunge into the radical portraits and self-portraits of 1910 is one of the most extraordinary accelerations of subjective emotion and style to be achieved anywhere in the early 20th Century painting.
It is difficult to trace this sudden metamorphosis to any one outward event in the artist's personal life, and it is probably more useful to understand this phenomenon in terms of the artist's growing sense of self-awareness and personal independence, coupled with the assimilation of new and vital stylistic influences. Schiele left the Vienna Academy in 1909 and participated in the great Kunstschau at the Secession that year, a large invitational exhibition that featured many important international artists as well as those from Austria and Germany. At this exhibition Schiele viewed works by van Gogh, Belgian sculptor Georges Minne, Edward Munch and Oskar Kokoschka, artists whose "Expressionist" works provided a powerfully fresh alternative to the refined elegance of the Jugendstil manner. Schiele was also influenced by a fellow artist, Max Oppenheimer (called "Mopp"), who also participated in the Kunstschau. They worked together in 1910 and painted portraits of each other.
"By early 1910, Schiele had shed the Klimtian decorative surround for good; what remained was the glaring negative space that Klimt, with his horror vacui, had striven to conceal. What remained, also, were the taut, spare lines that formed the boundary between object and background. Both in Schiele's drawings and in his paintings, line was the unifying force, the device that fixed the more or less realistically depicted subject and kept it from veering off into the abstract environs. From his years of academic training and Jugendstil posturing, the artist had concocted a unique combination of naturalistic rendering and expressive stylization...
...A metamorphosis was thus completed: by substituting emotional effect for decorative effect in the interplay of form and color, Schiele unmasked the sensual, sinister world that had always lain imbedded in Klimt's ornamental crust." (J. Kallir, op. cit., pp. 62 and 68)
Events in his personal life also played out in such a way that a break with the past was inevitable. His uncle and guardian Leo Czihaczek had grown weary of trying to control his rebellious nephew, and after Schiele's withdrawal from the Academy he renounced his guardianship and no longer sent money. Schiele was on his own in Vienna, impoverished and at times even starving. This critical situation required greater self-reliance and resourcefulness than ever before. Given Schiele's extreme youth and circumstances (he was only twenty years old in 1910), it is not surprising that the decadent, delirious and anxious atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Vienna, the city of Freud, should induce in him a tendency to extreme self-absorption, an intense craving to probe his inner self and his emotions, almost bordering on narcissism.
"While self-portraiture had figured in Schiele's repertory from the start, his previous self-portraits were relatively staid compared to the work he began in 1910. In a series of remarkable drawings and watercolors, the artist revealed a multitude of selves: Schiele the effeminate, the elegant, the dandy; Schiele the fearful, the anguished, the uncertain; Schiele the stoic, the angry; Schiele beautiful and Schiele hideous... His new, seismographic line served well to underscore the graphic nuances of the exaggerated poses, and his brush, loaded with brilliant reds or dusky mauves, followed the heightened concavities of abdomen and the angular eruptions of bone with obsessive fidelity. These works, viewed as a series, make evident a dualism that was already nascent in the artist's earliest self-portraits: while exploring his psyche, Schiele nonetheless always remains conscious of the image he is presenting to the public; he is object as well as subject. The self-portraits thus evoke a tantalizing combination of sincerity and affection. Even in the most unabashedly self-revelatory of the works, the element of artifice rescues the presentation from emotional excess. This dualism was a tightrope that Schiele walked with the fearless grace of somnambulist, risking mannerism on the one side, pathos on the other." (Ibid., p. 68)
The present work demonstrates Schiele's transformation of Jugendstil aesthetic into a hallucinatory, angst-ridden and sexually excited expression. The absence of facial features and the central positioning of the artist's genitalia serve to depersonalize the figure but at the same time exaggerate his intensely human sexuality. Each attenuated limb and angled joint is anatomically convincing, but twisted almost to the breaking point, like the body of a martyr being broken on a rack. The close-cropping of the figure within the edges of the sheet, and the termination of color in the left leg above the shoe-line heighten the sense of brutality done to the figure. The reddish highlights around the figure's nipples, contrasted with the lime- and olive-green tones of the flesh overall, heighten the sense of sexual excitement and self-abandon. The very pose itself is like a leap into the void, into a world at the very frontier of human emotion and imagination, in which all traditional points of reference, all the elements that help orient the self within its larger society and natural world, have been abandoned.
It is difficult to trace this sudden metamorphosis to any one outward event in the artist's personal life, and it is probably more useful to understand this phenomenon in terms of the artist's growing sense of self-awareness and personal independence, coupled with the assimilation of new and vital stylistic influences. Schiele left the Vienna Academy in 1909 and participated in the great Kunstschau at the Secession that year, a large invitational exhibition that featured many important international artists as well as those from Austria and Germany. At this exhibition Schiele viewed works by van Gogh, Belgian sculptor Georges Minne, Edward Munch and Oskar Kokoschka, artists whose "Expressionist" works provided a powerfully fresh alternative to the refined elegance of the Jugendstil manner. Schiele was also influenced by a fellow artist, Max Oppenheimer (called "Mopp"), who also participated in the Kunstschau. They worked together in 1910 and painted portraits of each other.
"By early 1910, Schiele had shed the Klimtian decorative surround for good; what remained was the glaring negative space that Klimt, with his horror vacui, had striven to conceal. What remained, also, were the taut, spare lines that formed the boundary between object and background. Both in Schiele's drawings and in his paintings, line was the unifying force, the device that fixed the more or less realistically depicted subject and kept it from veering off into the abstract environs. From his years of academic training and Jugendstil posturing, the artist had concocted a unique combination of naturalistic rendering and expressive stylization...
...A metamorphosis was thus completed: by substituting emotional effect for decorative effect in the interplay of form and color, Schiele unmasked the sensual, sinister world that had always lain imbedded in Klimt's ornamental crust." (J. Kallir, op. cit., pp. 62 and 68)
Events in his personal life also played out in such a way that a break with the past was inevitable. His uncle and guardian Leo Czihaczek had grown weary of trying to control his rebellious nephew, and after Schiele's withdrawal from the Academy he renounced his guardianship and no longer sent money. Schiele was on his own in Vienna, impoverished and at times even starving. This critical situation required greater self-reliance and resourcefulness than ever before. Given Schiele's extreme youth and circumstances (he was only twenty years old in 1910), it is not surprising that the decadent, delirious and anxious atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Vienna, the city of Freud, should induce in him a tendency to extreme self-absorption, an intense craving to probe his inner self and his emotions, almost bordering on narcissism.
"While self-portraiture had figured in Schiele's repertory from the start, his previous self-portraits were relatively staid compared to the work he began in 1910. In a series of remarkable drawings and watercolors, the artist revealed a multitude of selves: Schiele the effeminate, the elegant, the dandy; Schiele the fearful, the anguished, the uncertain; Schiele the stoic, the angry; Schiele beautiful and Schiele hideous... His new, seismographic line served well to underscore the graphic nuances of the exaggerated poses, and his brush, loaded with brilliant reds or dusky mauves, followed the heightened concavities of abdomen and the angular eruptions of bone with obsessive fidelity. These works, viewed as a series, make evident a dualism that was already nascent in the artist's earliest self-portraits: while exploring his psyche, Schiele nonetheless always remains conscious of the image he is presenting to the public; he is object as well as subject. The self-portraits thus evoke a tantalizing combination of sincerity and affection. Even in the most unabashedly self-revelatory of the works, the element of artifice rescues the presentation from emotional excess. This dualism was a tightrope that Schiele walked with the fearless grace of somnambulist, risking mannerism on the one side, pathos on the other." (Ibid., p. 68)
The present work demonstrates Schiele's transformation of Jugendstil aesthetic into a hallucinatory, angst-ridden and sexually excited expression. The absence of facial features and the central positioning of the artist's genitalia serve to depersonalize the figure but at the same time exaggerate his intensely human sexuality. Each attenuated limb and angled joint is anatomically convincing, but twisted almost to the breaking point, like the body of a martyr being broken on a rack. The close-cropping of the figure within the edges of the sheet, and the termination of color in the left leg above the shoe-line heighten the sense of brutality done to the figure. The reddish highlights around the figure's nipples, contrasted with the lime- and olive-green tones of the flesh overall, heighten the sense of sexual excitement and self-abandon. The very pose itself is like a leap into the void, into a world at the very frontier of human emotion and imagination, in which all traditional points of reference, all the elements that help orient the self within its larger society and natural world, have been abandoned.