The Provocative Self‐portraits
of Egon Schiele
Kent L. Boyer
HUMA 6336
Fall 2014
1
Viennese artist Egon Schiele is widely regarded as an important harbinger of
modernism in painting. Astonishingly, by the time he was 20 years old in 1910,
Schiele had already consumed enough of the fin‐de‐siècle culture to turn his artistic
gaze inward and create a personal artistic statement. That was the year he erupted
with a radical painting style moored in a previously unknown and absolutely
original aesthetic: nude self‐portraiture totally unreliant on traditional perceptions
of beauty or style.1 Male nudes hadn’t been seen in any number since antiquity;
further, male nude self‐portraits were unheard of. In addition, while the grotesque
had some precedent in Western art, the grotesque male nude self‐portrait was such
a combination of taboos, it was virtually invented by Schiele. Wagner describes him
as “the artist who concentrated on reality, on the passions, on the disorder of chaos,
and on sexuality” (80). This body of provocative work is as original and personal as
any 20th century artist who followed him. The paintings burst forth, fully developed
stylistically in a mature technique that Schiele was still investigating at the time of
his death eight years later.2 How much of this personal style was a response to the
culture around him? While much has been written about these paintings and
drawings, particularly in the last fifty years, the question of why Schiele portrayed
himself this way in these works is still somewhat controversial. Some scholars see
him as disturbed, narcissistic, sex‐obsessed, and angst‐ridden. 3 Others see his self‐
portraits as theatrical and style‐driven – meant to develop a new and unique
1
Importantly, Schiele also painted less controversial self‐portraits, as in Figure 15, also painted in
1910.
2 Schiele died in October 1918 at the age of 28 from the Spanish flu, which had taken his pregnant
wife three days earlier.
3 Former SMU Art History Professor Alessandra Comini wrote the first extensive monograph on
Schiele, a published version of her doctoral dissertation, in 1974.
2
vocabulary in expression of the figure. Still others find him deliberately provocative,
with his iconography market‐driven. This paper intends to investigate Schiele’s self‐
portrait oeuvre, particularly these groundbreaking expressionistic, sexually charged
nude self‐portraits.
Even as a child, Schiele used self‐portraiture to refine his artistic style.
Between the ages of 15 and 19, Schiele created at least ten self‐portraits; his
maturation as an artist is evidenced in them. Nothing in this early work could
prepare one, however, for the startling individual avant‐garde aesthetic that
suddenly appeared in his work beginning in 1910. Izenberg writes, “With almost no
period of development he became, overnight as it were, Egon Schiele” (465). From
precocious, but fairly pedestrian, pre‐1909 student work, a hint of something new
appears in two liminal self‐portraits painted in 1909, both of which include
decorative Klimtian elements as well as signs of Schiele’s own developing and
unique vocabulary. 4 Schiele ultimately used himself as a model more than any other
artist in the history of Western art, creating over 300 self‐portraits ‐ almost one‐
tenth of his sizable catalogue raisonne (Izenberg 465). These works are radically
different from the self‐portraits of other artists – most depict him nude; they are
often grotesque, ugly, puzzling, disturbing, and occasionally obscene.5 His portrayal
of himself is free from the usual constraints of the aesthetics of traditional beauty.
He frequently uses arbitrary color – violets, blues, yellows, greens, and oranges ‐ to
render his body. He amputates limbs and stretches his torso. He poses in unnatural
4
Gustav Klimt was the pre‐eminent Secession artist in Vienna as Schiele came to maturity, and, as
such, was an influence on younger artists.
5 Schiele paints himself masturbating or in the midst of sexual intercourse numerous times in this
stage of his career.
3
ways with odd hand gestures and facial expressions that create a fragile tension. He
removes from the work everything but his isolated figure – even his body’s support
is missing. Natter writes, “With their utter disregard for what had gone before, these
fascinating self‐revelations are what Nietzsche would have called ‘risky explorations
of the self’ by one who ‘experimented with himself’” (5). Intriguingly, Schiele also
posed for many photographs in his adult life; these photographs are extremely
useful in envisioning a fuller picture of Egon Schiele the man. Often mugging for the
camera, making faces or hand gestures that also appear in his self‐portraits, the
photographs add an additional dimension to the interpretation of his self‐portrait
work. Similarly helpful are the written and recorded descriptions of his
contemporaries.6
The complex moralistic yet erotic milieu of fin‐de‐siècle Vienna, preoccupied
with Freud’s new field of psychoanalysis that scrutinized urges, desires, and dreams,
is the cultural and historical context for Schiele’s surprising technique and
iconography. Perhaps no artist interpreted the times with his work better ‐ Wagner
states, “Schiele’s work adumbrates the central preoccupations of the world in 1900”
(88). Chan writes about her perspective of Schiele’s work, “His radical aesthetic
innovations, which define the Austrian contribution to Expressionism, are so aligned
with his existential explorations of the human condition…” (7).
Egon Schiele passed the entrance exam for and matriculated into the Vienna
Academy of Fine Arts at the age of 16. He finished the three‐year course but was
disillusioned by the traditional methods of the faculty at the Academy and was
6
Comini began her exhaustive research of Schiele in 1963. His two sisters, Melanie and Gerti, were
both still living, as were several of his commissioned portrait models.
4
regarded by them as a rebel (Comini 16). At 19, he sought out and boldly
introduced himself to Gustav Klimt, Vienna’s leading avant‐garde artist. Klimt, 28
years his senior, and Schiele became friends; Klimt sometimes sending Schiele
models or patrons or trading drawings with him. “Acknowledgement of his talents
by Vienna’s leading artist was an important factor in increasing Schiele’s already
considerable self‐esteem,” declares Comini (21). Several self‐portraits (Figures 1 –
10) from this period survive, showing Schiele’s rapid transition from his traditional
“academy” training, to his practice of incorporating Klimtian elements in his work,
to quickly finding his own unique voice. This maturation process is particularly
illustrated in his two 1909 self‐portraits, which predict his radical departure of the
next year. ”Went through Klimt until March. Now see myself as someone else
entirely,” he wrote later in 1910, at the age of twenty. (Leopold 20)
In 1909, Schiele painted two large self‐portraits, the last two known before
his radical personal style breaks through.7 In the first of these, Self‐portrait with
Spread Fingers (Figure 8), Schiele mimics Klimtian dimensions for the painting as
well as including a decorative striped band of colors in the background. However,
several prescient elements in the painting signal his new signature style. First, he
has disengaged his head from his hands by not painting his body. This tendency to
create portraits by focusing exclusively on head and hands – letting the subject’s
body disappear into the background ‐ repeats in both self‐portraits and
commissioned ones throughout his career. The second element to foreshadow
7
See also Male Nude (Figure 7), which is undated but should also be considered among the
transitional works that combine a nude male subject (himself?) in a non‐academic pose with Klimtian
decorative elements.
5
future work is in the odd rigid gesture of his hands. Similar gestures are often seen
in both his subsequent self‐portraits and his photographs. Here he painted his face
as a doll face, with rosy cheeks and lips and a vacant stare – the stare also being a
repeated element in future works. A rectangular yellow element at his neck reads as
a hangman’s noose. In the second painting, Nude Self‐portrait with Ornamental
Drapery (Figure 9), he took a radical and significant step toward his self‐portrait
oeuvre – he took off his clothes. Still utilizing Klimtian elements – the canvas shape,
the decorated cloth he is partially wrapped in, and the dark abstract element behind
him that fills the negative space, Schiele begins here his life‐long practice of painting
himself unclothed. Note especially that he painted his body hair with more exacting
detail than the hair on his head in this work. This element and his determined face
with its short‐lived mustache intentionally declare his manhood – his virility. His
gaze is penetrating. He hadn’t yet let loose of realistic color, but we see the
beginning of his unique contour line quality – note particularly the sharp bottom
edge of his ribcage and the sinuous curve of his abdomen.
In 1910, Schiele unleashed his newfound artistic voice in a number of
shockingly unique self‐portraits. He painted three large self‐portraits during this
year, but this one – Self‐portrait Sitting with Raised Arms (Figure 10) is the only one
that survives.8 These new works no longer share Klimt’s horror vacui; in fact, they
are remarkably empty. 9 Elisabeth Leopold writes, “The shift of the painter’s gaze
from the naked opposite to the exposed self gave rise to the nude self‐portrait – a
8
This painting is 152 x 150 cm in size and is owned by the Leopold Museum in Vienna.
Klimt’s portraits characteristically include large fields of decorative iconography filling the canvas.
Schiele’s mature style, in contrast, removes everything but the isolated figure.
9
6
shining beacon of modernism” (“Nude Men” 5). 10 His self‐portraits follow a cultural
interest in stark reality – truth, rather than a stylized beauty ‐ and that may be the
quality that makes them the most jarring.
Before looking in more depth at this new Egon Schiele painting style, it is
informative to look at the person Egon Schiele using the parallel photographic
record and the writings and memories of contemporaries. Early images of the boy
Egon Schiele remain from his school record and family photos. Figures 20 ‐ 21 show
Schiele from ages sixteen through eighteen. Figures 22 ‐ 32 are photographs taken
throughout Schiele’s twenties, showing him posturing for the camera and often
posing with the same idiosyncratic gestures that also show up in his paintings.
Naves posits, “Schiele was nothing if not photogenic and knew it. With his shock of
black hair, dramatically arched eyebrows, slow curl of the lip, and flair for stylized
gestures, he was, at least in front of the camera lens, never not posing” (34). The
photographs show that far from being an emaciated and physically unattractive
person (as one might expect looking at his self‐portraits), Schiele was in fact just the
opposite ‐ an attractive, well‐dressed young man with a highly expressive face and
body, who apparently self‐identified with certain quirky hand gestures and facial
expressions that formed a sort of secret language for him. His photographs reveal a
well‐developed understanding of how the camera would record him if he tilted his
head this way or that, wrinkled his forehead, or pursed his lips. His mugging for the
camera also portrays, at times, a playful and child‐like sense of humor and perhaps
an understanding about, and interest in, portraiture as performance, as theater; an
10
Leopold is the art historian widow of Rudolf Leopold, the founder of the Leopold Museum in
Vienna where one of the two largest collections of Schiele’s work can be seen.
7
interest he incorporated into his painting. Despite the genial good looks and the
personality we believe we see in the photographs of him, however, Schiele likely
experienced the same insecurities and self‐doubt most young men in their early
twenties feel. Comini, who likely knows more about Schiele than any living person,
proclaims that Schiele was, as a young man in his twenties, “painfully self‐aware,”
and that “he once exclaimed, ‘My outward bearing does not agree with my inner
needs’” (91).
In addition to these photographs, we are fortunate to have numerous written
descriptions of Schiele – both contemporaneous ones as well as memories by people
who knew him. Schiele biographer and early patron Arthur Roessler wrote this
literary and rather formal description about the young artist: 11
One felt one had before one a personality extraordinary in every respect, so
extraordinary, in fact, that by no means everyone can have felt comfortable in
its presence, sometimes not even its owner himself. To the sensitive, Schiele
must have seemed like a sendling from an unknown land, like one who has
come back from the hear and now, filled with a painful confusion, carries
among mankind a secret message, without quite knowing to whom to deliver
it.
Even amidst celebrated men of impressive appearance, Schiele struck
one as an extraordinary phenomenon, as I later had frequent opportunity of
observing. Of tall, slender, supple figure, with narrow shoulders, long arms,
bony hands, unruly dark hair, with a broad, obliquely furrowed, slanting
11
Roessler wrote a biography of Schiele, Das Egon Schiele Buch, in 1921. The book is available
digitally, but has not been translated from German into English.
8
forehead – a face whose eloquent features mostly bore a serious, almost
mournful expression, as of someone inwardly in pain – with his large dark
eyes, from which, when spoken to, had always to banish a dream, he
impressed you immediately you confronted him. (Vergo 212)
In 1963, Comini interviewed Frederike Maria Beer, the only woman to ever
commission Schiele to paint her, who described him this way: 12
He was tall, thin, shy, and quiet.… He dressed normally but even so he stood
out in a crowd. One could tell there was something unusual about him: that
fantastic head of hair! Those out‐spread ears! He really appeared rather
spectacular! (33)
Another patron who sat for a Schiele portrait, Dr. Otto Benesch, explained the artist
to Comini:
He was shy and quiet, but not close‐mouthed or locked up in himself. He
expressed his own opinions frankly and in fact was known for doing so…. he
believed in himself, his mission, that some power above had bestowed a
particular talent upon him.(29)
We also have a portrait of Schiele ‐ friend and fellow artist, Max Oppenheimer,
painted his portrait in 1910, shown in Figure 33. It’s notable that Oppenheimer saw
Schiele as the young man we see in the photographs – slightly impish, with his
idiosyncratic hand gestures – rather than an emaciated and ugly character – the way
he most often painted himself.
12
Schiele’s commissioned portraits were almost all of men or children – the Beer commission was,
for him, a rare one. Beer had also commissioned Klimt to paint her.
9
What are we to make of these memories and visual records about Schiele?
He is not remembered as a narcissistic or anti‐social. He appears to have had a
sense of humor. Contemporaries describe him as introspective and serious about his
work. He is seen as attractive to women. Comini believes the number of self‐
portraits result from the reality of his life – she calls 1910 and 1911 the years of
Schiele’s self‐imposed isolation ‐ important years for his work, albeit lonely ones.
During these two years, he was his own primary model. Schiele spent this
introspective time investigating gesture, expression, and sexuality with every self‐
portrait.
It is challenging to write about just a few of Schiele’s self‐portraits as
representative because each one is so unique. However, for the purpose of this
paper, I have selected Figures 10‐19 as important and representative examples.
These include his first eruption of self‐portraits in 1910, followed by a small
selection from later years to show his continuing practice of painting nude self‐
portraits until his death. These works were an inner‐directed exercise, utilizing a
large full‐length mirror in which he posed for them. The mirror (pictured in Figure
30) came from his childhood home, and was with him in every one of his studios
from 1907 to the end of his life.13 In his early, more isolated years, one might say
the mirror was his constant companion as he posed in front of it and then drew or
painted himself.
Self‐portrait Sitting with Raised Arms (Figure 10) could be described as one of
Schiele’s early masterpieces. This oil on canvas, one of three large self‐portraits he
13
Schiele’s sister Melanie still had the mirror in the 1960s when Comini visited her home in Vienna.
10
painted in 1910 (and the only one of the three remaining), showcases his newfound
vocabulary. He is unclothed and his figure is isolated on the canvas. His
outstretched body fills the canvas on a diagonal. He appears seated but the support
for his body is missing, and therefore his figure is described as floating. At the same
time, however, his figure appears to be entrapped or limited somehow by the top of
the canvas. This is a repeated compositional element in many of his works. Elsen,
writing in Werkner, explains, “the blank sheet of paper was to be visualized as a
cube of space…into which the figure and its volume would be located without even a
groundline” (18). Kallir writes, “He had an acutely developed sense of negative
space and knew how to exploit every angle and bit of tension between the contours
of his image and the edges of his picture plane. Not even the placement of his
signature – much less that of his figures – is ever random” (13).
While the figure in Self‐portrait Sitting with Raised Arms resembles his
corporeal self, Schiele has taken license by lengthening and thinning his torso and
limbs so that he appears extraordinarily thin. His head is bowed, eyes closed, with
his arms wrapped around his head and neck. His feet and ankles are missing –
amputated purposefully. He’s painted his figure in arbitrary colors – warm earth
tones – browns and greens in his legs, a yellow trunk, orange chest and brown arms
and face. His genitals, nipples, and eye are red, suggesting the colors were perhaps
chosen by tumescence rather than purely arbitrarily. As is true of all his self‐
portraits, Schiele carefully records his body hair – axilla hair, leg hair, and pubic hair
that extends to his navel ‐ as if to communicate his sexual virility – his masculinity ‐
to the viewer. Simmons also notices this phenomenon with this comment, “If a nude
11
is defined as an idealized set of artistic conventions— harmonious pose, adjusted
proportions, excision of body hair and imperfections, lack of clothes constructed as
a “natural” state— then Schiele’s figures are better described as naked” (264). In
the painting, Schiele invites viewers to see him without his clothes on. Consider the
viewing experience between this portrait and an ancient Greek nude for
comparison: a painting of a “naked” man is more personal and much more shocking
than a nude one.
What one notices after the initial characteristics of the painting is the quality
of the contour line with which his figure is rendered. Naves writes, “Schiele's line is
among the most distinctive in the history of art” (35). We see in his line drawings
that he had an uncanny way of creating dimensionality without the use of light or
shadow, but simply with the contour lines that separate his figure from the paper.
For example, look how sharply he’s drawn the ridges of his pelvis or his elbows. On
the other hand, feel the dense muscular tension of his quadriceps or calf muscles.
Both of these effects are achieved with line alone. Finally, that Schiele meant this
painting as a grand statement is evidenced by its size. At roughly 150 centimeters
square, the self he’s painted is at least life‐size, a little over six feet if it had feet and
was to stand. Schiele could rarely afford such large canvases except in his
commissioned portraits. His work is generally smaller and often on paper. This
painting and its two companions were statement works – coming of age
declarations.
In Self‐portrait with a Red Eye (Figure 12), Schiele demonstrates another
common characteristic of his self‐portraits ‐ they return the viewer’s gaze. Here he
12
poses, one shoulder higher than the other, and makes a face, closing one eye and
curling his lip while he clasps his arms behind him. This simple drawing, with no
color other than in the iris of his eye, demonstrates the extraordinary quality of his
contour line. Once again, without shadow or highlight, he causes us to believe we
are looking at a three‐dimensional figure with his bony shoulders, protruding ribs,
and concave belly. In this drawing, he also demonstrates a frequently used
technique to outline his body – he paints a thick white line around the contour,
creating an aura‐like effect to separate the body from the blank background. The
practice of odd facial grimaces and other expressions could easily have come from
his academic training. Traditional academy training to this day teaches life drawing
using plaster casts and the nude figure – both of which we know he drew. Another
common life drawing assignment is facial expression drawings, for which the
student poses in the mirror and draws himself making faces to learn how the
musculature of the face works. Knowing Schiele’s practice of posing before his
mirror, it’s likely the grimaces and other unusual expressions result from this habit.
Comini’s groundbreaking initial work on Schiele is now five decades old, but
since that time, international museum and gallery retrospectives have kept Egon
Schiele’s work alive.14 And why not? His work is intriguing, unusual, and sometimes
shocking even in our cynical day. The backstory of a young artist who looks like a
matinee idol and tragically dies young adds to the biographical interest in his life
and work. After viewing the most recent Museum of Modern Art Schiele
14
A major new Schiele show just opened in early October, 2014 at the Neue Gallery in New York
curated by octogenarian Comini. His work was also prominently featured in two major shows in the
last decade on the male nude: “Male Nude” at the Leopold Museum in Vienna and
“Masculin|Masculine” at Musee d’Orsay in Paris.
13
retrospective, Loughery wrote, “Schiele is someone who can still cause a stir. Yet he
also represents…. the paradigm of the artist who was once a taboo‐breaker but no
longer fulfills that function ‐ a statement that does not minimize his stature one bit”
(569). He seems to suggest that one hundred years later, Schiele’s work isn’t quite as
shocking as it would have been then. Izenberg describes the work like this, “These
images say a number of things. They represent perhaps first and most simply a bold,
almost theatrically defiant deviation from the ideal of masculine physical beauty
that had been the European norm since the eighteenth century” (466, 467).
Not all scholars see the same thing when they look at these works, therefore
alternative readings of the self‐portraits exist. The more classic explanation of this
body of work positions Schiele as the personification of cultural Vienna at the turn
of the century and describes his self‐portraits as narcissistic, angst‐ridden,
emaciated, full of psychological pain or self‐hatred. Some scholars go as far as to
suggest that Schiele was mentally ill, or that his self‐portraits look like they do
because he hated his mother or because his father died of tertiary syphilis when he
was young.15 There are other scholars, however, who see his work in a slightly
more nuanced way – as experimentation, as theater, as a youthful obsession with
sex, as provocation, as boundary‐testing examples of the ugly or grotesque in what
we now label expressionistic art, or as a new way to portray masculinity in a culture
in which traditional masculinity was being challenged. Schiele’s male nudes seem to
describe what future male nudes, however few they are in number, attempt to
portray. Hood writes (in 1997) that nude men in art, “all concentrate on imagery
15
Izenberg, Knafo, and Heller, for example, offer much scholarship along these lines.
14
that seeks to come to terms with our century's strict codification of masculinity,
through assimilation, rebellion, subversion” (4). Blackshaw, one of the more recent
Schiele scholars, writes,
With remarkably few exceptions, the tendency is to emphasize Schiele as a
traumatized individual who used the self‐portrait as a means of articulating
angst… this personal history, along with Schiele’s early death in 1918 at
twenty‐eight‐years old, has driven a cult of the anguished wunderkind which
negates the influence of a cultural context. (379)
Critic Norbert Lynton wrote a similar comment in an exhibition review fifty years
ago, in 1964, when the first Schiele exhibition was hung in London:
Two paintings in this exhibition, and several drawings …. announce the
complete disappearance of those elements of morbidity which Continental
writers habitually overemphasize in order to turn Schiele into a Kafka figure.
Most of these elements seem to reside in the eye of the beholder… (45, 46)
In 2005, Naves wrote a reaction essay after viewing a Schiele exhibition. His
thoughts on Schiele’s work also represent this alternate interpretation of the work:
Walking through “Egon Schiele,” …. isn't that much different from channel
surfing, leafing through the latest edition of Vogue, or strolling through
Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A not unattractive mix of youthful vigor, self‐
absorption, and strident sexuality is the rule. (34)
Naves may or may not have known that twenty years earlier, in 1986, Richard
Avedon, the iconic American photographer who literally taught a couple of mid‐
century generations what style and fashion should look like, discovered Schiele for
15
the first time and wrote about his discovery. He instantly recognized similarities
with his own photographic portrait work. Rather than seeing Schiele as anguished
or disturbed, Avedon recognized a modern aesthetic in Schiele’s unusual style that
he himself had used for decades in his own portrait photography. He writes about
discovering Schiele at MoMA’s “Vienna 1900” exhibition, “I was excited. It seemed
to me one of the highest examples of portraiture…” (57).
This is not to say that Schiele wasn’t, however, somehow emblematic of his
times. In fact, Blackshaw points out that Viennese art critic Julius Meier‐Graefe
wrote about work displayed in the (pre‐Schiele) 1903 Secession exhibition that the
figurative works were “shockingly thin, weak of bone and precociously diseased”
(379). 16 This exhibition is fully seven years before Schiele’s break‐through.
Certainly cadaverously thin male figures had appeared in some of Klimt’s earlier
work dating back to the 1890s, including his University murals. In describing this
Schiele style, Blackshaw asks not if he invented the technique or if it was
paradigmatic of his inner feelings, but rather “how self‐consciously Schiele
fashioned himself as “The New Vienna” so described by the art critic” (379). She
believes that at least a part of his aesthetic decisions were due to market forces and
the historical record shows that his work sold, even if not for high prices.
Avedon recognized what Schiele was doing as performance, mugging in the
mirror for his easel and brush like he is seen to do in his photographs. Something in
Schiele’s work reminded Avedon of his own; he writes, “The ultimate expression of
this kind of performance – extreme stylized behavior – is of course fashion, where
16
Blackshaw cites the reference of this quote as “Entwicklung des Impressionismus in Malerei und
Plastik of 1903, Ausstellung der Vereinigung bildender Künstler Österreichs.”
16
everything – the entire body, hair, makeup, fabric – is all used to create a
performance” (57). Avedon relates his reaction to Schiele’s work to another painter
who famously used self‐portraiture – Rembrandt. There can be no doubt that
Rembrandt was performing in many of his self‐portraits – in them, he wears
costumes: a feathered hat and cape or a helmet, for example. He portrays himself as
the Apostle Paul, or wears Oriental garb with a Javanese kris, among other
depictions. Schiele’s self‐portraits can be read as a similar kind of performance –
however, with his strong interest in the grotesque and the taboo, and his propensity
to portray himself nude, the clarity of his purpose can easily become lost. Avedon
says, “… Schiele pushed it to extremes, shattered the form by turning the volume up
to a scream. … And so what we see in Schiele is a kind of recurring push and pull:
first toward pure “performance,” gesture and stylized behavior, pursued for its own
sake, studied for its own sake” (55).
Avedon’s perspective is fascinating because of the similarities between his
work and Schiele’s work, albeit in different mediums. Grundberg described
Avedon’s contribution to fashion photography:
Avedon revolutionized the 20th‐century art of fashion photography, imbuing
it with touches of both gritty realism and outrageous fantasy and instilling it
with a relentlessly experimental drive.
From the start, his portraits seemed intent on peeling away the bright
sheen of celebrity to reveal the ordinary, often insecure human being
underneath …. he soon learned to visualize his pictures in strictly graphic
terms…. His later adoption of a seamless white studio background for most of
17
his fashion and portrait photography …. (and) use of "white space," a means
of making the subject seem suspended and weightless on the page.
In the studio he could isolate his subjects not only graphically but also
psychologically, producing a convincing illusion of a direct confrontation
between the person in the picture and the viewer.
It is no wonder that Avedon reacted to Schiele’s work in such a profound and
personal way. In his photographs of the human figure, he had been on a similar
aesthetic journey.
Perceiving Schiele’s oeuvre this way, rather than as an alarming self‐hatred
or psychological pain, seems to have some logic, especially when one considers how
contemporaries described him and how he appears in photographs. Grunberg
quotes Avedon as having once defined “the portrait” as, "… a picture of someone
who knows he's being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as
much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks." It appears
that Schiele also understood this.
A recent Sotheby’s catalog entry for a Schiele self‐portrait drawing
eloquently states a common reaction to his self‐portraits:
There is no more revelatory or intimate a subject for an artist than a self‐
portrait. This was especially true for Egon Schiele, whose unmatched skill as
a draughtsman could expose the intimate details and peculiarities of the
body that would otherwise go unnoticed. Because he was not dependent
upon the cooperation of his models to translate his vision for these works,
Schiele's self‐portraits are often more revealing than even his most salacious
18
pictures of nude women. He was unrestricted in portraying his own
vulnerability, playfulness or absurdity, and this freedom of expression is
undeniably apparent in this remarkable gouache from 1914.
In many ways, Egon Schiele can be seen as the personification of modernism – but
particularly in his spectacular break with tradition in self‐portraits. There is an
unanswerable question that hangs over the study of Schiele’s work like a veil, and
that is – had he lived, how would his style developed and matured in later decades?
Faced with the vast numbers of his works, it’s hard to remember that his art was all
done in an eight‐year period.
Loughrey writes, “Schiele's obsessions, which society insisted were his own
…. are now revealed to be ours, and the weird artistry of the images has long since
been accepted as artistry” (569). Are Schiele’s self‐portraits the first nude selfies?
They certainly represent the beginning of a new way to portray the male nude that
didn’t have its roots in classic antiquity. This method of portraying men (both in
portraiture and self‐portraiture) has a non‐continuous lineage into the latter part of
the 20th century and beyond, and would make for interesting further study. For
example, Robert Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre from the 1970s contains numerous self‐
portraits taken with a Polaroid – many of them nude, sexually charged, and
deliberately provocative.17 Like Schiele, his own short career can also be traced in
his self‐portraits. Current male fashion photography similarly glamorizes thin and
dour looking young men contorted into various poses – often partially nude.
Further, the hacked publication of nude smartphone selfies by celebrities such as
17
Consider “Self‐Portrait with Bull Whip,” 1978 for example.
19
musician Pete Wentz and others (both men and women), have become
commonplace. A well known website, guyswithiphones.com, popularizes the nude
selfie by providing a place on the Internet where regular guys, athletes, actors, and
musicians all shoot selfies in their bathrooms and publish them.
Are these cultural phenomena each a sort of 21st century version of the
ontological exploration Schiele was on? Expressionism found it’s early 20th century
height in the portrait work of the German Expressionists of the Weimar Republic. A
second group of figurative expressionists blossomed in New York in the 1950s and
investigated nudity in portraiture – consider Alice Neel’s nude self‐portraits as well
as her numerous male nudes, or Larry Rivers’ life‐sized nude portrait of poet Frank
O’Hara. Avedon’s interesting response to seeing Schiele’s work in the 1980s
certainly bears more investigation within the specific context of the photographic
portrait as performance. I hope to look at some of these topics in future writing.
What is certain is that Schiele’s electrifying expressions of self, while ushering in
modernism to fin‐de‐siècle Vienna, continue to enrapture artists and art historians
fully a century later.
20
Appendix
Figure 1
Mirror Picture of Self
Egon Schiele
1905
Figure 2
Self‐portrait
Egon Schiele
1906
21
Figure 3
Self‐portrait
Egon Schiele
1906
Figure 4
Self‐portrait
Egon Schiele
1906
22
Figure 5
Self‐portrait Facing Right
Egon Schiele
1907
Figure 6
Self‐portrait with Hat
Egon Schiele
1907
23
Figure 7
Egon Schiele
Male Nude
No Date (n.d.)
Figure 8
Egon Schiele
Self‐portrait with Spread Fingers
1909
24
Figure 9
Egon Schiele
Nude Self‐portrait with Ornamental Drapery
1909
Figure 10
Egon Schiele
Self‐portrait Sitting with Raised Arms
1910
25
Figure 11
Egon Schiele
Nude Self‐portrait Grimacing
1910
Figure 12
Egon Schiele
Self‐portrait with Red Eye
1910
26
Figure 13
Egon Schiele
Self‐portrait Grimacing
1910
Figure 14
Egon Schiele
Self‐portrait
1910
27
Figure 15
Self‐portrait with Arm Twisted Above Head
Egon Schiele
1910
Figure 15
Egon Schiele
Self‐portrait
1910
28
Figure 16
Egon Schiele
Self‐portrait
1910
Figure 17
Egon Schiele
Self‐portrait Crouching
1913
29
Figure 18
Egon Schiele
Self‐portrait Squatting I
1916
Figure 19
Egon Schiele
Self‐portrait Squatting II
1917
30
Figure 20
Egon Schiele
1906
Figure 21
Photographs of Egon Schiele
(L‐R) 1908, 1909
31
Figure 22
Photograph of Egon Schiele
undated
Figure 23
Photograph of Egon Schiele
1914
32
Figure 24
Photograph of Egon Schiele
1914
Figure 25
Photograph of Egon Schiele
1914
33
Figure 26
Photograph of Egon Schiele
1914
Figure 27
Photograph of Egon Schiele with his painting Encounter (whereabouts unknown)
1914
34
Figure 28
Photograph of Egon Schiele
1915
Figure 29
Photograph of Egon Schiele
undated
35
Figure 30
Photograph of Egon Schiele
1916
Figure 31
Photograph of Egon Schiele
1916
36
Figure 32
Egon Schiele
1918
Figure 33
Max Oppenheimer
Egon Schiele
1910
37
Works Cited
Avedon, Richard. "Borrowed Dogs." Grand Street 7.1 (1987): 52‐64. Print.
Blackshaw, Gemma. "The Pathological Body: Modernist Strategising in Egon
Schiele's Self‐portraiture." Oxford Art Journal 30.3 (2007): 377‐401. Print.
Carl, Klaus H., and Victoria Charles. Art of Century: Viennese Secession. New York:
Parkstone International, 2012. Print.
Chan, Mary. "Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection Vienna." MoMA 26 (Autumn
1997): 2‐7. Print.
Comini, Alessandra, and Egon Schiele. Egon Schiele's Portraits. Berkeley, CA: U of
California, 1990. Print.
Deshmukh, Marion F. "Egon Schiele: Art, Sexuality and Vienna's Modernism by
Patrick Werkner." German Studies Review 18.3 (1995): 561‐62. Print.
Grundberg, Andy. "Richard Avedon, the Eye of Fashion, Dies at 81." The New York
Times 2 Oct. 2004. Web. 22 Oct. 2014.
Harris, Lyle Ashton, and William Stern. "Pardon Our Appearance: Masculinity under
Construction." Art Journal 56.2 (1997): 6‐17. Print.
Heller, Reinhold. "Recent Scholarship on Vienna's "Golden Age," Gustav Klimt, and
Egon Schiele." The Art Bulletin 59.1 (1977): 111‐18. Print.
Hood, William. "How Men Look: On the Masculine Ideal and the Body." Art Journal
56.2 (1997): 4‐5. Print.
Izenberg, Gerald N. "Egon Schiele: Expressionist Art and Masculine Crisis."
Psychoanalytic Inquiry 26.3 (2006): 462‐83. Print.
Kallir, Jane. Egon Schiele. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1994. Print.
38
Knafo, Danielle. “Egon Schiele and Frida Kahlo: The Self‐portrait as Mirror.” Journal
of the American Academy of Pyschoanalysis, 19.4 (1991): 630‐647. Print.
Loughery, John. "Sex Survey." The Hudson Review 51.3 (1998): 568‐74. Print.
Lynton, Norbert. “London Letter.” Art International 8.9 (1964): 45‐46. Print.
Natter, Tobias G. Nude Men: From 1800 to the Present Day. Hirmer Verlag GmbH,
2013. Print.
Naves, Mario. "The Schiele Moment." New Criterion 24.4 (2005): 33‐36. Print.
Nude Men: From 1800 to the Present Day. Leopold Museum, 19 Oct. 2002. Web. 23
Nov. 2014.
Schiele, Egon, and Agnes Arco. Egon Schiele: Self‐portraits and Portraits. Munich:
Prestel, 2011. Print.
Schiele, Egon, and Alessandra Comini. Nudes, Egon Schiele. New York: Rizzoli in
Association with Gagosian Gallery, 1994. Print.
Schiele, Egon, and Rene Price. Egon Schiele: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky
Collections. Munich: Prestel, 2005. Print.
Selsdon, Esther, and Egon Schiele. Egon Schiele. New York: Parkstone International,
2011. Print.
Simmons, Sherwin. "Ornament, Gender, and Interiority in Viennese Expressionism."
MODERNISM/modernity 8.2 (2001): 245‐76. Print.
"Property from the Christian M. Nebehay Collection: Egon Schiele." Impressionist
and Modern Art Evening Sale. Sotheby's, 7 Nov. 2007. Web. 23 Nov. 2014.
Vergo, Peter. Art in Vienna, 1898‐1918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele and Their
Contemporaries. London: Phaidon Limited, 1993. Print.
39
Werkner, Patrick, ed. Egon Schiele: Art, Sexuality, and Viennese Modernism. Palo Alto,
CA: Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 1994. Print.
40