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. 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