“Could you reside in interesting instances,” goes the apocryphal however neverthemuch less much-invoked “Chinese curse.” Egon Schiele, born within the Austria-Hungary of 1890, certainly did dwell in interesting instances, and his work, as featured in the brand new Nice Artwork Defined video above, can seem like the creations of a cursed man. That’s especially true of these of his many self-portraits that, as host James Payne places it, render his personal physique “extra emaciated than it actually was, radically distorted and twisted, someinstances facemuch less or limbmuch less, someinstances in abject terror.” Right here Schiele labored at “an intersection of suffering and intercourse, as if he’s disgusted by his personal physique.”
Such a preoccupation, as Payne suggests, could not appear completely unreasonready in a person who witnessed his personal father’s dying from syphilis — caught from a professionalstitute, on the evening of his wedding to Schiele’s mother — when he was nonetheless in adolescence.
However what tends to occupy most discussions of Schiele’s artwork is much less his familial or psychological againfloor than his line: the “skinny line between beauty and suffering” that clearly obsessed him, sure, but additionally the road created by the hand with which he drew and painted. His artwork stays immediately recognizready at present as a result of “his line has a particular rhythm: angular, tense, and economically positioned. It’s not only a technique of describing type; it’s a voice.”
On this voice, Schiele composed not likenesses however “psychological portraits, a seek for the self or the ego, a preoccupation of the time.” The figure of Sigmund Freud loomed giant over fin-de-siècle Vienna, after all, and into the twentieth century, the town and its civilization had been “caught between the previous imperial order and modern democratic transferments.” A “laboratory for psychoanalysis, radical artwork, music, and taboo-breaking literature,” Vienna had additionally given rise to the profession of Schiele’s malestor Gustav Klimt. By the point Schiele hit his stride, he may categorical in his work “not simply personal discomfort, however the sickness and fragility of a complete society” — earlier than he fell victim to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 at simply 28 years previous, alongside along with his spouse and unborn little one. In a way, he was unfortunate to dwell when and the place he did. However as his artwork additionally reminds us, we don’t merely inhabit our time and place; we’re created by them.
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Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e-book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly often known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
