A tale of abject tragedy
Schiele’s death has been retrospectively construed as a kind of quasi-suicide, a mythical embrace of death that has helped make him one of the world’s most enduring artists.
A “rare cityscape” painted in 1914 sold for £24.7?million at auction in 2011; his collectors and devotees have included David Bowie and Madonna; and there’s a continual international round of Schiele exhibitions, with shows in Britain most recently at the National Gallery in 2013 and the Courtauld in 2014.
The complete paintings
This month, Taschen presents a monumental volume of every image he ever painted, Egon Schiele: The Complete Paintings 1909-1918.
As a tale of abject tragedy, Schiele’s life can hardly be topped. He spent the most calamitous of all wars undramatically guarding Russian prisoners, then died shortly before the Armistice in the Spanish flu pandemic, which killed more people than the war itself, just three days after his heavily pregnant wife Edith.
His art, however, isn’t quite the essay in unmediated feeling it might first appear. His aesthetic is “located”, as the book’s editor Tobias G Natter observes in his introduction, “between expression, performative staging and a search for physical identity”.
Soul to canvas
Of these, the “expression”, naturally, we take for granted: the idea that Schiele, like his idol Vincent van Gogh, is getting the untrammelled contents of his soul on to canvas, with no thought for the human cost. That word “performative”, however, may give us pause for thought, until we start to notice how much Schiele – unlike Van Gogh – is watching himself, watching us, watching him.
Indeed, when you scratch beneath the surface, the Schiele of the art, with his staring eyes and shock of dark hair, seems ever further from the person we encounter in real life.
