OT: Can Genitals Be Beautiful, part two
Martha Sprowles
By John Updike, NYRevBks, 12/4/97
The scathing morbidity of [Egon Schiele's] early work owes something, of
course, to the ferment of Austrian modernism and the glittering
permutation of Art Nouveau called Secessionism, epitomized by Klimt's
bejeweled, two-dimensional tableaux. In Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, a
generation younger than Klimt, Secessionism became Expressionism,
distinguished by violent color and a wiry, bony linearity. But the
scabrous violence of Schiele's precocious drawings had personal sources
as well; these are described in the fall issue of _Museums New York_:
The central, traumatizing fact of Egon Schiele's life was
his father's syphilis, madness and death. The untreated
illness pinballed hellishly throughout the family, infecting
(and demoralizing) his mother and killing four of his siblings.
Egon, already a brooding adolescent, was psychologically
seared by the association of sex, insanity and death--and
it shows in his brilliant, disturbing art.
The catalog biography for the MoMA exhibition, by Romana Schuler,
disputes some of this melodramatic summary; for syphilis she substitutes
"some kind of progressive paralysis" and says he was not "actually
insane, as some scholars would have us believe." But he did die when
his son Egon was fourteen, and Dabrowski in the catalog assumes that
venereal disease was the cause, so that Egon "lived in terror of the
possibility of his own insanity and death related to his sexuality." She
also asserts that the young artist had "a rather complicated
relationship with his mother, by whom since the early years he felt
victimized and neglected." His oil painting "Dead Mother" (1910) is
vivid enough to support a notion that his mother was dead for him; even
in the fine portrait profile of Marie Schiele done when Egon was a
seventeen-year-old art student, she radiates little warmth.
But psychoanalysis takes us only so far into an artistic accomplishment;
suffice it to say that the first works in which Schiele unmistakably
strikes his own note show naked males, usually himself, as fearfully
thin and isolated. In the "Kneeling Male Nude" of 1910, a ruddy stick
figure is striking an incongruously jivey attitude. In the "Seated Male
Nude" of the same year, the drawing is more polished, even academic in
its stylized anatomy; the yellowish boy, so distinctly muscled as to
look flayed shows five red spots--two nipples, one eye, a navel, and the
genitals--lit as if by a fire within. Emaciation, and a flesh coloring
as if of decaying meat, become more pronounced in gouaches later in that
same year; "Nude Self-Portrait in Gray with Open Mouth" and "Nude
Self-Portrait" could be studies from a Buchenwald where the victims'
arms have been lopped off. Concave hairy bellies and tufted armpits
have a weedy vitality that succumbs, in oils like "Poet" (1911) and
"Self-Seer II" (1911; also titled "Death and the Man"), to a tilted
patchwork of monstrously elongated heads and hands, the fingers
spatulate and stiff, like dead men's.
A kind of assault on the painter's own image is in progress; in
"Grimacing Self-Portrait" (1910--shown in article) he has knocked out
most of his teeth. Gazing even upon relatively undistorted
self-portraits like the two showing him in a shirt, and upon the
caricatural pair of the nude, dandified mime Erwin Osen, we uneasily
feel ourselves in the presence of an ongoing process, a matter not
merely of self-examination but of self-flagellation, in cells devoid of
any hint of furniture or perspective. A gouache not in the show but
reproduced in the catalog, "Self-Portrait in Black Cloak, Masturbating"
(1911), makes explicit a quality latent throughout his studies of males:
a joyless, quizzical onanism [sic!], a morose fondling of a problem.
The male to Schiele is the self, a realm in essence immaterial. The
female is the other, whose material opacity awakens a sense of bulk, of
linear grace. Most of us, I suspect, would not really like to live with
his lurid male nudes on the wall--their blotchy skins, hectic stares,
and dangling genitals. His female nudes, however, are among the great
drawings of the century, and even those with the vulval cleft
foregrounded have the guileless animation that occurs when
self-absorption lifts and observation begins. True, "Reclining Nude
Girl" and "Three Nude Girls," both from 1910, have the jittery line and
pained elongation of the male figures of the time, but the "Sick Girl,
Seated" and the two sketches of pregnant women permitting examination (a
friend and collector, Dr. Erwin von Graff, let Schiele draw women and
infants at his gynecological clinic) show real presences, whether in the
yellow-tinted, hot-eyed face of the first, the dramatic red sprawl of
the second, or the intent appraising gaze of the third, who sizes up the
viewer while exposing to view a densely curly pudenda and a distended,
pale green abdomen.