a translation of Sappho's Phainetai moi
To me he seems equal to the gods, that one
who sits face to face with you, that man who sits
so near to you as you speak sweetly, he who
listens, submitting
to your arousing laughter, which excites my
heart to flutter, truly quiver, in my breast;
whenever I look at you, even if brief-
ly, speech eludes me
but silent I choke on my broken tongue, then
directly a slight fire runs beneath my skin,
with my blinded eyes I see nothing, and roar-
ing then fills my ears,
then a cold sweat overtakes me, then an all-
over trembling seizes me, I am paler
green than prairie, having died a little death
I appear, revealed
Saturday, June 17, 2006
Egon Schiele: The Modern Artist-Hero
I wrote this a few years ago. As some of you know, Schiele is my favorite painter, and it was exciting for me to write a formal paper on him. I was too lazy to deal with the formatting involved in getting all the citations in here, but they're in the original, which I'm glad to send you if you're interested....
Modernist painting demanded things of the artist that had theretofore been outside the realm of acceptable artistic endeavors. Unlike previous centuries, in which paintings depicted classical subjects in such a way that the artist himself remained unobtrusive, the late nineteenth Century and early twentieth Century saw the evolution of the artist’s visibility and presence in painting. Although paintings could and were often expected to refer to previous achievements in the history of art, they were also judged on the basis of their originality. An early example of this is Manet’s “Olympia,” in which the artist refers to Titian’s classic nude “Venus,” while at the same time blatantly showing that his nude subject is a prostitute, a daring choice that may very well have piqued Manet’s audience in 1863 but would have been scandalous, even impossible, had it appeared much earlier.
It was not enough for a work of art to be merely original. Modernism viewed art as heroic, and art was made for art’s sake. The artist therefore became the hero who made the creation possible, who glorified art itself. In order to accomplish this, the painter had to emphasize the fact that his creation was exactly that: a creation; a representation and not the represented object itself. Thus, painters stayed true to the materials they used; the flatness of the canvas and the texture of the paint were emphasized, sometimes even exaggerated, rather than hidden. Lastly, in both subject and style, modernist painting was not to be bourgeois. In other words, it was not to be conventional, conservative, or materialistic.
Among the many painters who were successful in their artistic endeavors within these parameters of modernism, Egon Schiele was perhaps one of the most extreme in his adherence to the task of the artist-hero. Indeed, Schiele’s presence is felt so strongly in his work, that it is tempting to call him a narcissist. Whether one can truly label him as such is uncertain, and the answer hinges largely on one’s interpretation of Ovid and on the extent to which self-love can be applied to Schiele’s often disturbing depictions of himself in his work. What is clear, however, is that Schiele’s nude portraits, both of himself and other models, show an intimacy between artist and model, between subject and audience, and even between artist and audience that is intense, often uncomfortable, and that takes his audience down a treacherous tightrope between an appreciation of strangely beautiful, emotionally-charged art and a recoiling at lewd, offensive pornography.
Schiele’s self-portraiture provides a good starting point for exploring these aspects of his work. In his 1916 watercolor, “Nude Self-Portrait, Squatting,” the viewer is presented with a version of Schiele’s body which is ectomorphic, bony, and slightly deformed. Indeed, although Schiele was greatly influenced by Gustav Klimt, his friend and teacher, he abandoned many of the decorative, flat qualities of Jugendstil in favor of the intensely personal expression of emotion of Austrian Expressionism. In so doing, Schiele’s figures took on different qualities. Their physical characteristics were no longer a product of visual reality, but of Schiele’s own feelings translated into images. It is said of Expressionism that there is a change in content as well as in subject matter. The subjects are more contemporary; the content expresses the city-dweller’s restlessness, superficially as a reflection of the brilliance and agitation of the city, more profoundly as anxiety which may become deep psychic distress. The sources of this attitude lie far back in the nineteenth century, in the realization of the appalling emptiness of a world in which God, as Nietzsche had declared, was dead; in less clandestine but no less tormented sexuality; and in the pressures of mass society in which the individual discovers and maintains his integrity only with difficulty. The artistic response to these spiritual events is the often frantic search for self-expression as a means to self-knowledge.
This may explain why Schiele’s self-portraits lacked elements of traditionally accepted beauty or why his painting no longer included Jugendstil decorative elements. Instead, in a painting such as this 1916 watercolor (which is a later work, but which shares many qualities with his early self-portraiture), his body is contorted into an awkward squat, his limbs appear both too long and unshapely, his skin has a sickly pallor, and despite the body’s thinness, the skin folds softly, as if the muscles were too small and weak to hold his skeleton in any normal pose. He is not placed in a real physical space, but rather an empty space, merely the artist’s canvas. Something dark at the bottom of the painting suggests that he has just removed his trousers, which still cover his feet and ankles. With one too-long thigh splayed to the side, his genitalia are unobstructed and drawn in better proportion and more detail than much of the rest of his body. This image, enhanced by a furrowed brow, suggests pain, sickliness, weakness and deformity, but his intense, wide-eyed gaze straight into the eyes of the viewer creates a more haunting impression, one that is very intimate and slightly uncomfortable. It is as if he has undressed specifically for the viewer, just now, and is awaiting something, perhaps some sexual act.
This disturbing quality of his work is telling of his departure from both Jugendstil and the Vienna Secession (a movement within Expressionism that sought to bring art from abroad to Austria ), both of which were “still regulated by such [fin de siècle] values as reason, order, progress, and perseverance, and disciplined by conformity to the norms of good taste.” Schiele adhered to the stylistic elements of Expressionism, such as the black outlining of images common to printmaking and painting of that time, but although Expressionism was moving away from merely beautiful representations of modern life toward the expression of the artist’s reaction to modern life, Schiele was taking this movement further, pushing the boundaries of good taste.
In examining the question of why Schiele’s nudes, particularly his self-portraits, are so explicit, so close to obscenity, Schröder asks, “What and whom does Egon Schiele really see in his studio mirror?” and answers by saying,
Not just his own body, certainly . . . The sickly decrepitude of Schiele’s early nude self-portraits reflects the social destitution of his life. His own economic misfortune is offset by the imaginative imagery of submission to – and longing for – suffering.
Some of the suffering Schiele experienced was undoubtedly psychological, even sexual. After all, Freud was in vogue in Schiele’s time, making it very likely that any investigation into the self through art – which is largely what occupied the Expressionists – would include sexual-psychological exploration. Thus, it seems as though the grotesque imagery of sickliness, deformity, and sexuality displayed in Schiele’s self-portrait is a reflection of how the artist saw himself, not in a purely physical sense, but in an emotional and spiritual sense.
Even if one can “explain away” the disturbing manner in which Schiele has portrayed himself in this work, one is still left with an uncomfortable queasiness at the haunting look Schiele seems to direct at the audience, at the intimacy that is rather unwillingly shared by subject, artist, and audience. Perhaps this is Schiele’s attempt at pointing to the communication gap between artist and audience. Many artists were troubled by this gap, and many seemed to find it impossible to overcome. Indeed, the German Expressionist writer Franz Kafka wrote about this problem frequently, notably in his short stories “A Country Doctor” and “A Hunger Artist.” Perhaps through Schiele’s illusion of proximity to his audience and through his engaging gaze he hoped to show the futility of trying to reach an audience; after all, his paintings, despite possible attempts to reach the viewer, were often received with indignation.
If Schiele’s contemporaries were offended by his art, they were probably also captivated by it, as many of his paintings offered the viewer great voyeuristic pleasure, especially when the subject of the painting involved lesbian love.
Any contemporary of Schiele’s was firmly trapped in a perceptual framework in which masturbation was defined as pathological, and in which the sight of forbidden homosexual love was held to be sexually arousing. That contemporary was likely to waver between the solitary gratification of voyeurism and the constantly endangered reassurance of regarding the erotic motif as legitimized by the institution of Art.
According to Schröder, Schiele’s viewer could not have been purely repulsed by what he saw, but was rather prompted to feel conflicted over his own enjoyment on the one hand, and his sense of propriety on the other. The viewer was probably more nervous about the question of whether Schiele’s painting was erotic art or pornography than the artist himself was (if Schiele was at all).
Another watercolor, Schiele’s 1911 “Nude Girls Reclining,” probably rendered this kind of response. Two girls with long black hair are reclining against a blanket or bed of pinks and purples. They are painted in a less realistic manner than was the 1916 self-portrait. Indeed, they may have originally been sketched in a manner following what Albert Elsen calls “continuous drawing,” a technique Rodin used to free up his sketches which later influenced Schiele a great deal. Like the self-portrait, however, the figures occupy no “real” space; they are merely in the space the artist has created for them. The girl closest to the viewer is fully reclined, seemingly thrusting her chest out proudly, her arm tucked under her body, her eyes focused on the viewer. The girl behind her is sitting up slightly, her head turned away to look somewhere else.
The sexuality of this painting is obvious; there is an implied sexual relationship between these two nude girls. What is less obvious is the relationship between models and artist, models and viewer. Is the girl looking at Schiele? at the viewer? Is she beckoning, or merely observing? There is an ambiguity to her intentions, though not to the calm, unselfconsciousness with which she lies nude on richly colored fabric. In fact, as a viewer, one becomes so intrigued with her facial and bodily expression, that one becomes interested in her, the person, in more than the mere sexual object. And yet this special interest one gains aids in heightening the sexual excitement at seeing this image. This play between the artistically intriguing and sexually exciting is where Schiele walks the line between erotic art and banal pornography. As Matthew Kiernan argues in his article “Pornographic Art,” pornography can have artistic value, so long as the work not only arouses the viewer, but also successfully renders an artistic intention. Pornographic though this may have seemed to Schiele’s contemporaries, this painting explores a number of artistic ideas successfully. The three-dimensionality of the girls contrasts with the two-dimensionality of the background. Their arms and legs are largely invisible, cut off by the framing of the painting as a whole, or covered by the more important torso. The black outlining of the figures refers back to both van Gogh and Klimt, two important influences on Schiele’s art.
Again, however, one of the most intriguing aspects of this painting, one that places it unmistakably as modernist, is the artist’s implied presence. Unlike classical nudes, which are painted in classical poses in perfect proportion and often gaze off indifferently into space, these nudes are painted in poses which show their imperfections, their humanity, their sexuality. They are not in perfect proportion; they are even missing limbs. And rather than indifference, these nudes show self-awareness and an awareness of the artist capturing their image. The artist is present, the hero making art for art’s sake, recording the expression of his (or the models’) emotions with his paintbrush.
Nowhere is Schiele’s presence as the artist felt more than in his 1910 sketch “Schiele, Drawing a Nude Model before a Mirror.” In this image, one sees the back of a woman, nude except for stockings and a hat, posing suggestively. In front of her, in the background of the image, her front is shown as a reflection, and behind that reflection, Schiele’s own reflection is shown, sitting with his drawing pad, looking at his model. Here, the viewer is given an intimate look into the artist’s studio, to the relationship between model and artist, and to the relationship the model seems to have with her own reflection. Here the viewer sees the expressiveness of the woman’s back and front, a demonstration that this expressiveness can be captured without resorting to classical nude poses. The physical proximity between artist and model trespasses “the zone of discrete distance between artist and model so valued by academicians.” Both these aspects of this image showed Schiele’s audience that the body could be seen in new ways and they also “sabotaged classical notions of figural beauty.” This reminds one of Degas and his use of prostitutes as models, but takes the proximity one step further by using no illusions to hide the artist’s presence in observing the models’ actions; in fact, Schiele makes every attempt to ensure that his audience knows of his presence in every scene he paints.
Schiele put his own stamp on each of his images. In his paintings and drawings, one sees not only the image, a model, and the model’s expression or feelings, but also Schiele’s own response to these elements. He used his art to express his own reactions to the modern world, to his own psyche and sexuality. His works did not always earn him positive responses, but it seems as though his artistic endeavors were more exploratory, intended more for himself than for his audience, and perhaps in this sense he was narcissistic. And yet it seems as though he lacked the self-love, the entrancement by his own beauty that Ovid’s Narcissus had. Instead he was consumed by his own inadequacies, impotencies, and social destitution, circumstances which led him to portray his response to them as physical afflictions. Self-absorbed he was. And yet it seems he became interested in the emotional lives of his models as well, trying to portray them as emotional beings while simultaneously as sexual objects, a contradiction which may have plagued Schiele in his own life and relationships, indeed, a conflict that arises in many romantic interactions. He then placed these expressive images on his own artistic space, the canvas, and hoped his audience might be able to receive them.
Bibliography
• Elsen, Albert. “Drawing and a New Sexual Intimacy: Rodin and Schiele.” In Egon Schiele: Art, Sexuality, and Viennese Modernism, edited by Patrick Werner, 5-30. Palo Alto: The Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 1994.
• Hamilton, George Heard. Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1880-1940. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967.
• Kafka, Franz. “Ein Hungerkünstler” (1922) in Ein Landarzt und andere Prosa, edited by Michael Müller, 100-121. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1995.
• Kafka, Franz. “Ein Landarzt” (1922) in Ein Landarzt und andere Prosa, edited by Michael Müller, 10-15. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1995.
• Kallir, Jane. Austria’s Expressionism. New York: Galerie St. Etienne/Rizzoli, 1981.
• Kallir, Jane. Egon Schiele. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994.
• Kiernan, Matthew. “Pornographic Art.” Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001): 31-45.
• Schröder, Klaus Albrecht. Egon Schiele: Eros and Passion. New York: Prestel, 1995.
• Wagner, Manfred. “Egon Schiele as Representative of an Alternative Aestheticism,” in Egon Schiele: Art, Sexuality, and Viennese Modernism, edited by Patrick Werkner, 79-88. Palo Alto: The Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 1994.
Modernist painting demanded things of the artist that had theretofore been outside the realm of acceptable artistic endeavors. Unlike previous centuries, in which paintings depicted classical subjects in such a way that the artist himself remained unobtrusive, the late nineteenth Century and early twentieth Century saw the evolution of the artist’s visibility and presence in painting. Although paintings could and were often expected to refer to previous achievements in the history of art, they were also judged on the basis of their originality. An early example of this is Manet’s “Olympia,” in which the artist refers to Titian’s classic nude “Venus,” while at the same time blatantly showing that his nude subject is a prostitute, a daring choice that may very well have piqued Manet’s audience in 1863 but would have been scandalous, even impossible, had it appeared much earlier.
It was not enough for a work of art to be merely original. Modernism viewed art as heroic, and art was made for art’s sake. The artist therefore became the hero who made the creation possible, who glorified art itself. In order to accomplish this, the painter had to emphasize the fact that his creation was exactly that: a creation; a representation and not the represented object itself. Thus, painters stayed true to the materials they used; the flatness of the canvas and the texture of the paint were emphasized, sometimes even exaggerated, rather than hidden. Lastly, in both subject and style, modernist painting was not to be bourgeois. In other words, it was not to be conventional, conservative, or materialistic.
Among the many painters who were successful in their artistic endeavors within these parameters of modernism, Egon Schiele was perhaps one of the most extreme in his adherence to the task of the artist-hero. Indeed, Schiele’s presence is felt so strongly in his work, that it is tempting to call him a narcissist. Whether one can truly label him as such is uncertain, and the answer hinges largely on one’s interpretation of Ovid and on the extent to which self-love can be applied to Schiele’s often disturbing depictions of himself in his work. What is clear, however, is that Schiele’s nude portraits, both of himself and other models, show an intimacy between artist and model, between subject and audience, and even between artist and audience that is intense, often uncomfortable, and that takes his audience down a treacherous tightrope between an appreciation of strangely beautiful, emotionally-charged art and a recoiling at lewd, offensive pornography.
Schiele’s self-portraiture provides a good starting point for exploring these aspects of his work. In his 1916 watercolor, “Nude Self-Portrait, Squatting,” the viewer is presented with a version of Schiele’s body which is ectomorphic, bony, and slightly deformed. Indeed, although Schiele was greatly influenced by Gustav Klimt, his friend and teacher, he abandoned many of the decorative, flat qualities of Jugendstil in favor of the intensely personal expression of emotion of Austrian Expressionism. In so doing, Schiele’s figures took on different qualities. Their physical characteristics were no longer a product of visual reality, but of Schiele’s own feelings translated into images. It is said of Expressionism that there is a change in content as well as in subject matter. The subjects are more contemporary; the content expresses the city-dweller’s restlessness, superficially as a reflection of the brilliance and agitation of the city, more profoundly as anxiety which may become deep psychic distress. The sources of this attitude lie far back in the nineteenth century, in the realization of the appalling emptiness of a world in which God, as Nietzsche had declared, was dead; in less clandestine but no less tormented sexuality; and in the pressures of mass society in which the individual discovers and maintains his integrity only with difficulty. The artistic response to these spiritual events is the often frantic search for self-expression as a means to self-knowledge.
This may explain why Schiele’s self-portraits lacked elements of traditionally accepted beauty or why his painting no longer included Jugendstil decorative elements. Instead, in a painting such as this 1916 watercolor (which is a later work, but which shares many qualities with his early self-portraiture), his body is contorted into an awkward squat, his limbs appear both too long and unshapely, his skin has a sickly pallor, and despite the body’s thinness, the skin folds softly, as if the muscles were too small and weak to hold his skeleton in any normal pose. He is not placed in a real physical space, but rather an empty space, merely the artist’s canvas. Something dark at the bottom of the painting suggests that he has just removed his trousers, which still cover his feet and ankles. With one too-long thigh splayed to the side, his genitalia are unobstructed and drawn in better proportion and more detail than much of the rest of his body. This image, enhanced by a furrowed brow, suggests pain, sickliness, weakness and deformity, but his intense, wide-eyed gaze straight into the eyes of the viewer creates a more haunting impression, one that is very intimate and slightly uncomfortable. It is as if he has undressed specifically for the viewer, just now, and is awaiting something, perhaps some sexual act.
This disturbing quality of his work is telling of his departure from both Jugendstil and the Vienna Secession (a movement within Expressionism that sought to bring art from abroad to Austria ), both of which were “still regulated by such [fin de siècle] values as reason, order, progress, and perseverance, and disciplined by conformity to the norms of good taste.” Schiele adhered to the stylistic elements of Expressionism, such as the black outlining of images common to printmaking and painting of that time, but although Expressionism was moving away from merely beautiful representations of modern life toward the expression of the artist’s reaction to modern life, Schiele was taking this movement further, pushing the boundaries of good taste.
In examining the question of why Schiele’s nudes, particularly his self-portraits, are so explicit, so close to obscenity, Schröder asks, “What and whom does Egon Schiele really see in his studio mirror?” and answers by saying,
Not just his own body, certainly . . . The sickly decrepitude of Schiele’s early nude self-portraits reflects the social destitution of his life. His own economic misfortune is offset by the imaginative imagery of submission to – and longing for – suffering.
Some of the suffering Schiele experienced was undoubtedly psychological, even sexual. After all, Freud was in vogue in Schiele’s time, making it very likely that any investigation into the self through art – which is largely what occupied the Expressionists – would include sexual-psychological exploration. Thus, it seems as though the grotesque imagery of sickliness, deformity, and sexuality displayed in Schiele’s self-portrait is a reflection of how the artist saw himself, not in a purely physical sense, but in an emotional and spiritual sense.
Even if one can “explain away” the disturbing manner in which Schiele has portrayed himself in this work, one is still left with an uncomfortable queasiness at the haunting look Schiele seems to direct at the audience, at the intimacy that is rather unwillingly shared by subject, artist, and audience. Perhaps this is Schiele’s attempt at pointing to the communication gap between artist and audience. Many artists were troubled by this gap, and many seemed to find it impossible to overcome. Indeed, the German Expressionist writer Franz Kafka wrote about this problem frequently, notably in his short stories “A Country Doctor” and “A Hunger Artist.” Perhaps through Schiele’s illusion of proximity to his audience and through his engaging gaze he hoped to show the futility of trying to reach an audience; after all, his paintings, despite possible attempts to reach the viewer, were often received with indignation.
If Schiele’s contemporaries were offended by his art, they were probably also captivated by it, as many of his paintings offered the viewer great voyeuristic pleasure, especially when the subject of the painting involved lesbian love.
Any contemporary of Schiele’s was firmly trapped in a perceptual framework in which masturbation was defined as pathological, and in which the sight of forbidden homosexual love was held to be sexually arousing. That contemporary was likely to waver between the solitary gratification of voyeurism and the constantly endangered reassurance of regarding the erotic motif as legitimized by the institution of Art.
According to Schröder, Schiele’s viewer could not have been purely repulsed by what he saw, but was rather prompted to feel conflicted over his own enjoyment on the one hand, and his sense of propriety on the other. The viewer was probably more nervous about the question of whether Schiele’s painting was erotic art or pornography than the artist himself was (if Schiele was at all).
Another watercolor, Schiele’s 1911 “Nude Girls Reclining,” probably rendered this kind of response. Two girls with long black hair are reclining against a blanket or bed of pinks and purples. They are painted in a less realistic manner than was the 1916 self-portrait. Indeed, they may have originally been sketched in a manner following what Albert Elsen calls “continuous drawing,” a technique Rodin used to free up his sketches which later influenced Schiele a great deal. Like the self-portrait, however, the figures occupy no “real” space; they are merely in the space the artist has created for them. The girl closest to the viewer is fully reclined, seemingly thrusting her chest out proudly, her arm tucked under her body, her eyes focused on the viewer. The girl behind her is sitting up slightly, her head turned away to look somewhere else.
The sexuality of this painting is obvious; there is an implied sexual relationship between these two nude girls. What is less obvious is the relationship between models and artist, models and viewer. Is the girl looking at Schiele? at the viewer? Is she beckoning, or merely observing? There is an ambiguity to her intentions, though not to the calm, unselfconsciousness with which she lies nude on richly colored fabric. In fact, as a viewer, one becomes so intrigued with her facial and bodily expression, that one becomes interested in her, the person, in more than the mere sexual object. And yet this special interest one gains aids in heightening the sexual excitement at seeing this image. This play between the artistically intriguing and sexually exciting is where Schiele walks the line between erotic art and banal pornography. As Matthew Kiernan argues in his article “Pornographic Art,” pornography can have artistic value, so long as the work not only arouses the viewer, but also successfully renders an artistic intention. Pornographic though this may have seemed to Schiele’s contemporaries, this painting explores a number of artistic ideas successfully. The three-dimensionality of the girls contrasts with the two-dimensionality of the background. Their arms and legs are largely invisible, cut off by the framing of the painting as a whole, or covered by the more important torso. The black outlining of the figures refers back to both van Gogh and Klimt, two important influences on Schiele’s art.
Again, however, one of the most intriguing aspects of this painting, one that places it unmistakably as modernist, is the artist’s implied presence. Unlike classical nudes, which are painted in classical poses in perfect proportion and often gaze off indifferently into space, these nudes are painted in poses which show their imperfections, their humanity, their sexuality. They are not in perfect proportion; they are even missing limbs. And rather than indifference, these nudes show self-awareness and an awareness of the artist capturing their image. The artist is present, the hero making art for art’s sake, recording the expression of his (or the models’) emotions with his paintbrush.
Nowhere is Schiele’s presence as the artist felt more than in his 1910 sketch “Schiele, Drawing a Nude Model before a Mirror.” In this image, one sees the back of a woman, nude except for stockings and a hat, posing suggestively. In front of her, in the background of the image, her front is shown as a reflection, and behind that reflection, Schiele’s own reflection is shown, sitting with his drawing pad, looking at his model. Here, the viewer is given an intimate look into the artist’s studio, to the relationship between model and artist, and to the relationship the model seems to have with her own reflection. Here the viewer sees the expressiveness of the woman’s back and front, a demonstration that this expressiveness can be captured without resorting to classical nude poses. The physical proximity between artist and model trespasses “the zone of discrete distance between artist and model so valued by academicians.” Both these aspects of this image showed Schiele’s audience that the body could be seen in new ways and they also “sabotaged classical notions of figural beauty.” This reminds one of Degas and his use of prostitutes as models, but takes the proximity one step further by using no illusions to hide the artist’s presence in observing the models’ actions; in fact, Schiele makes every attempt to ensure that his audience knows of his presence in every scene he paints.
Schiele put his own stamp on each of his images. In his paintings and drawings, one sees not only the image, a model, and the model’s expression or feelings, but also Schiele’s own response to these elements. He used his art to express his own reactions to the modern world, to his own psyche and sexuality. His works did not always earn him positive responses, but it seems as though his artistic endeavors were more exploratory, intended more for himself than for his audience, and perhaps in this sense he was narcissistic. And yet it seems as though he lacked the self-love, the entrancement by his own beauty that Ovid’s Narcissus had. Instead he was consumed by his own inadequacies, impotencies, and social destitution, circumstances which led him to portray his response to them as physical afflictions. Self-absorbed he was. And yet it seems he became interested in the emotional lives of his models as well, trying to portray them as emotional beings while simultaneously as sexual objects, a contradiction which may have plagued Schiele in his own life and relationships, indeed, a conflict that arises in many romantic interactions. He then placed these expressive images on his own artistic space, the canvas, and hoped his audience might be able to receive them.
Bibliography
• Elsen, Albert. “Drawing and a New Sexual Intimacy: Rodin and Schiele.” In Egon Schiele: Art, Sexuality, and Viennese Modernism, edited by Patrick Werner, 5-30. Palo Alto: The Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 1994.
• Hamilton, George Heard. Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1880-1940. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967.
• Kafka, Franz. “Ein Hungerkünstler” (1922) in Ein Landarzt und andere Prosa, edited by Michael Müller, 100-121. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1995.
• Kafka, Franz. “Ein Landarzt” (1922) in Ein Landarzt und andere Prosa, edited by Michael Müller, 10-15. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1995.
• Kallir, Jane. Austria’s Expressionism. New York: Galerie St. Etienne/Rizzoli, 1981.
• Kallir, Jane. Egon Schiele. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994.
• Kiernan, Matthew. “Pornographic Art.” Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001): 31-45.
• Schröder, Klaus Albrecht. Egon Schiele: Eros and Passion. New York: Prestel, 1995.
• Wagner, Manfred. “Egon Schiele as Representative of an Alternative Aestheticism,” in Egon Schiele: Art, Sexuality, and Viennese Modernism, edited by Patrick Werkner, 79-88. Palo Alto: The Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 1994.
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