Egon Schiele in London

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Alexander Adams looks at work always ahead of its time

Egon Schiele (1890–1918) was essentially a graphic artist, who produced thousands of watercolours and drawings (both uncoloured and with touches of gouache or watercolour) and relatively few oil paintings. None of the oil paintings are in British museums and most of the works on paper are in Schiele’s native Austria and continental Europe.

An exhibition of Schiele’s art in Britain is an event. The recent display at London dealer Richard Nagy’s gallery (22 Old Bond Street, London, closed 30 June) was another demonstration that some top-level commercial galleries (such as Helly Nahmad and Philip Mould) can mount exhibitions of established masters at a museum level. The Nagy (a specialist in Expressionist art) rarely mounts exhibitions, so displays are events in themselves.

Work on paper can only be exhibited for short periods to restrict the degenerative effects of ultraviolet light on paper and pigments. This makes exhibitions of Schiele a rarity. The show at Richard Nagy was a collection of black-chalk and pencil drawings (some with watercolour) from throughout Schiele’s short career and was of the highest quality. The 44 pictures were drawn from private collections around the world with only a handful for sale (prices ranging from £300,000 to £3,000,000). The show was complemented by a handsome hardback catalogue.

Schiele’s genius lay in line – shading is relatively sparse and infrequent – sometimes effectively employing patterns. For example, Girl with Umbrella (1916) (in catalogue not display) uses the scalloped hems and striped sleeves to offset the plainness of the dress and lack of detail on the face. The artist’s characteristic nervous, sinuous outline is distinctive and influential. The examples selected also show his dramatic use of cropping – a distinctly modern approach. Standing Nude in Red Jacket (1913) is a female nude cropped beyond neck and calves, torso framed by a crimson-fringed shirt, the same colour used in washes to highlight parts of the body.

Schiele’s colour is very restrained but powerful. He used only a few colours in each drawing and applied them very sparingly in a way that is both evocative and decorative. The punchy scarlet, orange, viridian, black and ultramarine – applied in a seemingly casual way, unmodulated and unmixed – offset the starkness of the figure’s lines.

The show was balanced in its mixture of nudes, portraits and self-portraits, with only the landscapes unrepresented. The strong sexual element was neither overplayed nor downplayed. The drawings of pubescent girls create a frisson. These were works that led to Schiele’s brief imprisonment in 1912 on charges of displaying pornography to a minor – more a way for the establishment to display its disapproval of Schiele’s art than any attempt to protect children. The judge burnt some of Schiele’s drawings to make his point. Child prostitution was an endemic problem in the Habsburg Empire at the time but Schiele’s provocation proved too blatant and too easy a target for the judiciary to overlook. Austro-Hungarian society was riven with hypocrisy and inconsistency, though one gets the impression that Schiele’s martyr complex drove the artist to goad authority figures. Schiele himself was barely more than an adolescent at the time (as some of his more narcissistic self-portraits demonstrate).

The works raise again a number of questions that are still unanswered by the evidence here. To what degree have the sheets discoloured over time? Were drawings such as Standing Nude in Red Jacket designed this way or cropped later to accommodate Schiele’s jealous wife? How accurate are these depictions? Were any of these drawings coloured after the artist’s death in order to raise the value of the sheets?

Schiele appeals to today’s audiences as no other Expressionist does. He is tortured, ultra-sensitive, relentlessly probing, self-examining – a mentality for our times. His combinations of expressive pose, simple loose clothing and partial nudity are templates of contemporary fashion photography. His figures are elegantly slim (something of an exaggeration, if we compare photographs of his wife to Schiele’s depictions) – eminently to our tastes. Yet there is no reason to dismiss Schiele because he is popular. His art is not populist and indeed his subjects and style caused him problems in his lifetime. The world and society have finally caught up with his engagement with the marginal, complex and sexual – he was not an artist who courted popularity and followed fashion. The fact that Schiele had a unique style and was one of the world’s greatest draughtsmen makes his art even more essential and remarkable, something this memorable display underlined.