Egon Schiele – from teenage beginnings to complex relationships with women

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Two new books on the Viennese Expressionist Egon Schiele can be unreservedly recommended, says Alexander Adams

Regardless of media sensations around juvenile artist prodigies – routinely described as ‘being compared to Picasso/Matisse/Pollock’ (by journalists quoting gallery press releases) – there is no example of a child prodigy becoming an established artist as an adult. (Before parting with their money, enthusiasts should check newspaper archives to discover a parade of forgotten ‘sensations’.) Yet talented child performers of music do become legitimate virtuosi in later life and there does not seem to be firm hypothesis on why this does not happen for visual artists. Nevertheless, an artist’s juvenilia often provides insights into the psychology of a future notable figure even if it never contains masterpieces.   

At the heart of Egon Schiele: The Beginning is the reproduction of an entire sketchbook executed by Schiele in the summer of 1906, as he turned 16. It contains a melange of competent observational landscapes, clumsy figure sketches and modish graphics of motor cars and provides a microcosm of an adolescent artist searching for his identity in a welter of influences and urges. Likewise, a double-page spread of dozens of different signatures shows young Schiele testing potential logos.

There are plenty of arresting pictures in Schiele’s early output (as the writers note, there was no late period for this artist, who died at the age of 28 of Spanish influenza): a Symbolist red-hued mother and child, a poster-like design of a train travelling at night, a stark disjointed sunflower against a white ground. Yet even the most resolved and assertive painting – of ships at Trieste harbour in 1908 – is only indicative of influences, tastes and techniques that become significant in the light of later pieces. It is an attractive and impressive – but not great – painting and is actually atypical of Schiele’s overall accomplishments.

The book offers a useful insight into Schiele’s origins. Art illustrated includes academic exercises, landscape studies, family portraits, still-lifes, trains (Schiele’s father was a railway-station manager) and graphic design. Schiele’s Secession heroes were noted as designers of posters, book graphics, fabric patterns and so forth. There are very few pictures of Schiele’s most constant mature subject, the nude figure, as he did not have access to models until his later art-school years. The volume publishes valuable information about his schooling and friends, his father’s career and illness (syphilis) and his library (partly inherited from his father on his death in 1904). All texts are in original German with parallel translation.

Egon Schiele’s Women is replete with nudes and portraits, depicting the full breadth of Schiele’s insight into, and fascination with, women. Written by Jane Kallir, one of the world’s leading authorities on the artist, the survey examines Schiele’s relationships to his female subjects, starting with his mother and two sisters and continuing through the street urchins to his model-cum-lovers Valerie (Wally) Neuzil and sisters Edith and Adele Harms.

Schiele’s first significant model was his younger sister Gertrude, who first modelled for portraits, then later posed nude for her brother – a very irregular step for a bourgeois girl in a conservative society. The drawings of street children (who would model for trinkets or sweets) show subjects posing naturally and display empathy with these children of poor families, already tired and experienced beyond their years. Prostitution of working-class children was rampant in the period and one of the most obvious examples of double standards in Viennese society.  

When Schiele entered a relationship with a model, his first mistress Valerie (Wally) Neuzil, the early strongly sexual images gave way to more nuanced depictions, more tender and affectionate. The last phase, as Schiele felt the relationship breaking apart (by this stage he was already courting the Harms sisters), was characterized by the depiction of women as doll faced, with button eyes. They demonstrate the alienation between artists and model, Kallir considers. The nudes have lost none of their power to fascinate and disconcert, so vividly modern are they.

While marriage to Edith Harms satisfied the artist’s latent desire for bourgeois respectability, his wife was an unwilling nude model. Her sister Adele was much more open to modelling and it seems the relationship between the three of them (four including Wally, before she decided the break off relations) were strained by jealousy. Schiele had a habit of disguising his models’ faces and making them look fashionably slim, so it is hard to identify specific models in his drawings.

Kallir sets the art in the Austria of the period and blends technical, historical and biographical insight to provide a thoroughly satisfying study. The large size of the book (35 x 29cm) and the impressive colour illustrations make this book a pleasure to own. Both books can be unreservedly recommended.

Egon Schiele: The Beginning edited by Christian Bauer is published by Hirmer Verlag, 2013. 226pp, text English/German, 149 colour and 44 mono illus, €35.00 hardback. ISBN 978 3 777 42024 0

Egon Schiele’s Women by Jane Kallir is published by Prestel 2012. 303pp, illustrated in colour throughout, £50/$85 hardback. ISBN 978 3 7913 4648 9