Egon Schiele could be a late entrant of the 27 club. The artist, who died of the Spanish flu at 28, had a practiced confidence, signature hairstyle, and what looks to be a cultivated uniform (trousers, tie, and button-down shirt). All appear remarkably modern — and nearly trendy — in photographs throughout Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes at the Neue Galerie.
Like a 20th-century rockstar, the Viennese artist rose to fame with sexually charged and provocative imagery. Schiele is perhaps best known for his portraits of contorted nudes, sometimes tinged with an inhuman green, in which he features prominently, often alongside his lover and muse, Wally Neuzil.
However, the exhibition’s focus on landscape helps eliminate the distractions of biography and the sometimes ethically questionable explicitness of his nudes. Curator Christian Bauer, of the Egon Schiele Museum Tulln, considers how the artist saw the unstaged world around him: Central European towns are gloomy and Gothic, trees are skeletal, and sunflowers wilt. It is almost always fall or winter.
At 16, Schiele left his provincial hometown of Tulln, Austria, to become the youngest student at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He developed his signature artistic style under the tutelage of his friend and mentor Gustav Klimt. The early “Sunflower I, 1908” is a jaded foil to Vincent van Gogh’s vivid paintings. It foreshadows Schiele’s disquieting, severe style, which predated the German Expressionist movement that gained popularity after his death.
Still, Schiele was adamant about his preference for country life, writing in a characteristically narcissistic tone, “Everybody is envious of me and deceitful; former colleagues look at me with dissembling eyes, in Vienna there is only shadow, the city is black, everything is done by recipe.”
Despite his apparent disdain for city life, his countryscapes don’t leave this negative worldview behind. In “City on the Blue River I (Dead City I)” (1910), Schiele paints his mother’s Czech hometown of Krumau as a haunted relic, taking inspiration from Bruegel in his elevated vantage point from the medieval Krumau Castle. He gives Krumau the same dreary, Old World treatment in “Houses by the River II (The Old City II)” (1914), a blue-tinged cityscape with a frozen river in the foreground.
He swaps skeletal frames and world-weary eyes for spindly trunks and unnatural blue pistils in works like “Wilted Sunflowers (Autumn Sun II)” (1914) and “River Landscape with Two Trees” (1913). In “Sawmill” (1913), even a human-made structure is alone and decaying.
Schiele’s projection in his art of impending doom could have been a result of youthful angst, or of an apocalyptic dread anticipating the First World War, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed. It might also have been a symptom of personal strife. As a child, his father attempted suicide before succumbing to syphilis, leaving his family in financial ruin. The artist often depicted adolescent sexuality, as exemplified in portraits of his younger sister, Gerti. While living in the country with Wally Neuzil, Schiele was jailed for 24 days for the display of obscene imagery. His love affair with Neuzil was ill-fated. He wrote in a 1914 letter, “I’m planning to marry – most advantageously, perhaps not Wal[ly].” He ultimately married someone richer, Edith Harms, who was pregnant when she passed away of influenza a few days before the artist.
In one of Schiele’s last works before his death, “Town among Greenery (The Old City III)” (1917), he paints an abstracted version of Krumau. He sandwiches the town between nascent green leaves, and in a rare decision, paints townspeople onto the city streets. It’s an emergence from the artist’s eternal fall, a glimpse into the spring that he never got the chance to explore.
Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes continues at Neue Galerie (1048 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through January 13. The exhibition was organized by Neue Galerie and curated by Christian Bauer.
