Egon Schiele

 

I was going to say that 'to my shame'  had never heard of Egon Schiele before we went to Venna but then I decided to cut myself some slack because I'm not an art historian and really, there is no reason in the world why I should have heard of Schiele, who isn't particularly famous unless you happen to be Austrian, or an expert in the Secession movement.

But as I said in my blog post on the art we saw in Vienna I found Schiele's work - I don't know quite how to describe it. Overwhelming would be overstating the case, gobsmacked is to be too flippant, and I think the nearest I can get s compelling. I dd think, looking at the pictures of his that we saw, that he was probably a very disturbed man, and I wanted to find out more about him - not necessarily because he was disturbed, but because his pictures really resonated with me. 

The picture above is the book I got out of the library here on Schiele. It's less of a book, and more of an illustrated essay but hey? I wasn't even sure the library would have anything on Schiele at all, so I'm grateful for what I got, which was  basically a brief potted biography with lots of pictures. 

I had to smile. Having said at the beginning that, while Schiele is mainly known for his pictures of nudes but that his work in landscape and portraiture is just as important, about five sixths of the book is devoted to a detailed description and many photographs of Schiele's nudes, specially his self portraits, and the landscape section is basically one page of text and four pictures. I suspect  that the author really only wanted to discuss the nudes and felt obliged to throw in a bit about the landscapes and (non-nude) portraits. Which is a shame because the landscapes that he has included are lovely and there is an amazing use of colour  them. In fact  you might be hard put to believe they were all produced by the same artist. 

So the book wasn't very informative about Schiele the man (Wikipedia was much more forthcoming!) but it did a good job filling in the artistic background of Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century. I'd still like to know more, but as Schiele died at only 28 perhaps there isn't a lot more to be said. He was obviously deeply obsessed with sex and death which led to some truly bizarre pictures, but he was equally obviously a very talented painter who could describe the complex structure of the human body with  very few strokes of his brush. Who knows what he might have achieved had he lived longer? As t is, I just have to enjoy - if enjoy is the word - the work he did do.