The explosion of modern art and scientific thought in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century holds an enduring fascination. And perhaps no painter better captures the sense of liberation and latent crisis of that era — the era of Freud and Mahler — than Egon Schiele.
While his self-portraits may be the first works that come to mind, more than half of Schiele’s output on paper are depictions of women.
Drawings and paintings by Schiele have been subject to bitter legal disputes following theft and confiscation from Jewish owners during World War II. But that has not affected interest from collectors and museums, which remains robust, if not on the upswing, as Viennese modernists find an audience in Asia.
Earlier this year, the National Museum of Korea in Seoul presented “Vienna 1900, The Dreaming Artists — From Gustav Klimt to Egon Schiele.” The show, in collaboration with the Leopold Museum in Vienna, drew some 80,000 visitors during its first month. Back at home in Vienna, from March 28 to July 13, the Leopold will present “Changing Times. Egon Schiele’s Last Years: 1914-1918.”
And at this year’s edition of TEFAF Maastricht in the Netherlands, the Vienna gallery Wienerroither & Kohlbacher will include in its booth a drawing of Schiele’s muse and girlfriend, Wally Neuzil, and a watercolor of the artist’s youngest sister, Gertrude. Jane Kallir, the art historian and founder of the Kallir Research Institute, will co-curate the upcoming show at the Leopold with Kerstin Jesse, one of the museum’s senior curators. In a video interview from New York, Kallir said that although the artist “doesn’t fit into any predetermined movement, every generation seems to discover him anew and project onto him their emergent concerns as they enter adulthood.”
The fascination of young viewers with Schiele is not a coincidence, as his best-known work was created at an early age. “People often forget that he wasn’t yet 20 in the beginning of 1910 when he began doing these really radical red nudes,” she said.
His work emerged in the wake of Freud’s theories about sexuality and revolutionary movements not just in visual art but also design and music. Born in 1890 in the state of Lower Austria, Schiele was admitted to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts at age 16. In 1918, having established himself as a leading artist, he died of the Spanish flu.
His penchant for depicting adolescent figures led to friction with the Austrian establishment. In 1912, Schiele was held in prison for almost a month on accusations of having abducted and sexually assaulted the teenage daughter of a retired naval officer who spent the night at his house outside Vienna. While those charges were dropped at trial, he was ultimately sentenced briefly for an offense against public morality for exposing young visitors in his studio to his sexually explicit drawings.
For Kallir, the artist faced a “double standard” in a society that “on the one hand pretends sex doesn’t exist and on the other has a teeming underworld of prostitution.” By 1914, although Schiele has since been faulted for becoming more bourgeois and conventional, Kallir said that the artist had learned “the rules” that Klimt had more closely respected and was compensated financially “in the manner to which he was always entitled.”
“Suddenly, like Klimt, he has a studio full of models and is dashing off these sheets very quickly,” she said, adding that “there are drawings which are absolutely breathtaking in their perfection.”
The 1912 drawing of a standing, seminude Wally Neuzil that will be on sale in Maastricht most likely emerged after the artist’s imprisonment.
“There is a definite stylistic change in Schiele’s approach between the first months of that year and the second part,” Kallir said. “He becomes more aggressive; he’s using a softer pencil; and the lines become much firmer and stronger.”
Lui Wienerroither, who together with his business partner Ebi Kohlbacher, has made their gallery a foremost destination for acquiring works by Schiele, Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, said that the drawing of Wally “reveals a human being as she is, also in her seductive qualities.”
Wienerroither said he saw a connection between the position of her head and her direct gaze in the drawing to the famous oil painting “Portrait of Wally Neuzil” that hangs in the Leopold Museum and was the subject of a protracted legal battle. The painting’s original owner, the art dealer Lea Bondi Jaray, had corresponded extensively with Otto Kallir, Jane Kallir’s grandfather, who introduced the Viennese modernists to New Yorkers.
Otto Kallir’s first show of Schiele at the Gallery St. Etienne in 1941 sold not a single work. He wasn’t able to sell a Schiele painting until a decade later, when the Minneapolis Institute of Art bought a portrait of Albert Paris von Gütersloh it still owns today.
Last year, Wienerroither & Kohlbacher collaborated with Jane Kallir on a tribute to her grandfather with a show that traveled from Vienna to their partner gallery in New York, Shepherd W&K Galleries. Otto Kallir’s original gallery in Vienna, now the “Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder,” was simultaneously the site of an exhibit that explored the space’s history from 1923 to 1954.
Schiele’s work was declared degenerate by the Nazis, who singled out Expressionist art, and did not reassume his place in Europe until after the war. Rudolf Leopold played a central role, gathering Schiele works for a 1955 show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and eventually consolidating his collection at the Leopold.
For Mr. Wienerroither, Schiele’s “confrontation with the self” paved the way for contemporary Austrian artists such as Arnulf Rainer and Elke Silvia Krystufek, (both of whom he represents). As the world becomes “increasingly conservative and restrictive,” he said, “Schiele has as much to say today as he did back then.”
