VIENNA.- This spring, the Leopold Museum is dedicating a large-scale monographic exhibition to the central artist of the Leopold Collection, Egon Schiele (1890-1918). Changing Times. Egon Schiele's Last Years: 1914-1918 is the first presentation to shine the spotlight on the artist's late oeuvre. The eccentric exceptional artist only had around ten years of activity before he died at the age of 28 from the "Spanish Flu". Throughout this decade, Schiele created a comprehensive oeuvre, which is best known for his key paintings and the drawings he realized between 1910 and 1913, in which he addressed his own mental states as well as the self-questioning and inner conflicts of an entire generation. From 1914, right in the middle of his professional career, Schiele faced dramatic changes both of a private and historical nature, which he was forced to adapt to and which impacted on his oeuvre. His previous introspection gave way to a new focus on external realities and novel themes, altering his artistic style.
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Schiele's later oeuvre which, in contrast to his earlier works, is characterized by calmer, more fluent and organic strokes, more realistic figures with an increased physical presence, as well as greater empathy, is still not as well-known today. Based on more than 130 works from the collection of the Leopold Museum as well as international museums and private collections, and divided into nine themes, the exhibition weaves together biographical and artistic aspects. Exploring Schiele's stylistic and personal transformations during the dramatic war years, it affords new insights into the last period of his life, which came to an abrupt end with the artist's unexpected and untimely death in 1918. The diary of the artist's wife Edith Schiele (1893-1918) - kindly provided by the Kallir Research Institute - is exhibited in the presentation and published in its entirety in the accompanying catalogue for the very first time. In this diary, Edith recorded her experiences, thoughts and emotions between 1915 and 1918.
"With its Schiele collection, featuring 300 works, 48 of which are paintings, the Leopold Museum is home to the world's largest and most eminent compilation of masterpieces by this extraordinary protagonist of Austrian Expressionism. This is owed to the far-sighted feel for the quality and singularity of works of art and the obsessive passion for collecting that characterized the ophthalmologist Rudolf Leopold (1925-2010). He and his wife Elisabeth Leopold (1926-2024) shared their unending enthusiasm for the painter and draftsman, who at the beginning of their collecting activities - in the 1950s - had been all but forgotten. Today, Egon Schiele numbers amongst the most renowned artist personalities in the world." -- Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Directar of the Leapald Museum, Vienna
SCHIELE'S SEARCH FOR HIS SELF
To this day, Schiele's works exert an unbroken pull on beholders. The majority of his works created until 1914 reflect the artist's adolescent search for his own self in expressive staged poses, wild gestures and grimacing physiognomies. In numerous self-portraits and double self-portraits, Schiele played with various personalities, while his self-observations were closely linked to a sense of spiritual purpose: Schiele saw his artistry as his calling and assumed that, as a visionary, he was allowed special liberties.
LIFE-ALTERING HISTORICAL AND PRIVATE CHANGES
Austria-Hungary's declaration of war on Serbia on 28th July 1914 heralded a state of emergency lasting many years, which profoundly changed the prevailing socio-political order and brought far-reaching challenges upon people. Schiele was initially spared from active military duty, and was able to keep focusing on his art and on his new acquaintance with his neighbor Edith Harms.
In 1914, Schiele's favorite sister Gertrude, known as "Gerti", married his fellow artist and friend Anton Peschka, her pre-marital partner and father of their daughter Gertrude. A month after their wedding, the couple had another child, their son Anton jun., making Schiele a two-time uncle. Egon's relationship with his older sister Melanie was difficult, just as his connection to his mother Marie was at times fraught with tension. The exhibition Changing Times illustrates the extent to which Schiele's artistic explorations of the theme of family were shaped by his own relationships: While the mothers in his oeuvre often fail to connect with their children and appear more dead than alive, he rendered babies as symbols of vitality, creative renewal and spiritual salvation.
Edith and Egon were married in 1915, only a short time after the artist's painful separation from his previous partner Walburga "Wally" Neuzil. Immediately after the wedding, Schiele was drafted into the military in Prague, completed his basic military training in the Bohemian town of Neuhaus (now Jindrichũv Hradec), and subsequently had to carry out various military tasks. This infringement of his freedom and creative work weighed heavily on the young artist. The impressions of war and the changes brought about by married life caused the artist to dial down his adolescent soul-searching and radical formal experiments in favor of less egocentric and more universal allegorical paintings, more sensitive portraits and an overall more realistic style.
ALIENATION AND EMPATHY
The presentation Changing Times illustrates the effect the artist's increasingly humanistic worldview had on his oeuvre. Around 1915, he frequently explored couple motifs, addressing both the relationship between man and woman as well as that between women. Despite these couples' physical intimacy, they seem to lack an emotional connection, while their eyes, often rendered merely as dots, make them appear puppet-like and invest them with a sense of alienation: To Schiele, being part of a couple apparently meant having to scale back aspects of his self.
"Only a few days after their wedding, Schiele was called up for military duty with the Imperial-Royal Army, forcing him to leave his new wife behind in a Prague hotel. Edith had never felt so alone, and struggled to cope with the long separations from her husband. In her diary, which she called her 'book of consolation', and which is presented for the first time at the Leopold Museum, she recorded her feelings of unbearable loneliness. Her mood oscillated between hope and desperation. Edith's emotional needs forced Schiele to deal with interpersonal intimacy in a way that was entirely new to him. His art became more empathetic as he tried to capture his wife's changing moods, presenting her as an elegant, thoughtful, reserved or unforgiving individual. His portraits show a rather restrained personality with a meditative and melancholy expression." --Jane Kallir, curator of the exhibition, Kallir Research Institute, New York City
SENSITIVE PORTRAITS AND LANDSCAPES - SCHIELE'S LIFE IN THE ARMY
“Schiele’s new empathetic approach also impacted on other motifs. Carrying out various military duties, he grew a lot on an interpersonal level. In conversations with soldiers, his superiors and prisoners of war, he learnt about people’s different fates and hopes. His heightened sense of empathy is reflected in numerous portraits of soldiers and officers he created from 1915; today, we are aware of more than 40 such likenesses he executed until 1918. This newly discovered realism made Schiele’s portraits more attractive to commissioners, and over time, he was able to increase his renown by painting eminent personalities.” -- Kerstin Jesse, curator of the exhibition, Leopold Museum, Vienna
Wherever Schiele was stationed, he looked for ways of being able to continue his artistic work, and was supported in this endeavor by his superiors. In the prisoner-of-war camp in Mühling, situated 100 kilometers west of Vienna, where he was deployed in 1916, a depot room was placed at his disposal to use as a studio. It was there that he created the impres- sive 1916 painting Decaying Mill, in which he captured the mill in an almost documentary manner on canvas. His landscape drawings of those later years, too, are testament to his increasing naturalistic approach – much in contrast to his early, often stylized landscape motifs, which at times featured anthropomorphic elements.
LATE NUDES
When Schiele returned to his studio in 1917, and increasingly had access to models again, his style changed decisively. His lines became more organic, calmer and less erratic. The artist demonstrated his artistic prowess in well-considered poses and sophisticated foreshortening. He revisited individual poses several times, refining and optimizing them. While the bodies won plasticity, his female depictions at times lost some of their personality and charisma. His women became more or less generic types, giving us the impression that the aim of his later nudes was to serve the voyeuristic gaze rather than to explore sexuality.
SUCCESS AND LAST WORKS
In early 1917, Schiele was able to return to Vienna, and was determined to assume a lead- ing position in the art world. Plans for his ambitious project of an “art hall” – intended as an “intellectual rallying point” for artists against cultural fragmentation – fell through due to a lack of financial support, but other endeavors proved to be successful. A portfolio of prints he issued, featuring reproductions of his drawings, soon sold out, and the artist was asked to help with the realization of exhibitions, for instance for the Imperial-Royal Army Museum, and to participate in the organization of the 49th Exhibition of the Vienna Secession in March 1918. Schiele started to work on a cycle of allegorical depictions, meant to illustrate the major themes of earthly existence, death and resurrection, which he wanted to present in a mausoleum built especially for this purpose.
Schiele’s 1918 masterpiece, his Portrait of the Painter Albert Paris von Gütersloh, intimates what he wanted to achieve in his last works, many of which remained unfinished. The large-format portrait of his friend and fellow artist traveled to Vienna for this exhibition from the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minnesota.
Shortly before his 28th birthday, the artist had reached the preliminary zenith of his career, and forged plans for the revival of the Austrian art scene after the War. However, Edith, who was six months pregnant at the time, and Egon Schiele both died in October 1918, within a few days of one another, from the “Spanish Flu”. The story of their marriage, just like Schiele’s artistic career, thus ended abruptly and remained unfinished.
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