Customer Reviews

Schiele (Basic Art)

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As a quick study of/introduction to Egon Schiele, this book is great. Timeline, bio, an examination of influences and early works are included, but the highlights are Schiele's mature paintings. His self-portraits make him look like a concentration camp internee. Beautiful, scary stuff.

In Shiele's hands is a confident line and an uncensored, cooly critical appraising eye. His self portraits, angular, emaciated, naked place the viewer in the position of voyeur and Schiele the exhibitionist. His rendering of hands are boney, expressive, at times grasping with their black outlines across the body.

His female nudes are unforgiving, distorted, fleshy, grotesque and, at times, with a dismemberment that is confronting. His painting, The Embrace, so resembles the work of the much later, Lucien Freud that I would not be surprised if Schiele was one of Freud's artistic influences.

This book includes Schiele's early works, the influence of Klimt on his work, his later abstractions and landscapes. The text provides a fascinating insight into this complex artist.

This book by Reinhard Steiner gives a very intellectual treatment to the art of Egon Schiele. From pages 9 to 11, Nietzsche is quoted as a guide to the self, and for the first quote, Steiner must be translating from the German himself, for the footnote is not to an English version of Nietzsche's work. Could this be familiar?

It is a theatre of the self which is in dangerous proximity to Friedrich Nietzsche's aphoristic description (in 1888) of the modern artist: "The modern artist, physiologically close kin to the hysteric, bears the signs of hysteria in his very character too . . . The absurd excitability of his constitution, which makes a crisis of every experience and drags drama into the merest chances of life, renders him utterly unpredictable: he is no longer one person, but at most a gathering of persons, and now this one, now that will be conspicuous amongst them, with unabashed confidence. . . ." (pp. 9-10).

Almost everything in the book is reproduced in color, but the paintings might not please everyone. Consider them stark.

I failed to take art seriously for many years because I did not realize that any artist would dare to resemble me as much as Egon Schiele. We lived in different worlds, so it is not at all surprising to me that he died young in 1918. I have lived much longer, and times have changed. It is surprising to me how many people now envy the success that Egon Schiele had in 1918. He organized the 49th Vienna Secession Exhibition and designed the poster. Self-Portrait as St. Sebastian is shown on page 93. After being acclaimed the leader of the Vienna art community, he died.