In “Egon Schiele: Portraits,” a gripping exhibition at the Neue Galerie, there’s a room where you see Schiele become Schiele. On entering, you find to the left a set of portrait drawings from 1907 that he made during his three years (1906-9) at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, where, as a precocious teenager, he chafed under rigidly conservative instruction. In these dutiful charcoals of men and women, Schiele skillfully imitated the anodyne realism preferred by academies all over the Western Hemisphere.
In the same gallery, there’s a painting from 1909, a portrait of Schiele’s sister Gerti. Rendered partly in gold-bronze paint, now tarnished to dark brown, she reclines with closed eyes, surrounded by a field of silver in a decorative style obviously influenced by Gustav Klimt, a friend and mentor. (Schiele never lacked for powerful supporters.)
A year later, Schiele shed Klimt’s influence and suddenly burst forth as the feverish Expressionist who would become one of the most popular artists of the 20th century. “Portrait of the Painter Max Oppenheimer” (1910) is emblematic. Rendered in watercolor, ink and black crayon, the subject, a friend, stands sideways in a rumpled, skinny black suit, his figure from knees to the top of his head bisecting a 40-inch-high sheet of brown paper. He stares back over his shoulder, one eye squinted, the other open under a lifted brow. Oversize, bony hands, pea-green like his gaunt face, hang from his cuffs. He’s a demonic ghoul, a glamorous vampire, smoldering with dangerous inner fire.
With this and other pictures of fellow artists, and especially in self-portraits, Schiele (1890-1918) minted a modern archetype: the sexy antihero, the sort that parents pray their daughters will never date. His main spiritual ancestor is Rimbaud, and his descendants include Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Sid Vicious and Patti Smith.
It’s often said that this type rebels without cause, but, in Schiele’s case, that’s incorrect. You need only glance back at the portraits of 1907 to clarify what he was against and what he was for. In those vacuous academic exercises, he trained to express ideals of bourgeois propriety. He hated that program. What he sought instead wasn’t amoral or immoral but something more generously moral, a view of people that accepts them (himself included) as imperfect and animated by all sorts of desires, including those conventionally deemed perverse. (Not just incidentally, Sigmund Freud was working toward similar ends in Vienna around the same time.)
Organized by Alessandra Comini, a Schiele scholar, the exhibition consists mainly of works on paper. Of the approximately 125 items on view, only 11 are oil paintings, which is a good thing. Except for a lovely, large 1915 picture of his wife, Edith, in a vibrant striped dress, Schiele’s paintings are overworked, dark and turgid. His drawings are nimble and nuanced. Working on paper with pencil, charcoal, ink, gouache, watercolor and crayons, often using different mediums to achieve diverse effects within the same picture, Schiele was as responsive to his own impulses as he was to the human reality of his subjects. He portrayed all with infectious avidity: gray-bearded seniors; doctors and businessmen; women young, old and in between. There’s hardly a sheet in the exhibition that doesn’t warrant close looking for its virtuoso draftsmanship and psychological acuity.
His portraits of children are wonderfully lively and sympathetic. Because he couldn’t afford professional models, Schiele invited urchins from the neighborhood into his studio to pose. But judging from his drawings, it seems there was more to that approach than financial expediency. You sense that he identified with and was inspired by the incompletely socialized energies of children. Depicted from the ankles up on a nearly four-foot-tall page, the youngster in “Standing Boy in Striped Shirt” (1910) stands with spread legs, wearing knickers rendered with wide brush marks of muddy reds and greens. His shirt, by contrast, is carefully drawn, every pinstripe recorded in a wiggly black line. He holds his arms up around his neck, an oddly awkward gesture by which he seems to be trying to contain his own explosive impetuousness.
Schiele’s drive to free himself from Victorian moralism led to his most notorious works: the borderline-pornographic drawings and watercolors of young women in varying states of undress and erotic display. “The Red Host” shows Schiele with an enormous, ruddy erection and a naked woman between his legs facing forward and reaching up over her head to grasp his penis with one hand. Reading the title as a reference to the eucharist — the phallus resembles a loaf of bread — the image might be taken as blasphemous obscenity, but in Schiele’s inversion of conventional morality it might also be seen as an apotheosis of human sexuality.
A quasi-religious vibe animates Schiele’s self-portraiture, too. With his spiky hair and fashionable garb in a small, intense painting called “Self-Portrait With Peacock Waistcoat, Standing” (1911), he could pass for a dandified punk rocker. But note the glowing halo around his head and the long fingers of his right hand splayed across his abdomen: The index and middle finger are scissored open as if giving a benedictory sign. In his many drawings of himself nude, sometimes masturbating, he appears nearly as emaciated and bruised as Jesus does in early Renaissance depictions of the Passion, like Matthias Grünewald’s “Isenheim Altarpiece.”
In a sketch from 1914 called “Self-Portrait as St. Sebastian,” Schiele pictured himself executed by arrows, a martyr to the cause of creative and erotic freedom. There’s a real-life back story to that image. In 1912, a girl stayed overnight in Schiele’s studio, after which her outraged father accused him of kidnapping and rape. He was acquitted of those charges, but found guilty of immorality for exposing children to the erotic drawings he had lying around in his studio. He served 24 days in jail, an experience that traumatized and transformed him.
After that ordeal, he steered away from explicitly sexual imagery and toward more broadly humanist, allegorical compositions like “The Family (Squatting Couple)” (1918), a large, heavy-handed oil painting of a nude mother with a baby between her legs and herself nestled between the legs of the naked father (Schiele himself).
Edith was pregnant when Schiele painted his holy family. (He used a nonpregnant model for the mother.) It seems that with fatherhood impending, he was trying to emerge from his protracted adolescence. Sadly, Edith died that year before giving birth, a victim of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which carried away Schiele, too, three days later, just 28. What he would have done had there been more time to grow up we’ll never know. In his art he stays young forever.