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Egon Schiele is the man who loved vaginas. He quite liked stockings, too, as the Courtauld Gallery reveals in its sensational exhibition of his erotic art. But while his delight in stereotypical garb – how many colours of stockings did they manufacture in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, anyway? – may make him seem like just another male voyeur, his delight in the vagina sets him apart as an artist who not only lusts after but genuinely adores women. No one can call him phallocentric.
Many great modern artists in his age lived in terror of women. Picasso’s explosive painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is full of fear and loathing. The spectre of female sexuality is a jagged, castrating threat in this and other modernist images. The surrealists can also be branded misogynists for their obsessive yet objectifying images of dream lovers. Vaginas in their art often have teeth.
In this show, Schiele, by contrast, is a feminist who puts women at the centre of art. He is a lover, not a hater. In his 1913 nude portrait Woman with Black Stockings, his model reclines, but not in the sidelong position chosen by male artists to depict women, seen in everything from Titian’s Venus of Urbino to Manet’s Olympia. Instead, she lies back with her legs – those stockings contrasting with bright red garters – towards Schiele, showing him her gloriously pink vagina.
In Schiele’s art, sex is beautiful, the body poetic. After all, he studied art in Sigmund Freud’s Vienna. Schiele was born in Austria in 1890. In 1905, when the teenage Schiele was studying art in the imperial capital, Freud published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. And it wasn’t only Freud who celebrated sex in early 20th-century Vienna. Gustav Mahler was composing music that regularly collapses in exhausted post-coital luxuriance, while Gustav Klimt, Schiele’s mentor, painted his golden rhapodies of desire.
Schiele, however, is different. Perhaps he saw these sensualist elders as slightly evasive liberals, all silk and no skin, for he is savagely direct. In his early drawings of the body, shown here, he ruthlessly exhibits the human form as a piece of flesh. Extreme angles, brutal croppings, twisted fingers and limbs, in his self-portraits as well as images of others, concentrate our eyes on the terrifying drama of physical existence. This art is atheist. Nothing is true for the artist except our own corporeal life. In one picture, he shows a newborn, naked and vulnerable. There is a desperation here.
Sex, for an artist who found life a threatening wasteland populated by fragile, fleshy beings, was a refuge and utopia. He left Vienna in search of a private, hedonistic life in the provinces, only to be imprisoned for his erotic art. Schiele got even filthier after that punishment. Freud said curiosity was the origin of the sex drive. Schiele’s led him to portray women in love in Two Girls Embracing (Friends) in 1915, a masterpiece lent by the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, which boldly bought the work soon after it was created. (A fake appeared as a prop in Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel.)
There’s a delight in Schiele’s erotic art that goes against every cliche of what modernism in the early 20th century is supposed to have been like. Schiele’s Standing Nude With Stockings (1914) is a defiant modern masterpiece. But is it disturbing, despairing, or any of the bleak things modernist art is supposed to be? No, it is joyous and erotic.
No wonder these brilliant works were forgotten for so long, for Egon Schiele has largely been misunderstood. His paintings in public collections (even where they exist – there are none in British museums) tend to be his most tragic, expressionist works. Only recently have the seductive delights of his pornographic watercolours received recognition. And no British public institution has put on a proper show of them before.
That makes Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude one of the most important exhibitions of the year. The curator has, perhaps inevitably, stressed the spiritual anguish of Schiele’s tortuous bodies; the exhibition starts with the dark side that makes his art “serious”. But it relaxes to appreciate his nudes in all their pornographic freedom. This is a top-class exhibition of the sexiest art of the modern age. Egon Schiele died of influenza in 1918, aged 28, but his desire will live forever.
• Until 18 January. Venue: Courtauld Gallery, London.
• Sex and stockings: Egon Schiele’s nudes – in pictures
