Multitudes
Of a bastard line.
- Joined
- Nov 27, 2005
- Messages
- 9,296
- Reaction score
- 2
As I have been looking through the art threads, I have noticed how many of you are mentioning Egon Schiele as an artist you admire, so I thoght it was time to give him his own thread that he so much deserves..
Biography:
"b. 1890, Tulln, Austria; d. 1918, Vienna
Egon Schiele was born June 12, 1890, in Tulln, Austria. After attending school in Krems and Klosterneuburg, he enrolled in the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna in 1906. Here he studied painting and drawing but was frustrated by the school’s conservatism. In 1907, he met Gustav Klimt, who encouraged him and influenced his work. Schiele left the Akademie in 1909 and founded the Neukunstgruppe with other dissatisfied students. Upon Klimt’s invitation, Schiele exhibited at the 1909 Vienna Kunstschau, where he encountered the work of Edvard Munch, Jan Toroop, Vincent van Gogh, and others. On the occasion of the first exhibition of the Neukunstgruppe in 1909 at the Piska Salon, Vienna, Schiele met the art critic and writer Arthur Roessler, who befriended him and wrote admiringly of his work. In 1910, he began a long friendship with the collector Heinrich Benesch. By this time, Schiele had developed a personal expressionist portrait and landscape style and was receiving a number of portrait commissions from the Viennese intelligentsia.
Seeking isolation, Schiele left Vienna in 1911 to live in several small villages; he concentrated increasingly on self-portraits and allegories of life, death, and sex and produced erotic watercolors. In 1912, he was arrested for “immortality” and “seduction”; during his 24-day imprisonment, he executed a number of poignant watercolors and drawings. Schiele participated in various group exhibitions, including those of the Neukunstgruppe in Prague in 1910 and Budapest in 1912; the Sonderbund, Cologne, in 1912; and several Secession shows in Munich, beginning in 1911. In 1913, the Galerie Hans Goltz, Munich, mounted Schiele’s first solo show. A solo exhibition of his work took place in Paris in 1914. The following year, Schiele married Edith Harms and was drafted into the Austrian army. He painted prolifically and continued to exhibit during his military service. His solo show at the Vienna Secession of 1918 brought him critical acclaim and financial success. He died several months later in Vienna, at age 28, on October 31, 1918, a victim of influenza, which had claimed his wife three days earlier."(www.guggenheimcollection.org)
It's no secret, that Egon Schiele are one of my favorite artist and in my opinion one of the best draughtsmen ever seen.
In Schieles brief lifetime, he generated a copious volume of work. Along with his more than two thousand drawings and watercolours - Which I always has seen as his best work - he produced more than three hundred oils. His rate of progression is mind-boggling and The ambition he showed, that proppeled his technical and stylistic development at such astonishing pace; indeed, one of the most remarkable apects of Schiele's short life is the ground that he covered in his career before his death in 1918, at the age of twenty-eight. Even from a purely technical standpoint, the flowering of Schiele's genius was as rapid as it was dramatic. In one of the biographies I have, it says that he was so obsessed with perfecting his line, that he use to sit with a pencil in one hand and a stopwatch in the other, timing him self while he was drawing, so he could obtain the perfect line in the shortest amount of time.. that maybe explains the amount of work he was able to do.
For me The reason why he is one of the most important artist we have to date is especially because he revolutionized the portrait and the use of colour(inventing new colours for the flesh which are fare from "nature"), form and the relation between the figure and the field...
The abandoment of simpel configuration is the general fact of modern painting, but what is interesting I think, is the way he breaks with figuration: it is not impressionism, not expressionism(eventhough he is seen as an expressionist painter which I don't agree on..), not symbolism, not cubism, not abstraction... never has anybody broken with figuration by elevating the figure and the field, their solitary wrestlingin a shallow depth, that rips the painting away from all narative but also from all symbolization. When narative or symbolic, figuration only obtains the bogus violence of the represented or the signified; it expresses nothing of the violence of sensation-in other words, of the act of painting. This is why Shiele(Unfortunately in his oilpaintings he couldnt escape the symbolic..) is my Favorite painters.
Another aspect of Schiele which is interesting, for better or worse(depending on their personal prejudices), viewers tend to see sex as Schiele's principal subject. While this view, I most say, is based on an exaggeration of the role played by the nude among the artist's varied subjects, Schiele's approach to sexuality was not only groundbreaking in his day, it is still shocking to some today. To be sure, The female nude was and is a well-established artistic motif, but its erotic aspect can be highly unsettling. Artists have traditionally tamed the nude by aestheticizing her. Languorously beautiful and compositionally fixed in her own remoted space, the classical nude can be safely enjoyed as an artistic, rather than a sexual object. Thus iis art distinguished from p*rn*gr*phy, the sole goal of which is titillation. Over the years, Schiele's harshest critics have branded him a pornographer. However, these critics miss the point. Schiele's nudes are anything but titillating. On the contrary, they are often frightning, fearful, or downright ugly. And that is just the beginning of the problem. For not only did Schiele fail to conventionally aestheticize his nudes, he also granted his audience honest access to a much broader range of sexual emotions than is permitted by classical convention. Perhaps most disturbing, particular to male observers, is the fact that Schiele refused to fix his nudes in a clearly defined space. He adopted the practice of drawing models from above, perched o a high stool or ladder. By eliminating all traces of a three-dimensional background setting in the resultant compositions, and signing drawings of recumbent figures as vertical, he created a profound sense of spatial dislocation. Both the content and the form of Schiele's nudes brought the artist's sexual anxiety and confusion too close for the comfort of some one. Another aspect of Schiel's nudes, which also could arouse the critic of objetification and brand him as a pornographer, is Schieles desubjectification and the lacking of personality in his nudes(especially the ones from 1910). But again, in my opinion, this aspect is what makes his nude fare from that. The desubjectification in Schiel's nudes is what takes them away from conventions and cliches, and create possibilities for new kind of subjectivity to be produced, which produces statements escaping from dominant discourses.
Another aspect of Schiele I find very interesting, is this illusion, that pleasure depicted exists in isolation from the artist who depicts it, which is one Egon Schiele abolishes through his forced emphasis on the model-viewer relationship. To use klimt as a contrasting example, he doesn't 'offend' you at all. He is pleasing to the eyes, with no complications or any disruption. But what he does offers you, is an very uncomplicated eroticism. His soft, caressing line emphasizes the "femininity" and passivity of his women who lie, more often than not, luxurating on rich and delicate materials, their faces transfixed by sensual delight. The spectator is both voyeur and potential participant. There is free access for the gaze, without any disturbance. It is no doubt pimarily the psycological expression of self-forgetfullness that promotes the emotional detachment of Klimt's subject from the artist's and thus from the viewer. Their eyes are mostly closed, they look at no one, they seem to exist by them selves alone and for their own pleasure.
Where Klimt's models hardly ever catch the voyeur at all, Schiele's women give us an unblinking stare. The viewer of Schiele's nudes is not really a voyeur at all; the situation staged by Schiele, that of modelling in his studio, has nothing secret. Of course, both Klimt as well as Schiele or any artist for that matter who works with live models, have the model's body at their entire disposal. But in Klimt's drawings he conceals him selfs behind his own pictorial idea, and behind the fantasy of secretly eavesdropping on an erotic act; In Schiele, the artist is always there. Not only the portraits but the nudes, even the back view, react with and offer themselves to the viewer. Also Klimt's nudes are always placed in recognisable surroundings, which makes it even more accesable and pleasing to the eye. That is why I have always, prefered Schiele because you can ask your self what is more 'offensive'... presenting the pleasuring female always available and uninterupted to your disposal or a female that stares back at you, striped away from any pleasuring cliches?
I have outlined here, some of the reason why I find Schiele so interesting and why I admire him. It would be very interesting to hear what it is in his art that draws you in, what it is that makes him so interesting and also what you might find offensive in his art...
www.netmint.com
www.finesite.webart.ru
www.wooop.de
www.archive.com
Biography:
"b. 1890, Tulln, Austria; d. 1918, Vienna
Egon Schiele was born June 12, 1890, in Tulln, Austria. After attending school in Krems and Klosterneuburg, he enrolled in the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna in 1906. Here he studied painting and drawing but was frustrated by the school’s conservatism. In 1907, he met Gustav Klimt, who encouraged him and influenced his work. Schiele left the Akademie in 1909 and founded the Neukunstgruppe with other dissatisfied students. Upon Klimt’s invitation, Schiele exhibited at the 1909 Vienna Kunstschau, where he encountered the work of Edvard Munch, Jan Toroop, Vincent van Gogh, and others. On the occasion of the first exhibition of the Neukunstgruppe in 1909 at the Piska Salon, Vienna, Schiele met the art critic and writer Arthur Roessler, who befriended him and wrote admiringly of his work. In 1910, he began a long friendship with the collector Heinrich Benesch. By this time, Schiele had developed a personal expressionist portrait and landscape style and was receiving a number of portrait commissions from the Viennese intelligentsia.
Seeking isolation, Schiele left Vienna in 1911 to live in several small villages; he concentrated increasingly on self-portraits and allegories of life, death, and sex and produced erotic watercolors. In 1912, he was arrested for “immortality” and “seduction”; during his 24-day imprisonment, he executed a number of poignant watercolors and drawings. Schiele participated in various group exhibitions, including those of the Neukunstgruppe in Prague in 1910 and Budapest in 1912; the Sonderbund, Cologne, in 1912; and several Secession shows in Munich, beginning in 1911. In 1913, the Galerie Hans Goltz, Munich, mounted Schiele’s first solo show. A solo exhibition of his work took place in Paris in 1914. The following year, Schiele married Edith Harms and was drafted into the Austrian army. He painted prolifically and continued to exhibit during his military service. His solo show at the Vienna Secession of 1918 brought him critical acclaim and financial success. He died several months later in Vienna, at age 28, on October 31, 1918, a victim of influenza, which had claimed his wife three days earlier."(www.guggenheimcollection.org)
It's no secret, that Egon Schiele are one of my favorite artist and in my opinion one of the best draughtsmen ever seen.
In Schieles brief lifetime, he generated a copious volume of work. Along with his more than two thousand drawings and watercolours - Which I always has seen as his best work - he produced more than three hundred oils. His rate of progression is mind-boggling and The ambition he showed, that proppeled his technical and stylistic development at such astonishing pace; indeed, one of the most remarkable apects of Schiele's short life is the ground that he covered in his career before his death in 1918, at the age of twenty-eight. Even from a purely technical standpoint, the flowering of Schiele's genius was as rapid as it was dramatic. In one of the biographies I have, it says that he was so obsessed with perfecting his line, that he use to sit with a pencil in one hand and a stopwatch in the other, timing him self while he was drawing, so he could obtain the perfect line in the shortest amount of time.. that maybe explains the amount of work he was able to do.
For me The reason why he is one of the most important artist we have to date is especially because he revolutionized the portrait and the use of colour(inventing new colours for the flesh which are fare from "nature"), form and the relation between the figure and the field...
The abandoment of simpel configuration is the general fact of modern painting, but what is interesting I think, is the way he breaks with figuration: it is not impressionism, not expressionism(eventhough he is seen as an expressionist painter which I don't agree on..), not symbolism, not cubism, not abstraction... never has anybody broken with figuration by elevating the figure and the field, their solitary wrestlingin a shallow depth, that rips the painting away from all narative but also from all symbolization. When narative or symbolic, figuration only obtains the bogus violence of the represented or the signified; it expresses nothing of the violence of sensation-in other words, of the act of painting. This is why Shiele(Unfortunately in his oilpaintings he couldnt escape the symbolic..) is my Favorite painters.
Another aspect of Schiele which is interesting, for better or worse(depending on their personal prejudices), viewers tend to see sex as Schiele's principal subject. While this view, I most say, is based on an exaggeration of the role played by the nude among the artist's varied subjects, Schiele's approach to sexuality was not only groundbreaking in his day, it is still shocking to some today. To be sure, The female nude was and is a well-established artistic motif, but its erotic aspect can be highly unsettling. Artists have traditionally tamed the nude by aestheticizing her. Languorously beautiful and compositionally fixed in her own remoted space, the classical nude can be safely enjoyed as an artistic, rather than a sexual object. Thus iis art distinguished from p*rn*gr*phy, the sole goal of which is titillation. Over the years, Schiele's harshest critics have branded him a pornographer. However, these critics miss the point. Schiele's nudes are anything but titillating. On the contrary, they are often frightning, fearful, or downright ugly. And that is just the beginning of the problem. For not only did Schiele fail to conventionally aestheticize his nudes, he also granted his audience honest access to a much broader range of sexual emotions than is permitted by classical convention. Perhaps most disturbing, particular to male observers, is the fact that Schiele refused to fix his nudes in a clearly defined space. He adopted the practice of drawing models from above, perched o a high stool or ladder. By eliminating all traces of a three-dimensional background setting in the resultant compositions, and signing drawings of recumbent figures as vertical, he created a profound sense of spatial dislocation. Both the content and the form of Schiele's nudes brought the artist's sexual anxiety and confusion too close for the comfort of some one. Another aspect of Schiel's nudes, which also could arouse the critic of objetification and brand him as a pornographer, is Schieles desubjectification and the lacking of personality in his nudes(especially the ones from 1910). But again, in my opinion, this aspect is what makes his nude fare from that. The desubjectification in Schiel's nudes is what takes them away from conventions and cliches, and create possibilities for new kind of subjectivity to be produced, which produces statements escaping from dominant discourses.
Another aspect of Schiele I find very interesting, is this illusion, that pleasure depicted exists in isolation from the artist who depicts it, which is one Egon Schiele abolishes through his forced emphasis on the model-viewer relationship. To use klimt as a contrasting example, he doesn't 'offend' you at all. He is pleasing to the eyes, with no complications or any disruption. But what he does offers you, is an very uncomplicated eroticism. His soft, caressing line emphasizes the "femininity" and passivity of his women who lie, more often than not, luxurating on rich and delicate materials, their faces transfixed by sensual delight. The spectator is both voyeur and potential participant. There is free access for the gaze, without any disturbance. It is no doubt pimarily the psycological expression of self-forgetfullness that promotes the emotional detachment of Klimt's subject from the artist's and thus from the viewer. Their eyes are mostly closed, they look at no one, they seem to exist by them selves alone and for their own pleasure.
Where Klimt's models hardly ever catch the voyeur at all, Schiele's women give us an unblinking stare. The viewer of Schiele's nudes is not really a voyeur at all; the situation staged by Schiele, that of modelling in his studio, has nothing secret. Of course, both Klimt as well as Schiele or any artist for that matter who works with live models, have the model's body at their entire disposal. But in Klimt's drawings he conceals him selfs behind his own pictorial idea, and behind the fantasy of secretly eavesdropping on an erotic act; In Schiele, the artist is always there. Not only the portraits but the nudes, even the back view, react with and offer themselves to the viewer. Also Klimt's nudes are always placed in recognisable surroundings, which makes it even more accesable and pleasing to the eye. That is why I have always, prefered Schiele because you can ask your self what is more 'offensive'... presenting the pleasuring female always available and uninterupted to your disposal or a female that stares back at you, striped away from any pleasuring cliches?
I have outlined here, some of the reason why I find Schiele so interesting and why I admire him. It would be very interesting to hear what it is in his art that draws you in, what it is that makes him so interesting and also what you might find offensive in his art...
www.netmint.com
www.finesite.webart.ru
www.wooop.de
www.archive.com
Last edited by a moderator:
but it was really quite sadistical, wasnt he a pronounced pervert or am i imagining things??
....
but like klimt is more sensual and schiele more sexual and deeply emotional..i wish like i had know this before i went to the exhibition last year, but wohayz i was only 15...
... 
... you better come back
