Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude, Courtauld Gallery - exhibition review

This small but incisive exhibition focuses on about 40 drawings and watercolours by the Austrian bohemian
Disarmingly sexual: Squatting Female Nude, 1910 (left) and Two Girls Embracing (Friends), 1915 (right) by Egon Schiele
Courtauld Gallery
Ben Luke23 October 2014

A great deal was crammed into Egon Schiele’s short life. Born in Tulln outside Vienna, he went to the Austrian capital aged 16 in 1906, sought out Gustav Klimt, the leading avant-garde artist of the time, who became his mentor, and was soon making some of the most original depictions of the human body of his, or indeed any, era.

His explicitly sexual art and bohemian life outraged some, and he was imprisoned briefly in 1912, on a trumped up public decency charge. He was dead at just 28, succumbing to Spanish flu, from which his wife and unborn child had perished three days before.

Such a brief life and career, yet he produced a remarkable body of work. We see too little of it in this country, because there are no works in our museums — the last time a significant group was shown in London was 1991.

This show more than makes up for that absence: small but incisive, it focuses on about 40 of Schiele’s drawings and watercolours. It begins with the pivotal year of 1910, in which Schiele made giant strides. A cluster of twisted male nudes, likely self-portraits, reflect his singular way of looking at the body, a mass of angular bone and almost flayed flesh, captured in a supremely elegant line.

Portraits of his sister striking poses are similarly honest, as are the still-shocking images he made of pregnant women and babies in a medical clinic. Schiele’s not interested in the environment in which his models sit or stand — the body is everything, and every detail is unflinchingly observed.

Many of the images are frankly — disarmingly — sexual, their eroticism enhanced by the fact that models are often partially clothed. The lesbian couple depicted in Two Girls Embracing (1915) are all the more convincing because of the immediacy Schiele captures. One of the women’s faces is barely sketched in.

On some occasions, Schiele signs his works at 90 degrees to the drawing — forcing us to tilt our heads and view the figures, and their exposed bodies, from a different angle. It’s all part of capturing reality: he wants to bring us into the studio, to experience these figures from several angles, much as we might look at a sculpture, in the round.

Remarkably, given his youthful demise, Schiele found a genuinely unique vision. But still, it’s impossible not to wonder what he might have achieved had he lived.

Until Jan 18 (020 7848 2526, courtauld.ac.uk/schiele)

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