Читать книгу Egon Schiele - Esther Selsdon - Страница 11

In 1908, Schiele took part in a public exhibition in the Imperial Hall of the Klosterneuburg Monastery for the first time. He exhibited small-scale landscapes that he had painted from summer through to the autumn (pp. 39–40). According to Jane Kallir, around the end of 1908, Schiele had painted nearly half of all the oil paintings of his lifetime. It was only in 1909 that Schiele’s artistic creativity reached a great turning point. He left the academy and the reactionary professor Christian Griepenkerl, together with Anton Peschka, Albert Paris von Gütersloh, Anton Faistauer, Sebastian Isepp, Franz Wiegele and others, established the “New Art Group” (Neukunstgruppe). The theme of the new artists was ‘opposition’.

Schiele’s retreat from the subjective experience of the individual was a counter-reaction to Viennese historicism and its prince of painters, Hans Makart, who was celebrated by the government. Schiele distanced himself from their allegoric compositions. He turned Catholicism’s conventional values upside down and placed them in the service of sexuality. His strategy: he wanted to shock. In the painting provocatively titled The Red Host, Schiele reclines on his back in an orange shirt with his abdomen bared, his spread legs suggesting the feminine gesture of submission, while before him, gazing at the viewer, a nude strawberry-blonde holds his enormous phallus.

Nude on Her Stomach, 1917.

Gouache and black crayon, 29.8 x 46.1 cm.

Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.

Portrait of Arthur Roessler, 1910.

Graphite on paper, 24.2 x 32 cm.

Private collection.

In other paintings, monks make love to nuns and expectant women, who were often unwelcome and repudiated by strict viennese society an example being, the nun prays chafed and nude before ‘christ’s agony on the cross’. Furthermore, schiele painted homosexual couples, transgressing taboos and provoking the fantasies of his contemporary viewers. In turn, schiele found acknowledgement at the international art show in vienna where he was represented by four paintings next to the expressionist works of vincent van gogh, edvard munch and oskar kokoschka. He made the acquaintance of josef hoffman, the director of the vienna workshop. In december of 1909, the first exhibition of the “new art group” took place at pisko’s fine art dealership.