Читать книгу Egon Schiele - Esther Selsdon - Страница 6

Vienna was the capital city of the Habsburg Empire, a state of multiple ethnicities consisting of twelve nations with a population of approximately thirty million. Emperor Franz Josef maintained strict Spanish court etiquette. Yet, on the government’s fortieth anniversary, he began a large-scale conversion of the city and its approximately 850 public and private monumental structures and buildings. At this time, the influx of the rural population coming to the big city was increasing. Simultaneously, increasing industrialisation resulted in the emergence of a proletariat in the suburbs, while the newly rich bourgeoisie settled in and around the exclusive Ringstrasse. In the writers’ cafés, Leon Trotsky, Lenin and later Hitler, consulted periodicals on display and brooded over the future of the new century.

Just how musty the artistic climate in Vienna was is evidenced by the scandal over Engelhard’s picture Young Girl under a Cherry Tree, in 1893. The painting was repudiated on the grounds of “respect for the genteel female audience, which one does not wish to embarrass so painfully vis-à-vis such an open-hearted naturalistic study”. What hypocrisy, when official exhibitions of nude studies, the obligation of every artist, had long been an institution. In 1897, Klimt, together with his fellow Viennese artists, founded the Vienna Secession, a splinter group aiming to separate itself from the officially accepted conduct for artists with the motto: “To the times its art, to the art its freedom”.

In 1898, the first exhibition took place in a building belonging to the horticultural society. It was distinguished from the usual exhibitions, which normally included several thousand works, by offering an elite selection of 100 to 200 works of art. The proceeds generated by the attendance of approximately 100,000 visitors financed a new gallery designed by the architect Olbrich. Exhibitions by Rodin, Kollwitz, Hodler, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne and Van Gogh opened the doors to the most up-to-date international art world. Visual artists worked beside renowned writers and musicians such as Rilke, Schnitzler, Alternberg, Schönberg and Alban Berg for the periodical Ver Sacrum. Here they developed the idea of the complete work of art, which encompassed all artistic areas. Simultaneously, the Secession required the abolition of the distinction between higher and lower art, art for the rich and art for the poor, and declared art common property. Yet, this demand of the art nouveau generation remained a privilege of the upper class striving for the ideal that ‘art is a lifestyle’, which encompassed architectural style, interior design, clothing and jewellery.

Nude Self-Portrait, Grimacing, 1910.

Pencil, watercolours and gouache, 55.8 x 36.9 cm.

Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.

Standing Male Nude with Red Loincloth, 1914.

Pencil, watercolour and gouache, 48 x 32 cm.

Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.