Egon Schiele’s portraits, in New York

Artists had occasionally painted themselves into their pictures before, but Dürer was the first to take himself as an exclusive subject. When you think of it, nothing is more difficult. Picasso painted himself obsessively into his pictures but almost always in masquerade: in mid-career as a bull, the symbol of virility; later in life, as a cavalier of the Spanish Golden Age. Only at the age of 90 did he depict himself directly, as a man staring at death. Matisse, in old age, allowed himself to be photographed at work. But he did not represent himself.

Of course, Rembrandt painted himself from youth to old age. There is Goya. There is van Gogh. But van Gogh isn’t really painting himself — only a man who looks just like him.

And then there is Egon Schiele, the first painter to present himself in the raw in every sense of the word. There wasn’t any precedent for it. There hasn’t been any successor to it. There isn’t any comparison to it, except Rembrandt himself.

Edge of explosion

The two men were, of course, as different from each other as it is possible to be. Rembrandt presented himself as a Dutch burgher, a man with a profession. In this attire, he takes you as deeply into the human face, the human condition, as it is possible to go. The clothes are there to not only depict the tragedy of status, but also to hold you at arm’s length so that you can really see the face, be drawn into it. It’s as perilous an experience as art can give you.

Egon Schiele took the opposite tack. His self-portraits are aggressive and confrontational in the extreme, and what he confronts you with is his body, semi-clothed or fully nude. Even when he appears garbed and with his gaze lowered or averted, his stance is passive-aggressive: See how you have martyred me, how vulnerable the flesh I must conceal is.

The fact is that in this I-thou relationship between the artist and the spectator, wounds are being delivered on both sides. You can’t look at a Schiele self-portrait, despite the admiration and even exhilaration it compels, without wincing, both from the blow your gaze inflicts on the fragile yet defiant figure on the sheet or canvas and the one you receive from it. For Schiele, the body is the barely possible container of the spirit, which is naturally contorted by it and always poised on the edge of fragmentation, division, or outright explosion.

The only precedent for this approach was El Greco, but whereas the earlier artist meant to express the aspiration to the divine that is the final meaning of flesh, Schiele instead displays for us the inner tumult of carnal desire. We can only imagine how he might have responded to maturity and old age, as Rembrandt was able to. Had Schiele lived as long as his slightly elder contemporary Oskar Kokoschka, whose own self-portraits are striking, he would have survived into the 1980s; instead, the influenza epidemic of 1918 carried him off at the age of 28.

Defiant sexuality

The Neue Galerie’s current exhibit of Schiele portraits and self-portraits— which needless to say shouldn’t be missed by anyone who cares about art — begins with a selection of student work from Schiele’s teen years, including family portraits and academic studies. They show the enormous technical skill that seems to have been effortlessly present from the beginning, and no small degree of psychological penetration. The very young Schiele looks out at us, quite respectably dressed but with a sly and slightly coquettish gaze at the viewer. These works convey the full promise of talent but no hint, as yet, of genius. Quite suddenly then, maturity arrives in the astonishing works of Schiele’s 20th year, which alone would have revolutionized our conception of the human body’s expressive possibilities.

This is where the exhibit really begins, though the apprentice work sets it off all the more. The artist appears as a spindly, twisted, elongated figure, often with limbs truncated, hair bursting from the crown of his head, the body picked out in greens and reds as if in incipient dissolution. The effect is both intensely Romantic — the artist as martyr — and wickedly subversive of all Romantic convention; in short, Expressionist.

The intense contradiction of these images — of defiant sexuality combined with active decay — gives them a uniquely poignant quality, as if we were literally watching the passage of time through the human body. But they are daunting too at the same time, for they neither court nor accept the least pity or indulgence; on the contrary, they are almost barbed in their assertiveness, as if mortality were a badge of honor. Finally, too, they are achingly beautiful because the sensuous, undulating economy of Schiele’s line — a perfection never before achieved in art — both constitutes and contains the whole in a rippling, unbroken vitality.

Holy Family, nude

Just as a moment of perfect youth will never quite come again, so Schiele would never again quite match the effect of these first self-portraits, and of those others — of models, lovers, friends, family, patrons — that comprise the bulk of the show. That some of the models were prepubescent children shown in the nude was a scandal that led to Schiele’s imprisonment in April 1912, which he duly depicted as well. Later, he sought a kind of respectability in his marriage to Edith Harms (whose father he depicted in particularly haunting portraits). The show’s large 1915 portrait of Edith is executed with all of Schiele’s panache — the parti-colored skirt is a marvel — but even he can’t find much of interest in her face, and honesty compels him to say so.

The large 1918 oil portrait of a kind of Holy Family — Schiele, squatting protectively above Edith and their prospective child, all three in the nude — is a kind of summation of where he was when life cut him short. His body is more mature, his expression less defiant, even in a way quizzical. What, he seems to wonder, lies ahead? That question haunts us, as with other geniuses — Caravaggio, Géricault, Seurat — whom we lost far too early. Egon Schiele was the youngest of them all.