Egon Schiele exhibit in New York

Austrian Expressionism's greatest figure is Egon Schiele (1890-1918), whose life was cut tragically short by the influenza pandemic that swept Europe at the end of the Great War. His reputation in the U.S. rests largely on the pioneering scholarship of Otto and Jane Kallir, who produced the definitive catalogue of Schiele's work and whose Galerie St. Etienne on New York's 57th Street has mounted more exhibitions of Schiele in its 70 years of operation than any other venue in the world.

Schiele and St. Etienne are in fact inseparable, though the now-defunct Sabarsky Gallery on Madison Avenue put on fine shows of its own, and the Neue Galerie opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art is now this country's major Schiele repository.

Schiele at St. Etienne is still special though, and the 70th anniversary exhibition of his work that has just ended was not merely an historic occasion but an opportunity to savor an all but hidden aspect of Schiele's art: his graphic work.

The Expressionists, of course, specialized in graphic art— think of Nolde, Kirchner, Beckmann, Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff et al.— but Schiele produced only a relative handful of drypoints, lithographs and woodcuts against the 3,000 drawings and 300 paintings he made in his short lifetime. The reason for this disparity is simple: Schiele, the absolute master of the spontaneously expressive line, had little patience for the painstaking labor of graphic composition, preferring the immediate gesture and absorbency of pen, watercolor and gouache to whatever could be achieved by a press. He turned to graphic composition only as a source of revenue and a means of promotion.

Halo effect

The present show— 47 drawings and 18 graphic works— was, therefore, more an event for the Schiele connoisseur than an introduction to his works for the casual viewer. Naturally, the latter are touched with his genius; and their fascination, for those acquainted only with the drawings, is to see that genius filtered through a scrim to a degree resistant to it. Schiele, that is, is still above all trying to draw, with only the most minimal hatching and shading.

The halo effect (usually in gouache) with which he sometimes surrounds figures in the drawings becomes, in his prints, stiff, spiky lines that stand off their outlines, like raised body hair. The line itself, so rich and supple in the drawings, is dry and astringent, though spiderlike too in its intricacy. The effect is sometimes iconic— as in Squatting Woman and Sorrow, both from the 1914 drypoint edition— but sometimes more intimate and reflective, as in Schiele's portraits of his patron Franz Hauer.

Whose hands?

Rather different are the portraits of another patron, Arthur Roessler, whose face is averted from his raised hands, which are the central focus of interest. One has the impression that the hands are those of the artist rather than his subject, perhaps being manipulated puppet-fashion; it was Roessler who, tired of Schiele's requests for money, had urged (forced?) printmaking on him. Whatever the case (Schiele's hands are often the most sensitive parts of his portraits, and when, as often happens, he cuts off a sleeve or extends an arm beyond the picture plane, they are even more conspicuous by their absence), the image is singularly powerful.

One lithograph long familiar is Schiele's 1918 poster for the 49th Secession Exhibition, which shows a group of friends sharing a meal around a table— it looks like a monastic refectory, but it reflects the spare camaraderie of an artists' collective instead.

Two other posters for individual shows by Schiele himself are fascinating rarities, both privately owned. A trilogy of portraits of the painter Paris von Gutersloh, two in lithographs and one in black crayon, show Schiele's mature mastery of the lithograph, where the line is fully as supple as in the drawings, and also his ability to work the most subtle changes of expression in an identical pose.

Accused of pornography

The graphic work is, in short, complementary to the drawings, rather than a new and independent direction. Many of the prints are derived from earlier drawings, though some strike out on their own—one particularly intriguing and recurrent image is that of a monumental head, not apparently based on a particular sitter.

There's always a tension in Schiele between the personal and the impersonal, a part of his intensely erotic approach to the human form. For many of his contemporaries— including the police— the frank eroticism of his figures skirted the edges of pornography, especially when adolescent or prepubescent models were involved; this suspicion resulted in a brief but deeply traumatic imprisonment in April 1912 that left a permanent mark on Schiele.

Not since Rembrandt

It did not, however, dissuade him from seeking the whole truth of the human body. In that, he has few if any peers in modern art, and I believe one must go all the way back to Rembrandt to find a comparable degree of psychological penetration and expressiveness in human portraiture. The truth Schiele found was, of course, that of his own unquiet time, but it speaks no less to us across the century that now separates us from him.

Some drawings in the show— which, as I've indicated, outnumbered the prints by nearly three to one— were familiar and classic, in part drawn from the Neue Galerie collection, which contributed generously to the show. These are, as always, welcome, for the work of Schiele's maturity is inexhaustible.

But there were rarities here too, including work sketches with multiple ideas. Schiele's finished drawings are so fluent and authoritative that it's hard to conceive of hesitation or second thought in them, any more than in a predator's dive. The sketchbooks exist, of course, and no doubt they'd make fascinating show on their own.

Examining himself

Again like Rembrandt, Schiele turned his most penetrating eye on himself. Some of his portraits contain a Doppelgänger; some are androgynous or even, as in Male Nude I and II (both lithographs from the 1912 portfolio), unsexed. A later lithographic self-image (above) is frankly feminine in cast. One should not make inferences— banal as they would be— about Schiele's sexual proclivities; rather, these works, and the oeuvre as a whole, reflect a continual dialogue between the self and the Other and the permeable boundaries between them.

Freud was making similar inquiries in Vienna at the same time. The father of psychoanalysis revealed himself candidly in his dreams. Schiele dreamed directly on paper, plate, and canvas. He held nothing back.

Of course his art was stylized like any other, fully seized of its time and highly sophisticated. You cannot tell the truth artlessly. But Schiele was as deeply honest as I think it is possible to be.