Gustav Klimt’s 105th Anniversary of Death – Portrait of Emilie Flöge

Austrian painter Gustav Klimt died on this day, 6th February, in 1918, from a stroke. His last words were “Call Emilie”, referring to Emilie Flöge: his life-long best friend, intellectual companion, muse and possibly a lover as well.

Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Emilie Flöge, 1902

I have been captivated by Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Emilie Flöge” these days. It is this mesmerising blueness, at once dreamy and vivacious, and the pattern of the dress which seems to be dancing on my mind, moving almost in front of my eyes – the more I gaze at it the more it is coming alive. This is yet another one of Klimt’s wonderful portraits of the high-class Viennese ladies, but this is not just another Viennese lady. Who was Emilie Flöge and who was she to Klimt? In the simplest, or perhaps in the most complex of terms, Emilie was Klimt’s life companion. She was his muse and his best friend. Their relationship has been as much a subject of debates and gossips in their times as it is in our times.

Klimt was a notorious womaniser and a painter known for his provocative erotic themes, but in the end, Emilie was the one with whom he had exchanged more than four hundred letters and postcards, she was the one with whom he had been spending his summer holidays, she was the one with whom he collaborated artistically, and, perhaps most poignantly, she was the one he called for on his deathbed and she was the one who inherited half of his estate. Was she his lover in the physical sense of the word? Well, who knows really. The fact that Klimt has left no proof of their relationship in his letters means nothing, for he was not a man of words nor was he the man to kiss and tell. The discreet nature of their companionship doesn’t necessarily mean there wasn’t more under the surface. Emilie wasn’t a low-class girl or a prostitute as Klimt’s other models were. Despite her association with the bohemian circles, and mainly due to her fashion philosophies, Emilie was still part of the respectable society and had her own reputation to keep. One doesn’t need to flaunt what one has.

And how did they two meet? Well, Klimt’s younger brother and a fellow artist, Ernst, died suddenly in 1892. Klimt lost not only his brother but also his father that year and that left him with the responsibility of taking care not only of his own family but also of Ernst’s young bride Helene Flöge. Emilie was Helene’s younger sister, eighteen years old at the time, and she befriended Klimt by suggesting they both start learning French together. These innocent lessons have grown into a serious bond that laste for twenty-seven years, until Klimt’s death. From such a simple, unassuming root a beautiful golden flower of ‘Vienna Secession’ blossomed, or should I say perhaps, two flowers, intertwined yet separate, for Klimt and Emilie, despite their close bond, both had their own pursuits.

Ceiling mosaic “Garden of Eden”, barrel vault, Mausoleum of Galla Placidia (died 450), daughter of the Roman Emperor Theodosius I, Ravenna, Italy. Picture found here.

Emilie was a seamstress turned couturiere, and, in 1904 she became a business woman as well, having opened her own fashion salon called “Schwestern Flöge” (Flöge Sisters) together with her sister Helene. The dresses that they were designing were in the style and spirit of the Wiener Werkstätte or “Vienna Workshop” which was a productive association in Vienna, established around the same time, in 1903, by the painter and graphic designer Koloman Moser, the architect Josef Hoffmann and the patron Fritz Waerndorfer. The association brought together architects, artists, designers and artisans working in ceramics, fashion, silver, furniture and the graphic arts. Their ideas, in terms of fashion, were unconventional and reformative, continuing perhaps where the Victorian trend of the Artistic dress and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had stopped.

The freedom in one’s clothing wasn’t merely a matter of feeling comfortable, it was a liberation from society’s restraints on a symbolic level. A lady freeing herself from the torments of the corset had made not just a practical decision, but a social statement as well. Designs of Emilie’s dresses had a loose high-waisted silhouette, flowing fabrics, billowing sleeves, comfortable in terms of form, inspired by the flowing Oriental styles of kimono and kaftan, and inspired in print by the kind of patterns that Klimt loved and often designed as well, a stunning mixture of geometrical and floral. Klimt himself loved to feel cozy and free, especially whilst painting and during his countryside holidays. He was often seen, and photographed even, in his garden wearing comfotable loose garments with no underwear and sandals on his feet.

Emilie Flöge wearing an Artistic Reform dress, photograph by D’Ora, 1907

Emilie Flöge and Gustav Klimt in a garden, both wearing their loose garments.

In May 1903 Klimt travelled to Ravenna and Venice, then spent the summer months pleasantly on the Attersee with the Floge familie, and in November the same year he made another trip to Italy and visited Padua, Pisa and Florence. This portrait of Emilie was painted in 1902, a year before Klimt’s Italian adventures, but, to me, it signifies a premonition of sorts, as though the fifth century mosaics of San Vitale and Galla Placidia had been calling out to him with their golds and blues, with their centuries old Byzantine charms. I do love the dress that Emilie is wearing in the portrait! It is just magnificent; flowing loose and freely as though it were a river of dreams, with those beautiful bishop sleeves, wide and then tight at the wrist, and the pattern with its blue swirls, golden circles, white dots, white ovals, then the shawl tight around her neck, like the goddes of Midnight, her pale moon-face arises from the blueness and then that voluminous hair which brings to mind the hairstyle from the portraits of the Spanish painter Velázquez. Hungarian writer and journalist Ludwig Hevesi wrote upon seeing the portrait: “another, unfinished portrait has come to us as if from a blue-mottled world of majolica and mosaic.”

I almost prefer the blueness of this portrait to Klimt’s future golden portraits, there is something ethereal, mystical and dreamy about it which brings to mind the nocturnal atmosphere of the ceiling mosaic in the mausoleum of Galla Placidia, the daughter of the Roman emperor Theodosius I, in Ravenna, representing the “Garden of Eden” where the deep blue circular golden decorations represent the white corollas of moonflowers. As one may physically pass from the nocturnal atmosphere of the mausoleum of Galla Placidia, where one sees nothing but blueness wherever one ganders, to the bright and golden interiors of the Basilica of San Vitale, full of lightness and life, thus it seems that Klimt has symbolically passed from the starry night of the portrait of Emilie and exploded into the bright golden day that was his Golden period.

Japonism in Oskar Kokoschka’s Fan for Alma Mahler

Oskar Kokoschka, Third Fan for Alma Mahler, 1913

Japonism, or the influence of Japanese art on Western art, was all the rage in the European art circles of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Ukiyo-e prints and folding screens were the most influential. Artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet and many others were captivated by the strange and vibrant beauty of Japanese artworks and decorative objects and they found all sorts of ways to be inspired by what they saw. It is very obvious then that the semicircular shape and vibrant patterns of Japanese fans were also highly popular with European artists. In the shape of the fan and in its changeable quality, it being different when it is open and when closed, they found a new inspiration to play with shapes and depictions of landscapes and other motifs. Degas of course incorporated his delightful ballerinas on the fan, Manet painted chrysanthemums, but a very striking and exciting example of a fan inspired by Japanese art comes from the brush of Oskar Kokoschka; an Austrian artist very prolific in the period just before and during the First World War in Vienna. In those times ladies still wore their fans as a fashion accesory so it was not just an artwork but also a useful object. In his series of six fans painted for his lover Alma Mahler, Kokoschka brings the art of fan painting on a whole new artistic level. The pictorial space on the fan stretches over several sections, not just one, and you can only imagine how exciting this fan would look when being slowly opened and all the figures were enliven for a moment. The central scene of the fan is the most beautiful and romantic one; it shows two lovers, Kokoschka himself and Alma, under the Mount Vesuvius. Perhaps the eruption of the vulcano Mount Vesuvius can be symbolically seen as the culmination of all his intense love, desire and yearning for the seductive and charming Alma who, very tragically, ended their relantionship and ended up marrying the architect Walter Groppius, and later even the writer Franz Werfel. The scenes on the left and right of the fan are an hommage to the couple’s trip to Italy.

Gustav Klimt – Hope I

Gustav Klimt, Hope I, 1903

The redhead vixen staring straight at us from the canvas without a trace of shyness was Herma; Klimt’s favourite model. He apparently said that her ass was more beautiful and more intelligent than the faces of all other models; what a compliment! The story goes that one day Herma didn’t show up at his studio, days passed and she still didn’t show up and Klimt got worried she might be ill so he sent someone to get her. It turned out she didn’t want to come and pose because she was pregnant, but regardless Klimt insisted she must pose for him, despite her condition, and that’s how painting “Hope I” was born. There is also a painting “Hope II” painted in 1907-08 but it is very different stylistically, and I personally love “Hope I” more, especially these days. There is just so many interesting details about it that keep me captivated.

Firstly, there is the subject of a nude woman, Klimt’s preferred motif to paint, but this time the woman is heavily pregnant and we don’t see that often in art. Still, despite her huge stomach, the rest of her seems slender and girlish, just like other women in Klimt’s paintings. With masses of coppery red hair and the wreath of delicate flowers in her hair, she seems more like a bride than like a mother to be. Gazing directly at us, and unashamedly naked, with her ginger pubic hair exposed, she seems like a wild child of nature, a forest nymph, a friend of water lilies, weeping willows and reed. The very elongated format of the painting and the, at least partly ornamental background, were obviously taken from Japanese Ukiyo-e prints. The choice of using a vertical canvas goes hand in hand with the motif of a woman shown standing up.

The space around her, above her and behind her is decorative and undefined; it’s a symbolic setting not a real one. The wave of serene blue colour, adorned with golden dots and blade shaped ornaments, flowing from the woman’s hair to her legs looks like a waterfall. On the left of the woman is a strange, but lovely black creature called the sea monster; it doesn’t look like a scary monster to me, rather it reminds me of that ghost in Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away”. Above them we see strange, unsettling faces with grimaces and dead eyes, and also a skull. A very strange motifs considering the painting is called Hope. The eerie heads and skulls reminded me of the way Katsushika Hokusai portrayed his Lantern ghost and Kohada Koheiji’s skull appearing as a ghost at the burning mosquito net before his wife’s lover who murdered him. This painting is filled with unsettling contrasts; the sensuality of the woman’s body contrasts with her future role of a mother, the darkness of the background contrasts with the growing new life.

Katsushika Hokusai, Kohada Koheiji’s skull appears as a ghost at the burning mosquito net before his wife’s love who murdered him, 1830

Katsushika Hokusai, The Lantern Ghost, 1830

Egon Schiele – Sunflowers, 1909

“Amidst those golden
Flowers of melancholy
The spirit is ruled
By silent darkness.“

Egon Schiele, Sunflowers, 1909, oil on canvas, 150×30 cm (59×11 3/4)

The elongated format of this painting is very unusual and thrilling, but it isn’t the only thing which makes this painting fascinating. Vincent van Gogh is responsible for immortalising the motif of the sunflower in his wonderful paintings full of ecstatic yellow colour and rough brushstrokes, but Egon Schiele painted quite a few “portraits”of this flower as well. In Schiele’s paintings, the sunflower isn’t just a bright yellow flower, in fact it looks almost completely the opposite. Both Schiele’s nudes and sunflowers are skinny, fragile, melancholy, broken creatures. Despite the extremely vertical format of the painting, there still doesn’t seem to be enough room for the sunflower to grow. The space around the sunflower, although devoid of any background or ornamentation, appears restrictive, almost claustrophobic. There is no room to grow, no room to rise his head up towards the sun. It is hard to believe that such a thin, frail stem can hold such a large head of the flower, dark like the night and heavy with dreams. Trapped on that canvas with no fellow flowers for company, the sunflower is all alone, isolated and lonely. Schiele’s paintings of flowers are always psychological portraits. The mood, the form, the drab autumnal colours are pure poetry and speak more than words can. Despite the visual eloquence of Schiele’s painting, I would still like to share Georg Trakl’s poem “The Sunflowers”:

“You golden sunflowers,
Feelingly bowed to die,
You humble sisters
In such silence
Ends Helian’s year
Of mountainous cool.
And the kisses
Make pale his drunken brow
Amidst those golden
Flowers of melancholy
The spirit is ruled
By silent darkness.”

This is one of Schiele’s early works, painted at the age of nineteen maybe even eighteen, when he was still experimenting and finding his style. The vertical format is the only thing that connects him with Klimt and thus with Secession and Japonisme as well. The way Schiele uses colour and line is already unique and striking. Bellow is an example of Japanese art of the same vertical format because the format was taken from Japanese art. Interestingly, in Shunso’s artwork the leaves and branches of the tree give the impression that the space is stretching out, outside the bounds of the artwork. In Schiele’s painting the space seems to be closing in on the sunflower.

Hishida Shunso, Black Cat, a Meiji Silk Painting, 1910, colours on silk, 150×51 cm

Egon Schiele and Klimt: Danaë

Wonderful and one of a kind Austrian artist Egon Schiele was born on this day in 1890. In this post we’ll take a look at one of his very early works “Danaë”, inspired by Gustav Klimt’s painting of the name.

Egon Schiele, Danaë, 1909

Although Egon Schiele died fairly young, in 1918 at the age of twenty eight, he left an oeuvre of mostly erotic drawings and paintings, which is as provocative and captivating nowadays as it was in his time. In 1909, Schiele was a confident, self-aware and handsome nineteen year old who had already started creating the image of his art as something extraordinary and something that the world would remember. He was truly following his own path and his art already started showing the characteristics that he would develop in later years in something unique. Still, in 1909 he was still in his experimental phase and very influenced by Gustav Klimt; both share a fascination with the body and the erotic component of art.

Schiele’s painting “Danaë” is a perfect example of this young artist looking up to the older one. It shows Danaë as a nude auburn haired girl hiding from what is suppose to be a lush shower of gold, though it doesn’t quite look golden here. She looks like a dreamy child of nature, surrounded by grass and woods, a shy rosebud in hiding. Her face is rosy-cheeked and sweet, but her body appears yellowish and flat, much like the way bodies look in Japanese Ukiyo-e prints that both Klimt and Schiele admired. In contrast to the minimalist approach to painting her body, Schiele painted her hand little and bony, the same way he would continue to paint his girls; fragile, all skin and bones.

Egon Schiele, Study for Danaë, 1909, watercolour, pencil and ink

Whereas Schiele was directly inspired by Klimt’s version of “Danaë” from 1907, Klimt on the other hand was merely following a painterly tradition of portraying the mythical woman Danaë that started with Grecian vases and reached its peak in the Renaissance with renditions painted by Correggio and Titian. Danaë was the princess of Peloponnese, daughter of the King Acrisius of Argos who unfortunately didn’t have an heir to his throne but the prophecy said that his daughter Danaë will have a son and the King would be murdered by Danaë’s son. The King did the only reasonable thing he could; imprisoned his daughter in a bronze tower with no doors or windows, with just a source of light instead of a roof. She spent a long time there until Zeus started desiring her. Zeus’s lust knew no boundaries and there are many stories from Greek mythology about the different ways he seduced beautiful young girls but the way he came to Danaë is surely a very magical one; he took form of the golden shower which fell down into the tower and left her with a child, a son named Perseus.

Schiele exhibited four works in the Kunstschau of 1909, one of which was the painting “Danaë” whose decorative and erotic elements showed a frank homage to Klimt, but Schiele’s painting isn’t a pure copy of Klimt’s style, for it shows the young artist’s personal touches, the shape of the body and a slight reluctance to excessive decorative background. Klimt’s version has more sensuality; Danaë’s body is portrayed as plump and accepting of the rich stream of gold which is flowing through the canvas. Her hair is red and seems alive, her lips are parted and her eyes closed, she seems to be enjoying the moment.

Gustav Klimt, Danaë, 1907

Egon Schiele’s Heroin Chic Look – Lipgloss and Cigarettes

The distinctive trashy glamour of Egon Schiele’s nudes is unsettling and alluring at the same time, provocative and eye-catching. His drawings and watercolours of skinny, fragile, starved nymphets who look like they live on lipgloss and cigarettes, made from 1910 to about 1914/15, before the war and before his marriage, encapsulate the heroin chic aesthetic decades before was defined and popularised by models such as Kate Moss. Things that connect these drawings and watercolours are the same mood and aesthetic and the same reaction from the public. Schiele’s portrayal of female form was shocking to the early twentieth century Vienna, and photographs of Kate Moss’s skinny body received the same reaction.

Kate Moss by Corinne Day

In the beginning of this year I watched a new documentary about Egon Schiele called “Egon Schiele: Dangerous Desires (2018)” made to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his death. It which was super cool and I loved it to death, it was hard not to like it: the soundtrack was rock music and the first lines were spoken by Iggy Pop, who clearly appreciates Egon Schiele’s art. One woman says something really interesting in the first two minutes: “If someone were to show you a Schiele watercolour and ask you: ‘when do you think this was done’, I think the answer would be: yesterday.” I partly agree; as a nostalgic person who romanticises the past, I would never believe that something as great could have been painted yesterday, but I agree in that his drawings, great majority of his art, appears not modern but timeless.

I can’t really say “modern” because Schiele wouldn’t agree. In one of his watercolours from prison he wrote: “Kunst kann nicht modern sein; Kunst ist urewig.” or “Art can not be modern, art is primordially eternal.” I don’t think this can be said about all art, but Schiele truly succeeded in creating art that is eternal. When you look at it now, it doesn’t seem out of place, kitschy, or strange, on the contrary, those colours and lines on papers that he held in his hand sometime in 1912 still have so much to say – or scream. And Schiele’s art goes so well with modern music as well, rock music particularly; in his self-portraits of the tormented artist staring right at us from the canvas, you can imagine a streetwise yet vulnerable heroin addict from the song “I’m waiting for the man” by The Velvet Underground, or the raw and trashy sound of The Stooges’s “Raw Power” or the sleek sound of urban alienation from David Bowie’s Berlin-era albums.

Egon Schiele, Nude against coloured background, 1911

I like Schiele’s paintings, and I also enjoy looking at pictures of Kate Moss, particularly those from the 1990s, it’s just an aesthetic thing, I don’t care for her personality or her life choices, although her love life is interesting. I look at a picture only to get a shot of beauty in my veins and possibly a seed to inspire my future reveries. I am certain that Kate Moss would be a perfect model for Schiele. His ideal was a thin, fragile, bony body with that elegantly wasted look; protruding spine and collar bones, under eye circles, ribs peeking under thin layer of skin, strange complexion with patches of unnatural colour…. The heroin chic look that Schiele clearly painted decades before, has become synonymous with Kate Moss whose appearance at the beginning of her career was in stark difference to the perfect and unattainable looks of the supermodels of the previous decade. Calvin Klein spoke in her defense back in the day: “For them, what is real is beautiful—looking plain is beautiful. What is less than perfect is sexy.” Schiele liked strangeness and imperfections and never resorted to idealization.

Kate Moss by Bettina Rheims, 1989

Egon Schiele, Girl with black hair, 1910

Schiele’s models were often girls from the streets, pretty prepubescent street urchins hungry for attention and amusement. He was young and poor and probably couldn’t even afford a proper model, and why would he when these little things were around, looked and behaved unpretentiously and were a good thing to draw. In his book about Egon Schiele, F. Whitford wrote: “Physically immature, thin, wide-eyed, full-mouthed, innocent and lascivious at the same time, these Lolitas from the proletarian districts of Vienna arouse the kind of thoughts best not admitted before a judge and jury.” The same words could be used to described the teenage Kate Moss; thin, wide-eyed, with full lips and gorgeous high cheek bones, on the pictures taken by Corinne Day for The Face magazine in 1990 she looks innocent and vulnerable, a bit shy, hiding herself behind a straw hat. In 1990 this working class nymphet from Croydon, a drab suburb of London, had already left school, and despite being a rich and famous model today, back then the prospects were bleak and she was in a similar position as the street urchins who posed for Schiele. Her beauty wasn’t yet recognised, but she did attract the attention of some designers very early on such as John Galliano who chose her for his spring/summer collection 1990 and saw her as his “Lolita”; the half-child and half-woman appeal made her stand out.

Kate Moss for Calvin Klein

Kate Moss by Corinne Day, 1993

Egon Schiele, Sitting girl with ponytail (Sitzendes Mädchen mit Pferdeschwanz), 1910

Schiele’s drawings were outrageous and provocative in his day and age just as they are now still. Viennese public had perhaps grown accustomed to Klimt’s nudes, but the vision of the female form that Schiele had presented was a tad too much. Likewise, pictures of Kate shot in the early nineties by a young and ambitious autodidact photographer Corinne Day were considered equally outrageous and accused of perplexing ideas that neither Kate nor Corinne had dreamt of; in the pictures she looked skinny and childlike, but her clothes and poses weren’t childlike at all, mingling sexuality with innocence. Kate Moss’s appearance represented the nihilistic spirit of the decade and a culture that believe in nothing. Hippies had hope, acid and belief in a better world, punks had their anger and outrageous clothes, and nineties seemingly had nothing, to quote Manic Street Preachers: “I know I believe in nothing, but it’s my nothing”.

Pictures above by Corinne Day for The Face magazine, July 1990

Over the ocean, grunge bands expressed their dissatisfaction and in Manchester the youth tuned out in the reviving sounds of psychedelia of bands such as The Stone Roses, The Charlatans and The Happy Mondays. Kate’s “elegantly waisted” look was perfect for Corinne Day’s aims in photography, for her love of realism. A new philosophy required a new look, and strong, over the top and glamorous models of the 1980s were passé. Just like Egon Schiele in his nudes and self-portraits, Corinne Day’s photographs penetrate to the bare essence and expose the truth, and what lies within. Schiele freed the women from Klimt’s suffocating gold and poisonous flowers, and focused on the psychology of their faces. In a similar way, Day freed the model from the excessiveness of shoulder pads and too much blush. Calvin Klein said “For me, Kate’s body represented closing the door on the excessiveness of the ’80s”.

Here is an expert from Maureen Callahan’s book “Champagne Supernovas“: “The culture at large didn’t see Kate that way. Up against the skyscraper supermodels of the ’80s, their very perfection a comment on American supremacy, a small-boned, flat-chested model like Kate Moss was heresy. Someone her size hadn’t been seen since Twiggy in the ’60s; suddenly, Kate and Calvin Klein were accused of promoting anorexia, heroin use, child pornography, and the downfall of Western civilization. She was on the sides of buses, kiosks, and pay phones, naked and draped across a velvet sofa in a ramshackle room, “FEED ME” often scrawled across the ad by protesters.”

Under Exposure, Kate Moss by Corinne Day for Vogue UK, June 1993

Here is another interesting passage from Callahan’s book “Champagne Supernovas” about Corinne Day’s photo shoot with Kate Moss: “When British Vogue commissioned Corinne for a lingerie shoot with Kate, Corinne insisted on creative control. She shot in Kate’s London apartment and staged it to look like her own flat: modest and cold, with white walls and gray carpet, exposed wiring, a mattress on the floor. Kate had been crying after a fight with her boyfriend, and Corinne exploited the juxtaposition of distress and seduction, putting Kate in tiny cotton tanks and silk underwear, some of it from a sex shop on Brewer Street. In the finished editorial, Kate, silhouetted by a string of multicolored Christmas lights, looked frail and lost.”

Egon Schiele, Nude With Blue Stockings Bending Forward, 1912

To end, here are some lyrics from the song which inspired me to write this post in the first place: “Lipgloss” by Pulp:

No wonder you’re looking thin,
When all that you live on is lipgloss and cigarettes.
And scraps at the end of the day when he’s given the rest,
To someone with long black hair.
All those nights up making such a mess of the bed.
Oh you never ever want to go home.

Egon Schiele, Sitting Female Nude with Yellow Blanket, 1910

Egon Schiele, Lovemaking, 1915

 

Kate Moss and Johnny Depp by Annie Leibovitz, 1994

Egon Schiele, Lovers – Self-Portrait With Wally, c. 1914-1915, gouache and pencil on paper

Oskar Kokoschka – The Bride of the Wind

And you held me, my love, and then went on dreaming.
Of perhaps a different kind of death.

Oskar Kokoschka, The Bride of the Wind (or The Tempest), 1914

In nervous, swirling and frantic brushstrokes Kokoschka painted two lovers lying side by side in a sad embrace. The woman is asleep, her eyes are peacefully closed and while she is sailing the seas of dreams, unaware of the shadows of reality that grow bigger with each passing hour of the night, the man is awake. His deep set eyes gaze into the void, his cheeks are hollow, his fingers ugly and twisted, his chin protruding, his skin taunted over his bones; he might as well be a skeleton already. While their bodies are painted in quick nervous strokes of white colour with dashes of yellow and blue the abstract space around them is made out of swirls of black and midnight blue. The blueness of the space around them might, in different circumstances, lead us to thoughts of something spiritual and serene, a vast blue sky or a calm sea, but his frantic brush strokes have dismissed such thoughts. It’s difficult, or rather impossible to determine the setting, for the whole space appears to us like a nihilistic swamp of darkness and despair; it’s a world from a dark dream, a nightmare, a premonition of the future, a scream from the bottom of one’s being.

The painting allegorically represents the painter and his beloved Alma Mahler who was at the time his lover and the wife of the composer Gustav Mahler. They are carried by strong gusts of wind, but it isn’t the wind of passion that carried Paolo and Francesca in Dante’s hell, but the wind of anxiety, uncertainty and the futility of everything. Oskar Kokoschka was a representative of the Viennese Expressionism and this catastrophic vision of the world and the future is typically Expressionistic. The same dreary mood fills his portraits which all have a psychological aspect to them and look as if they were made out of mud and tears, and is similar to painting of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s paintings with urban mood of alienation and premonitions of catastrophe that the World War One was about to bring. Expressionistic art was a whirlwind of colours and screams created from the nervous energy of the antebellum period, and although many artists shared the sentiment, none experienced it so deeply and profoundly as the artists who were the closest to the fire, that is those who lived in the Austria-Hungarian Empire; Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, poets Georg Trakl and August Stramm, Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, and many other across the vast decaying empire.

So, the painting is infused with his personal torments or life and love, and fragile nature of both, but at the same time it hold a deeper meaning because it perfectly represents the changing times and the political and cultural changes that were taking place. The painting mirrors the uncertainties that the future beholds; both the fleeting nature of love and passion, and the political instability that affects everyone. Here is a poem called “With Your Right Hand on my Neck” by a Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti that seems to fit the mood of Kokoschka’s painting and also mingles the themes of love and death:

With your right hand on my neck, I lay next to

you last night,

and since the day’s woes still pained me, I did

not ask you to take it away,

but listened to the blood coursing through your

arteries and veins,

Then finally around twelve sleep overcame me,

as sudden and guileless as my sleep so long ago,

when in the downy time of my youth it rocked

me gently.

You tell me it was not yet three when I was

startled awake

and sat up terrified and screaming.

muttering strange and unintelligible words,

then spread out my arms like a bird ruffled with

fear

flapping its wings as a dark shadow flutters

through the garden.

Tell me, where was I going? And what kind of

death had frightened me so?

And you held me, my love, as I sat up half-asleep,

then lay back in silence, wondering what paths

and horrors awaited me.

And then went on dreaming. Of perhaps a

different kind of death.

During the process of painting this painting, the poet Georg Trakl had a habit of visiting the artist almost daily and he composed this poem called “The Night” directly inspired by the painting:

Over nocturnal dark floods
I sing my sad songs,
Songs which bleed like wounds.
However, no heart carries them to me again
Through the darkness.

Only the nocturnal dark floods
Rush, sob my songs,
Songs which bleed from wounds,
They carry them to my heart again
Through the darkness.

Egon Schiele – Death and the Maiden

Egon Schiele died on the 31st October 1918. Three days prior to that he witnessed the death of his pregnant wife Edith. If it wasn’t for the Spanish influenza, she could have had their child and his prodigious mind could have produced many more drawings and paintings.

Egon Schiele, Death and the Maiden, 1915

Painting “Death and the Maiden” is a very personal work and it connects and unites two themes that were a lifelong fascination to Egon Schiele; death and eroticism. It shows two figures in an embrace, apparently seen from above, not unusual at all for Schiele to use such a strange perspective. They cling to each other in despair; painfully aware of the finality and hopelessness of their love. They are lying on rumpled white sheets, their last abode before the hours of love vanish forever, which simultaneously add a touch of macabre sensuality and remind us of the burial shroud. The background is an unidentifiable space, a desolate landscape painted in colours of mud and rust.

Death is a man not so dissimilar to Schiele’s other male figures or self-portraits, without the help of the title we couldn’t even guess that is represents death. The red-haired woman hugs him tightly with her long arms and lays her head on his chest. She is not the least bit afraid of his black shroud of infinity. She holds onto him as if he were love itself, and still, her hands are not resting on his back gently, they are separate and her crooked fingers are touching themselves. We can sense their inevitable separation through their gestures and face expressions, and, at the same time, their embrace feels frozen in time, the figures feel stiff and motionless, as if the rigor mortis had already taken place and bound them in an everlasting embrace. The maiden will not die, she will be clinging to death for all eternity.

It is impossible not to draw parallels between the figures in the painting and Schiele’s personal life at the time. The figure of Death resembles Schiele, and we do all know he showed no hesitation when it came to painting and even taking a photo of himself, and the red-haired woman is then clearly Wally. To get a better perspective at the symbolism behind this painting, we need to understand the things that happened in Schiele’s life that year. In June 1915 he married Edith Harms; a shy and innocent girl next door. But first he needed to brake things off with Wally Neuzil, a lover and a muse who not only supported him during the infamous Neulengbach Affair but was also, ironically, an accomplice in introducing him to Edith.

Upon meeting Wally for what was to be the last time, Egon handed her a letter in which he proposed they spend a holiday together every summer, without Edith. It’s something that Wally couldn’t agree with. Perhaps she wasn’t a suitable woman to be his wife, but she wasn’t without standards or heart either. There, in the dreamy smoke of Egon’s cigarette, sitting at a little table in the Café Eichberger where he often came to play billiards, the two doomed lovers bid their farewells. Egon gazed at her with his dark eyes and said not a word. He was disappointed but did not appear particularly heart-broken, at least no at first sight, but surely the separation must have pained him in the moments of solitude and contemplation, the moments which gave birth to paintings such as this one.

Egon Schiele, Embrace, 1915

If we assume then that the painting indeed shows Egon and Wally, the question arises: why did he chose to portray himself as a personification of Death? He chose to end things with Wally, so why mourn for the ending? And shouldn’t Death be a possessive and remorseless figure who smothers the poor delicate Maiden in his cold deadly embrace? Schiele’s embrace in the painting seems caring and his gaze full of sadness.

On a visual level, the motif of two lovers set against a decorative background brings to mind both Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” (1907) and Oskar Kokoschka’s “The Bride of the Wind (or The Tempest)” from 1914. Although similar in composition, the mood of Schiele’s painting differs vastly to those of his fellow Viennese eccentrics. Klimt’s painting shows a couple in a kiss and oozes sensuality and beauty, the background being very vibrant and ornamental. It’s a painting made before the war, its horrors and changes. Kokoschka’s painting is, in a way, more similar to Schiele’s but they two are very different in the overall effect. Both show doomed lovers in a sad embrace, and a strange, slightly distorted background, but Kokoschka’s painting is a whirlwind of energy, brushstrokes are nervous and energetic, the space is vibrant, not breathing but screaming. Schiele’s painting exhibits stillness, stiffness, a change caught in the moment, a breeze stopped, and the space around them seems heavy, muddy and static. “Kokoschka’s is a ‘baroque’ painting, while Schiele’s relates more to the Gothic tradition. “The Tempest” is life-affirming, the Schiele is resigned to the inevitable, immobile and drained of life.” (Whitford; Egon Schiele)

Egon Schiele, Lovemaking, 1915

In this painting Schiele used the old theme of Death and the Maiden and enriched it by adding an introspective, private psychological dimension. Schiele’s rendition of the theme isn’t a meditation on transience and vanity as it was in the works of Renaissance masters such as Hans Baldung Grien; a gifted and imaginative German painter and a pupil of Albrecht Dürer. Grien revisited the theme of Death and the Maiden a few times during a single decade, at the beginning of the sixteenth century. These paintings always feature a beautiful and something vain young woman (she is looking at herself in the mirror) with smooth pale skin and long golden hair, and a grotesque figure of Death looming behind her like a shadow, reminding her with a sand clock that soon enough she too will come into his arms.

Hans Baldung Grien, from left to right: Death and the Maiden, 1510; Death and the Maiden, 1517; Death and the Maiden, 1518-20

I’ve included two more examples of this theme in this post; another version by Grien where Death is shown chowing the Maiden’s dress and the knight is literally saving his damsel not from the dragon or from danger, but from Death and mortality itself. Quite cool! And an interesting detail from Van Groningen’s “The Triumph of Death” where Death is shown as a skeleton in a cloud armed with a spear, chasing a frightened and screaming young Maiden dressed in flimsy robes who is running around hopelessly trying to escape. In these paintings, the Maiden is merely a symbol of the fragility of youth and beauty, but later artists, the Romantics and the fin-de-siecle generation, and Schiele too, had different vision of Death; they glamorised it and romanticised it. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Edward Fane’s Rosebud” the beautiful young Maiden Rose is faced with mortality for the first time and how poetically Hawthorne had described it:

“She shuddered at the fantasy, that, in grasping the child’s cold fingers, her virgin hand had exchanged a first greeting with mortality, and could never lose the earthly taint. How many a greeting since! But as yet, she was a fair young girl, with the dewdrops of fresh feeling in her bosom; and instead of Rose, which seemed too mature a name for her half-opened beauty, her lover called her Rosebud.”

Death was a life-long fascination for Schiele; at a very young age he witnessed his father’s madness and suffering death, possibly from syphilis, he was obsessed with the idea of doppelgänger who was seen as a foreboding of death, in his poem “Pineforest” he even wrote “How good! – Everything is living dead”. All his art is tinged with death, and with Schiele it wasn’t a fad of the times but a deep, personal morbid obsession. In the height of summer, he already senses autumn leaves, in the living flesh he already sees decay. Also, he was born in 1890, and along with other artists of his generation he witnessed the final decay of a vast empire that had lasted for centuries; “Decay, death and disaster seemed to haunt their every waking hour and to provide the substance of their nightmares.” (Whitford, Egon Schiele)

Hans Baldung Grien, The Maiden, the Knight and Death, date unknown

Jan Swart van Groningen, Der Triumph des Todes (detail), 1525-50

Life and Death contrafted or, An Essay on Woman, 1770

Richard Bergh, The Girl and Death, 1888

Henry Levi (1840-1904), La jeune fille et la mort, 1900

Marianne Stokes, The Young Girl and Death, 1900

Happy Halloween, with Schiele and Death!

Egon Schiele’s Birth Anniversary and Federico Garcia Lorca’s Sonnets of Dark Love

One of my favourite painters ever, Egon Schiele, was born on this day in 1890, so naturally, my thoughts are nearly all with him today. I have been an ardent lover and admirer of his art for years now, but another work of art, with a darkness and eroticism that matches that of Schiele’s art, has occupied me these days: Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Sonnets of Dark Love”, translated by Paul Archer here. As I was reading Lorca’s beautiful sonnets, one by one, slowly, half-soaking in the strange verses and half-daydreaming, I had Schiele’s paintings in mind, or rather, the mood that pervades his paintings; darkness, anxiety, death, eroticism and alienation, murkiness of the colours and strangeness of the pale and fragile heroin chic figures, often entwined, together yet distant. I’ve chosen the verses which I loved the most and assembled them together with Schiele’s paintings and drawings.

Egon Schiele, Cardinal and Nun (Caress), 1912

“(…) And then, together entwined,
with love-broken mouths and frayed souls
time will find us utterly destroyed.”

(Sonnet of the Garland of Roses)

Egon Schiele, Two Women, 1915

“Don’t let me lose the wondrous sight
of your sculpted eyes, or the way you have
of placing on my cheek at night
the solitary rose of your breath.”

(Sonnet of the sweet complaint)

Egon Schiele, Girl in Black, 1911

“This weeping of blood that adorns
an unplucked lyre, the lusty torch,
this weight of the sea that pounds,
this scorpion that dwells in my breast

are all a garland of love, a sickbed
where I lie awake dreaming you are here
among the ruins of my downcast heart.”

(Love’s Wounds)

Egon Schiele, Sunflower, 1909

“My gut-wrenching love, my death-in-life,
in vain I wait for you to write me a letter,
like a withered flower I think rather than to live
without being me, to lose you would be better.”

(The poet begs his beloved to write to him)

Egon Schiele, Liebende (Lovers), 1909

“I want to weep with my pain and tell
you – so you’ll love me and cry for me also
in a nightfall of nightingales
with a knifeblade, with kisses and with you.”

(The poet tells the truth)

Egon Schiele, Four Trees, 1918

“Your voice watered my heart’s dunes
in that sweet wooden telephone booth.
It was spring at my feet to the south
and north of my forehead flowered ferns.”

(The poet talks on the telephone with his beloved)

Egon Schiele, Wally in Red Blouse with Raised Knees, 1913

“Did you see in the transparent air
that dahlia of sorrow and pleasure
my warm heart had sent you?”

(The poet asks his beloved about the ‘Enchanted City’ of Cuenca)

Egon Schiele, Mother and Daughter, 1913

“Thus my heart all night and day through
incarcerated in its cell of dark love
cries its melancholy at not seeing you.”

(Sonnet in the style of Góngora in which the poet sends his beloved a dove)

Egon Schiele – Edith In a Striped Dress

This is a post from last spring, but many of my new readers probably haven’t read it yet so I decided to share it again because these paintings are dear to my heart.

________________________________________________________________________________

Egon Schiele’s portrait of his wife Edith in a colourful striped dress is something quite unusual and new in his art, and her face, full of naivety, sweetness and innocence seems so out of place amongst his usual female portraits, nudes and half-nudes, with a decaying heroin chic appeal. Where did this change of style come from?

Egon Schiele, Portrait of Edith Schiele, the artist’s wife, 1915

When I first saw this portrait, I loved the stripes on the dress for they seemed so alive, so intricate and colourful, and yet the quality of the colour is murky and earthy, as usual in Schiele’s palette. I was also amused by her face expression, but my interest quickly turned to Schiele’s alluring nudes. What can this portrait show us, apart from the fact that Edith loved wearing striped dresses? Well, it’s a psychological study which shows us Edith’s true personality. Let’s say that her true colours shine through. Look at her – she looks awkward and artless, she is clumsy and doesn’t know what to do with her hands, her eyes are wide open and eyebrows slightly raised, her lips are stretched in a weird, shy smile, as if she’s in the spotlight but wants to get away, she’s pretty but not exceptional, timid but not gloomy. Prior to marrying Schiele, Edith led quite a sheltered life, with her sister Adele and her conservative parents.

In Spring of 1914, Schiele noticed that there were two pretty young girls living just across his flat. Naturally interested, he started thinking of ways to meet them which was hard because the girls lived under the watchful eyes of their mother. They started waving each other through the window, and sometimes Schiele would paint a self-portrait and show it to them through the window. Surely by now, both Edith and Adele had dreamt of meeting that cheeky, arrogant but charming artist across the street. Schiele started sending them little notes, the content of which must have made Edith and Adele blush and giggle, but they never replied to any of them for a year. They met with Wally’s help, and all four went to the theatre or cinema together. Needless to say that the cynical Schiele was interested in both girls, in fact, for some time he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to marry Edith or Adele. Crazy situation, but luckily for him, it turned out that Adele wasn’t really interested so he settled on Edith and they got married, despite the strong disapproval of her parents, on 17 June 1915, which was the anniversary of the marriage of Schiele’s parents.

Scenes from ‘Egon Schiele: Excess and Punishment’ (1981)

I can understand why Edith liked Schiele, women always go for the bad guys; he was an artist, straightforward about what he wanted, he had a bad reputation and was once imprisoned for pornographic art, and, admit it or not, there’s something romantic about criminals. What remains a mystery to me is why Schiele liked her? What could this timid, shy, proper and frightened girl had to offer him? Most importantly, what was it so appealing about Edith that the witty, funny street-wise, experienced Wally didn’t have?

“We sense here the conflicting emotions that Edith must have caused in Schiele: a quiet pleasure in her innocence, a satisfaction with her selfless loyalty mixed with frustration at her lack of of sexual energy. Schiele makes her seem passive and whilst he found vulnerability attractive he must also have longed for those quite different qualities which Wally possessed in abundance: the kind of temperament and aggressive eroticism which made Schiele himself feel vulnerable.“*

Edith was portrayed well in the film Egon Schiele: Excess and Punishment (1981). If I remember well, in one scene she’s sitting in Schiele’s lap and he shows her some of his erotic drawings, and she throws a quick shy glance, giggling and blushing, and you can see that she’s at unease with the nude models in his studio, stretching in different poses. She wanted to pose for him so he wouldn’t look at other women, but she just couldn’t satisfy his artistic demands. Again, that’s something that Wally did more than well.

Where did this wish to settle down, this wish for security come from? It seems like he wanted to indulge in a bourgeois life all of a sudden. Also, his decision to marry Edith and not Wally shows the double standards typical for men of his time; Wally was an artist’s model, a position practically equal to that of a prostitute, and as much as he loved her aggressive eroticism, he still wanted his wife to be modest and chaste. In the portrait of Edith in a striped dress from the same year, again her shyness shines through. Look at her eyes, frightened like that of a delicate fawn in the forest glade, and her sloping shoulders, almost crouching under the weight of the artist’s gaze, her hands in her lap; she looks like a child forced to sit still against its wish. Schiele always painted his middle-class wife modestly dressed, with a stiff collar and long sleeves, whereas looking at the pictures of Wally we know only of her petticoats, lingerie and stockings, not of her hats and dresses. Without a doubt, Edith loved Schiele, but she couldn’t understand his art.

Egon Schiele, Portrait of Edith Schiele with striped dress, 1915

Their marriage didn’t last long for they both died in that sad autumn of 1918. First World War had just ended, Spanish flu had taken many lives, amongst its victims were Edith who died six months pregnant on 28th October, and Schiele who died a few days later, on 31st October.

Everything that is sad, and occurs in autumn, gets imbued with an even greater sadness, but Autumn was Schiele’s favourite season, he wrote ‘I know there is much misery in our existence and because I find Autumn much more beautiful than every other season…. It fills the heart with grief and reminds us that we are but pilgrims on this earth…’ He also wrote in his short lyrical autobiography: ‘I often wept through half-closed eyes when Autumn came. When Spring arrived I dreamed of the universal music of life and then exulted in the glorious Summer and laughed when I painted the white Winter.’ The fresh, new, dreamy Spring of his art is forever tied with the image of cheerful Wally in her stockings, forever smiling from the canvas, and so the Autumn of his art is tied with Edith’s timid half smile and her striped dress. Rapture and gloom, life and death, Eros and Thanatos; all intertwined in Schiele’s paintings.

___________________________

*Egon Schiele, Frank Whitford