Patrick Bade
Art in Vienna 1897-1918: Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele
Patrick Bade - Art in Vienna 1897-1918: Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele
- Thank you, Lauren, and welcome, everybody. So we’ve got up to the year 1908. And around about 1908, 1909, we see another big sea change in the cultural atmosphere of Vienna. Last time, I noted that Vienna went modern around 1897 to ‘98. But once you’re into the 20th century and 10 years later, 1908, we get a new kind of modernism which is tougher and harsher. And this is particularly associated in the visual arts with exhibitions that were held in 1908 and 1909 with the title of “Kunstschau.” And the photograph on the left shows an elegant and sophisticated crowd, Viennese crowd, about to enter the 1908 “Kunstschau.” And what really fascinates me about this picture, this photograph, is the contrast between the appearance of these very bourgeois, wealthy people and the kind of art that they were going to look at inside the exhibition, represented by Kokoschka. You see a poster for the exhibition on the right-hand side. So we see these men, as Baudelaire said in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” the madmen in modern urbanised, bourgeois society. They’re all dressed in black, and they all look like they’re attendees at a funeral. And the women, they’re in these extraordinary, complicated clothing, with layer upon layer upon layer of underwear before you see the final thing. You have very little idea of what a woman’s body is actually like underneath all this stuff, the corsetry, the padding, the upholstery.
And I quoted Stefan Zweig last time saying how unhygienic it often was and how people really had very little idea what the opposite sex looked like underneath all this clothing. Now, all these people, these respectable bourgeois people, they’re on the brink of some kind of revolution. And the women actually were on the brink of a revolution in fashion, 'cause that very same year, in 1908, in Paris, Paul Poiret, he liberates women from all these multi-layered dresses and all the corsetry and the upholstery, and he introduces a newer, freer shape for women. And women’s fashion changes really from one year to the next, very radically. And it’s not just in the visual arts, and it’s not just in fashion, that this change happens. We see it also in architecture. If you remember from last time, on the left we have the Majolikahaus by Otto Wagner. That was a break with the kind of wedding-cake historicism of the Ringstrasse. And instead you have quite a simple facade, but elaborately decorated with gorgeous Art Nouveau ornament derived from natural forms. So that’s 1898. Just over 10 years later we have Adolf Loos, the Haus am Michaelerplatz, that dates from 1910 to '12. And it was a scandal when that was built, 'cause it looked so naked. It looked so bare. And, in fact, the city of Vienna intervened, and they insisted that Adolf Loos add those slightly dinky little shelves for flowerpots underneath the windows. This is what the house… Oops. We’re stuck here. This is the actual design, how Adolf Loos wanted it to be. And now, because we’re used to seeing naked windows without little eyebrows and shelves and surrounds… That was really quite shocking in 1910.
Apparently the Kaiser Franz Joseph would avoid going out of the Hofburg entrance that faced this 'cause he disliked the building so much. And I’d like you to note the contrast between the stark simplicity of this facade and the one to the right of it, which dates back to the Ringstrasse period, which of course is fantastically elaborate and encrusted with classical ornament. And we have also a sudden sea change in music. I mentioned last time, 1897, Brahms dies. Mahler arrives, takes over the opera. Mahler is the musical king of of Vienna. And you’ll be getting talks on Mahler, both from Dennis and from me, further along the course. He’s the musical king of Vienna in this period, from 1897 to 1907. 1907, as we shall hear, he’s driven out of the Vienna Court Opera, and he goes to America. And I’m going to give you two musical examples to show this move from the sort of Belle Epoque plushness, lushness, sumptuousness of Mahler towards the new harsher musical language of Schoenberg. So first of all we are going to hear the opening bars of the first movement of Mahler’s “Fourth Symphony,” which was premiered in 1901. We’re going to hear it in a very fascinating historical recording under the Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg. You see Mengelberg with Mahler on a hike on the left-hand side. They were very close to one another. Mengelberg was the conductor that Mahler most admired, and he was considered the great champion of Mahler’s music during Mahler’s lifetime. Later, of course, his role was taken over by Bruno Walter, and I’ll be talking about that in a week’s time. But sadly, because Mahler died so young, we don’t have any recordings of him conducting.
We have a few piano roll recordings. We only have verbal descriptions of his conducting. So this unique recording, 'cause it’s the only complete symphony of Mahler that was recorded under the baton of Mengelberg, is very fascinating, 'cause I think it probably gives you a very good idea of how it was with Mahler himself conducting, very indulgent, with lots of rhythmic flexibility, lots of rubato, lots of wonderful sliding portamento. And this, what you see on the right-hand side, is Mengelberg’s score of the symphony, which you see is absolutely covered in notes. And down at the bottom, you may be able to read, he says, “Mahler told me in a rehearsal that this passage should be conducted like a Viennese waltz.” And you’ll hear it. It’s like there’s a little pause, and it slows down, and then we have the start of this melody in wonderful sort of yearning, gorgeous rubato and portamento. So, as I said, Mahler leaves Vienna in 1907. 1908, Arnold Schoenberg presents a breakthrough work to the Viennese public, his “Second String Quartet,” causes a scandal and a riot at its first performance with the angularity and the harshness of the musical language. This is another very fascinating historical recording with the Kolisch Quartet, which was led by Schoenberg’s brother-in-law. They didn’t actually present the premiere of the “Second Quartet” of Schoenberg, but he chose them to premiere both the Third and the Fourth quartets.
So, again, we have a really very direct connection with the composer himself. So we have a new generation, all young artists. In the middle is Richard Gerstl, and he’s born in 1883. On the right is Oskar Kokoschka, or I’m authoritatively told it should be pronounced Ko-koschka, but having done it once, I’m afraid I’m going to give up on that, as it just doesn’t come naturally, I think, to an English person to put the stress on the first syllable. He’s born in 1886, and Egon Schiele, on the right, is born in 1890. So these are very young artists indeed in 1908. They’re in their teens or early twenties. So Egon Schiele, he was the son of a provincial station master. We see his parents here on the left-hand side, his father a very handsome man, but brutal, violent, eventually mad, and died of syphilis, presumably the madness being associated with the syphilis. This rather touching photograph of Egon as a child is the only image that exists of him… There are hundreds and hundreds of images of him, either photographic or his self-portraits. In none of them is he ever smiling. This is the first and last image of the smiling Egon Schiele. As a child, he was fascinated by railway trains and did endless drawings of them. And in a violent rage, his father once burned all his early drawings of trains in front of the distressed child.
So he grew up, I think, in a very strange household. You sometimes think, gosh, the whole of Vienna was like a vast lunatic asylum around 1900. Of course, there was the great asylum at Steinhof outside the centre of the city, which still exists, which was a kind of separate city of the insane. But here is Schiele in his teens with his younger sister Gerti, with whom he apparently had an incestuous relationship. When he was 16, he went down to Trieste with his 12-year-old sister to stay the night in the hotel where his parents had spent their wedding night, apparently wished to recreate the event of his parents’ wedding night. And here is a drawing he made of her a little later, which, again, is a rather strange drawing to make of one’s younger sister. When he was a child, a small child, he had two obsessive preoccupations. One was looking at himself in his mother’s cheval glass, and the other was watching chickens copulate. You could say that, you know, the whole of his life’s career and interest were already established at a very early age, the narcissism, which I think we see very clearly in this early self-portrait on the left-hand side, and an obsessive interest in sex. Of course, he was not alone. As I said last week, there was a lot of it about in Vienna. And this, the narcissism, I think it comes through. There’s the, this is a self-posed photograph, a trick photograph where he shows him looking at himself, and the drawing on the right-hand side, where he shows him embracing himself. And I think there is a strongly obsessive narcissistic quality that comes across in the literally hundreds of self-portraits that he made, either photographic or in drawings or paintings. Well, you can compare him with great self-portraitists of the past.
He certainly spent a lot of time pulling faces in front of the mirror, as Rembrandt had done in the 1630s. I think both of them are interested in facial expression, and studying their own face in the mirror was one way to explore this. And the narcissism, I mean, Durer, who painted the first fully independent painted self-portraits at the end of the 15th century, Durer, on the left-hand side, also made by a very, very long way the first naked self-portrait in Western art, and whereas I think we can say that Schiele made more naked self-portraits than any other major artist in the Western tradition. You might feel that you get to know rather more than you want of these two men from these self-portraits, and others by Egon Schiele, like this one, where he really explores his own body with merciless truthfulness and intensity. Now, in his early teens, he went to study at the prestigious Vienna Academy. And he was extremely gifted as for drawing, so it was easy for him to gain entry to the Academy, under the notorious professor Christian Griepenkerl. Such a wonderful name, says everything about him. He was apparently a horrible, crusty, nasty old reactionary. So he’s famous for two artists that he accepted, young artists that he accepted, neither of whom liked him or got on with him, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl, and maybe even more famous for one student that he actually rejected twice. And that was Adolf Hitler, who you see bottom left here.
And of course there’s much speculation about how the world, the 20th century, might have been different if Professor Griepenkerl had accepted the young Adolf Hitler as a student at the Vienna Academy. Here is a photograph of a life class, and the circled figure in the background is identified as Egon Schiele. His early work around about this time that he’s just finishing or just after he’s finished at the… He didn’t last very long. He was accepted I think in 1906. Hitler was rejected in 1907. And soon after that, Schiele gave up on the Academy. And you can see, yes, what’s he been looking at? He’s certainly been looking at Gustav Klimt. I think he’s already, to a remarkable degree for such a young artist, his own man. But the flatness, the interest in patterning, the rather Art Nouveau quality to these images, self-portrait on the right-hand side, portrait of his younger sister, again, Gerti, on the left, these show a clear debt to Klimt. And he hero-worshiped Klimt, and he took himself to Klimt’s studio with some of his drawings to show to Klimt. And Klimt was enormously enthusiastic and really encouraged him. And I suppose very boldly, considering he’s just a boy and Klimt was, you know, at the height of his career and very, very famous at this point, he suggested swapping drawings with Klimt. They did, although Klimt actually said to him very generously, you know, your drawings are actually better than mine. And he painted this big picture, which is a sort of allegorical picture of himself and Klimt. It’s a painting really about their relationship, and they’re shown as hermits or monks. And we can make a direct and fascinating comparison between the two artists, because the young lady you see in the centre, she was called Friederike Maria Beer.
She was from the wealthy Viennese Jewish bourgeoisie. And she had the intelligence that nobody else had to commission full-length oil portraits from both Klimt and Schiele. And sadly they’re not in the same museum. The Klimt is in Tel Aviv. I’m not sure where the Schiele is. Last time, I mentioned the wonderful books on Klimt and Schiele. I mean, they’re quite short, but they’re such incisive and insightful books, by Alessandra Comini. And she wrote another book, a rather longer book, on Schiele’s portraits, and she went to visit Friederike Maria Beer, who told her very fascinating and interesting things about posing for the two artists. She clearly had the hots for the young and nervous, nervy, shall we say, rather than nervous, Egon Schiele. And I think probably Klimt was rather too old for her, but she recognised his charisma, his animal charisma. She said he actually even smelled like an animal. But you can see a very different take on on her. I mean, she was a pretty girl in a sort of rather plump, happy way. And so both artists think, mm, how can we make her interesting? And, as I said last time, Klimt poses her against a background of a violent battle which he’s borrowed from a Chinese ginger jar. So you have this very placid, plump woman standing in front of us with all this raging battle going on around her, and you’ve got the strange sensation that, you know, a sword is actually being driven through her head. Whereas Schiele, who’s made her look skinny and anxious as he was, he’s really, I think, imposed his own personality on her. And he got her to lie on the floor in a kind of semi-fetal position and to display hands that made them look like talons or claws, and she is surrounded by emptiness.
So Klimt has this horror vacui. He likes to fill every inch of the background with decorative detail. This is a portrait of 1910 where I feel that that Schiele has really reached full maturity as an artist and as a portraitist. It’s of a man called Eduard Kosmack, and it’s a really alarming portrait. This is in the Belvedere, in the Osterreichische Galerie. You stand in front of it and, oh, his eyes seem to bore through you. There’s this incredible intensity, with this frontal pose and total emptiness around the figure. Again, for contrast, so this is 1910, Schiele, on the left-hand side. 1912 is the second portrait that Klimt made of Adele Bloch-Bauer, again showing this horror vacui and filling the whole thing with gorgeous, lush decorative detail. And more examples of Schiele’s portrait style… Really, you’re concentrating on the person and maybe the inner being of the person. This is the difference. I think you could say that Klimt is much more concerned with the external appearance and the surroundings. Schiele and later Kokoschka, they make you feel that the artist is really trying to capture the spirit rather than the physicality of the person. And this, I think, touching portrait of a father and son, Heinrich and Otto Benesch… Otto, the young man, would later go on to become one of the most distinguished of Viennese art historians.
And he developed, Schiele developed, a friendship with the Lederer family. I talked about them last time, August Lederer, the industrialist, his wife Serena, who was rumoured to be having an affair with Klimt and whose daughter Elisabeth might have been Klimt’s daughter and for that reason was spared by the Nazis during the Second World War. This is Erich, who escaped and survived. And as an old man, he, again, had very detailed and vivid memories of his friendship with Schiele and what Schiele was like. And this is rather touching, I think, this photograph on the right-hand side of the elderly Erich Lederer standing in front of his portrait as a boy by Schiele. So Schiele, I suppose he makes his name with portraits, and portraits certainly form a very major part of his oeuvre. He also paints landscapes and flowers. He made a whole series of wonderful paintings of the town of Cesky Krumlov, where his mother had been born, in what was the, used to be called the Sudetenlands, the German-speaking part of the Czech Republic. And it’s a very pretty place. It’s actually astonishingly picturesque. It’s almost on an island in a sharp bend in the river, and there’s a castle overlooking it. And Schiele obviously went up to the castle, so that he could look down on the town for these pictures.
Now, Cesky Krumlov is now a really major tourist destination. As I said, it’s an incredibly picturesque town. But it rather sells itself on its connection with Schiele, rather in the way that, say, Salzburg sells itself on its connection with Mozart. There’s an irony in that, in that when Schiele was staying there with his mistress, they were regarded with deep suspicion by the local people as being thoroughly depraved and immoral bohemian types, and they were actually driven out of the town. Here is one of his landscapes. I remember giving a lecture, of course it is many years ago, and afterwards the young Austrian girl who obviously didn’t like the lecture, and she didn’t like the way I dwelt on the nudes and the sexual pictures, said, “Why do you have to talk about the sex? Why can’t you just talk about his landscapes and his flower pictures?” Well, the simple reason is, yes, it’s a lovely picture, but it’s not the reason that Schiele is famous. It’s not the reason that he’s great. Here are the sunflower pictures. He painted a series, which I imagine were inspired, of course, by the famous sunflowers of Van Gogh. And, yeah, they’re lovely. They have a certain pathos. But it’s really the human figure that engages him from the first. This is a drawing you can see he made in 1909, soon after he left the Academy.
And he acquired his mother’s cheval glass, and it was the most important prop in his studio. And he spent an awful lot of time posing nude in front of this. To me, these are the greatest things he did. And I think he’s much, much better on paper as a draughtsman than he is on canvas as a painter. He’s freer. It comes to him more naturally. Two more studies from his own body. And, again, let’s compare Schiele, on the left, with Klimt, on the right. Both artists are interested, one could even say obsessed, with human sexuality. And that’s… They’re not alone in this. This is the time, of course, of Freud, and Freud is… There are many other people, many doctors and scientists, trying to understand and explore human sexuality freed from the inhibitions of Judeo-Christian morality. But let’s look at these two. I mean, so these, both drawings, I think you have to say, yes, they are erotic drawings, because they are concerned with eros. But whereas the Klimt on the right-hand side, I can imagine somebody looking at that as a kind of pinup and finding it erotic, finding it a turn-on, it would be difficult to imagine anybody finding… Despite its extreme explicitness, with the open legs and so on, I think you’d have to be very strange to get turned on by that drawing on the left-hand side. It’s an alarming drawing, that I think Schiele, rather like Munch, he’s interested… There’s a frightening, there’s a terrifying side to sex and sexual desire. And this woman on the left-hand side, she’s staring at the viewer with really quite alarming, alarming intensity.
His drawings, his nude drawings, sold well. And these drawings, these are clearly two drawings… There are hundreds and hundreds of drawings, of course, that are studies, that are very free. But these are drawings that are clearly quite highly finished. And they’re drawings which… Well, the one on the right-hand side is of his wife, so it may not have been for sale, but the one on the left I’m sure was for sale. And he found many collectors for these drawings. And the whole thing is very studied. It’s very thought through, you know, the placing of the figures on the sheet and the placing of, notice the signature, which is in a little cartouche, as you might find a signature on a Japanese woodcut print. And the Japanese influence is still very pervasive in Vienna at this time. And this, the one on the right-hand side, you can see how important the placing of that cartouche with the signature is for the final effect of the drawing. It unifies the whole composition, and it brings in all that empty space into the composition. Here are more of these drawings, which I’m sure were intended for sale and that earned him quite a lot of money. And you can see an element of fetishism here, with the shoes and the stockings and the half-clothed… And you can say, yes, these are the tricks, the methods, of men’s magazines, the kind of magazines that used to be on the top shelf at WHSmith to keep them out of the hands of curious children. And so I think there is a certain type of even slightly exploitative eroticism in some of these drawings, like this drawing of a lesbian pair.
But I want you to consider, you tell me, which of these two is art with a capital A and which one is semi-pornographic? The painting on the left-hand side is by Henri Gervex, who was a highly successful, bemedaled French Academician. If you went to the Salon in the 1880s and ‘90s and right up to the First World War, the walls would’ve been absolutely covered with pictures like this, nudes like this, a very sexy nude, of course no pubic hair, nothing too real. It’s all very airbrushed, very beautiful. And she’s, you’ve got this rather simpering nude who’s eyeing the viewer with a kind of come-hither expression. So it’s clearly an image, an artist who’s setting out to titillate and to please, where I don’t think you could say that about the Schiele. So I’ll be interested in your reaction, if you find one or both of these pictures objectionable. So, like any artist, like Klimt, maybe not quite as obviously as Klimt, but Schiele also is picking up influences from other artists. And a major influence on his graphic style was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, as you see Lautrec on the left-hand side, Klimt on the right-hand side, use of different media, combining different media of, you know, gouache and pastel and so on. And he’s looking at sculpture. An artist who had a major impact in Vienna in 1900 was the Belgian Symbolist sculptor George Minne.
This piece on the right-hand side in particular had a tremendous success and was very well known, and it’s thought to have been the inspiration for many of these images of very emaciated young figures by Egon Schiele. Rodin. Last time I mentioned that Rodin made this visit to Vienna in 1902 that caused a huge, huge fuss, and everybody was very, very excited. One of the most controversial things about Rodin was his exhibiting of figures that seemed to be mutilated, that were missing arms or legs or feet or the head. These, of course, had in turn been inspired by fragmentary sculptures that survive from the ancient world, like the “Apollo Belvedere” on the left-hand side. But, ooh, know what, I should have… What’s happening there? I’m missing something. Might come up later. I was going to show you Schiele drawings of figures which are truncated, where the legs and the arms are missing. I think that will come up in a minute. So modernity, I think one of the aspects of early modernity was dealing with the unpleasant, the unacceptable, the uncomfortable. And certainly a major figure in establishing the modern sensibility was the Norwegian playwright Ibsen.
And the two plays which really revolutionised theatre and modern culture altogether were “A Doll’s House,” where of course at the end the wife claims her independence and walks out on her husband, and the other one was “Ghosts,” which dealt with the ultimate forbidden subject of syphilis, inherited syphilis. Syphilis was the great, dark, terrible, terrible secret of the 19th century that cut a huge swathe. I mean, it was said at one point in Paris that one person in five was infected with syphilis. And think of all the, you know, the great geniuses of the 19th century, probably Beethoven, certainly Schubert, certainly Schumann, Baudelaire, Guy de Maupassant, endless, endless cultural figures who were destroyed by syphilis. So this painting, I’ll never forget seeing this painting in reality for the first time, it would’ve been in the early '70s in London in a Munch exhibition, and watching an elderly woman with her granddaughter go around the exhibition. And the granddaughter, that was a little girl, was just, couldn’t be pulled away from it. The grandmother kept on saying, “Come away, come away, don’t look at that.” And the little girl was saying to her grandmother, “Granny, granny, what’s the matter with that child?” 'Cause it’s an image of a baby born with hereditary syphilis. So this is, as I said, this is an aspect of modernity, that you look frankly and truthfully at uncomfortable and sometimes very ugly things. Now, here’s a rather ugly and alarming man. Would you want to put yourselves in, especially women… This man was, he was a gynaecologist, and his name was Erwin von Graff, and he was the head of the women’s clinic of the Vienna University’s Hospital.
Terrifying man, I would think, to be examined by. And he was a friend of Schiele, and he invited Schiele to his clinic. Schiele had free range. And to modern ideas, it’s absolutely extraordinary that this young artist was just allowed to wander around the women’s clinic, observe everything that was going on, and to draw it. Now, is this the most terrifying gynaecologist in Western art, or here are two others. This is Christian Schad, “Dr. Haustein.” That’s a Neue Sachlichkeit painting of the 1920s. And the very handsome, but I think also quite sinister, Dr. Pozzi by… Maybe there’s a small exhibition here to be had about the gynaecologist in Western art. So on the left is one of these drawings. I mean, I suppose these women, they were mostly, I think, working-class women who couldn’t really play for their treatment, so they were probably just treated as meat in the hospital. So last time, it was interesting. A lot of the questions were about representations. A lot of the comments were about representations of pregnancy. And I mentioned how scandalous and how daring it was for Klimt to exhibit this picture, called “Hope,” on the right-hand side. And the same year, 1908, there was a big art scandal in London. The American artist Jacob Epstein, his first important commission was for sculptures for the British Medical Association. And it was his bad luck, actually, that opposite this building, the offices of the National Vigilance Society had their premises, and they looked up directly on this.
And of course people were absolutely scandalised that there could be such a frank depiction of naked pregnant nudity on a building on a London street, the Strand. And you can see that the sculptures, this is how it originally looked, on the left-hand side. Later they were mutilated on, inverted commas, health and safety grounds. Somebody claimed that something, if a bit of the sculpture fell off, it might kill somebody. But I think it was really on grounds of prudishness rather than health and safety that these sculptures were mutilated. And here is a newborn baby. The reality of it, I mean, a newborn baby is not a pretty sight. It’s a rather alarming sight. And so here is Schiele on the left-hand side, Klimt on the right-hand side, a much prettier, much more comfortable, much more decorative view of a child. Now, this is a prison cell in which Schiele landed up in 1912. He was staying in a place called Neulengbach not far from Vienna, and he apparently attracted all the sort of disaffected working-class children of the area, and he was drawing them. And he was accused of seducing a 13-year-old girl. In fact, that charge was dropped in the end, and I have no idea whether it was true or not, that charge. But when the police went to his studio, they found lots of drawings of naked or semi-naked children, and he was prosecuted. He was held for 21 days in the jail that you see here, and then he was sentenced to three further days in prison. You might think, well, actually he got off rather lightly. I’m not sure anybody today who had, you know, child pornography on their telephone or their computer would get off… They wouldn’t get off as lightly as that.
But Schiele obviously felt very martyred, victimised. And he was actually allowed his paints and paper while he was in prison, and he made these self-portraits in prison. Now, this talk, I have actually done something which I’ve almost never done before, in that I have self-censored. I mean, I’ve lectured on Schiele many, many times, and I’ve shown these drawings, and I’ve invited comment. But it’s a very different thing in a class with students, or, I mean, in a class, say, at the London Jewish Cultural Centre, where you might have 30 people. I thought about this, and I thought, hmm, I can see that there are 1600 computers tuned into this, and I’m not sure it’s a good idea to show these images in this way. So, in fact, I took them out of the PowerPoint. And you’ll see in all… If you look at the PowerPoints that you get sent, you’ll notice that there are always lots and lots of images down at the bottom, and these are the outtakes. I start off with a huge, huge number of images. I know I use too many images anyway. And I pull them out and I put them down at the bottom in case I want to change the lecture on another occasion. So if you are curious and if you want to see these images and if you want to make your own judgement about whether you think they are paedophile or not or whether you think they’re acceptable or not, you can bring up the images on the PowerPoint you’ve been sent and scroll down to the bottom. Here is Schiele, again, looking at himself in that cheval glass, and a rather intriguing drawing where he’s standing in front of the glass with a model between him and the glass. And here he is standing in front of the glass.
Now, I’m going… I think my next image is one I thought, shall I take this out or not? And I decided not to take it out. But you can look the other way, or you don’t have to look at it. But it’s an image of himself masturbating. Trudy always says I nearly got the London Jewish Cultural Centre shut down because I had it in a lecture there, and by chance there was a delegation of orthodox rabbis who came to the school. And they walked in on my lecture when I was showing this image, which is a bit of an alarming image, and it might be rather more of Egon Schiele than you want to know about. But he made lots of these drawings, and he actually hung them off the balcony to attract attention of two sisters who were living in the flat opposite. And obviously it worked, 'cause he married one of them. And here is his drawing with Edith, who became his wife. And he made drawings of himself… He was making love to her, you know, in front of that mirror. So there’s a rather shaky drawing, as you can imagine it might well be, as he’s multitasking here. He’s making love to his wife and drawing that event as seen in the mirror, and then a rather more elaborated version of the same subject. And for comparison here, interesting, isn’t it? I mean, the Klimt, which is very about… It’s a very erotic picture, and in some ways it’s very explicit, but in a symbolic, decorative way. And there’s a rather more gritty truthfulness, I think, about the act of love in the work of Schiele. Now we move on to Richard Gerstl. Short, tragic life… Only really a handful of works survive.
He was born into the Viennese bourgeoisie, quite a wealthy family. His father was a wealthy assimilated Jewish merchant. And I stress that because this is such a fascinating thing about Vienna, that I know Trudy’s been talking about this. How is it that pretty well everybody of interest in Vienna in 1900 was Jew-ish? You know, they were assimilated Jews or one parent was Jewish or whatever. It’s hard to find anybody who’s not, and yet where the visual artists were not Jewish. Schiele, Klimt, Kokoschka, or Ko-koschka, they were from Christian backgrounds. So the dealers, the collectors, the gallerists, the critics, they’re all Jewish. But the only major artist who could be classified as Jewish would be Richard Gerstl, but you probably have to be a Nazi to classify him as Jewish, because his, as I said, it was his father, not his mother, who was Jewish. So as far as Jews are concerned, he wasn’t Jewish, and I very much doubt whether he regarded himself as being Jewish. He was certainly somebody who was filled with self-loathing and self-hatred. Could that be something to do… I mean, I don’t know enough about it, does anybody know enough about it, to know if that had something to do with his Jewish background and the ambient antisemitism of Vienna in 1900.
But this sense of self-loathing and being incredibly uncomfortable in his own skin, it comes through in his self-portraits and also, actually, in the odd way he reused his self-portraits. On the left, you can see he’s reused the canvas, paints something else on the other side. On the right-hand side, this is a painting, when I first saw it, it just blew me away. It’s so powerful, so disturbing. It was a full-length portrait of himself that he obviously loathed, because he’s disfigured the face. He’s attacked his own face, and he’s turned it around and he’s turned it upside down. And he painted a portrait of Zemlinsky on the other side, which I’m going to show you in a minute. So here is that portrait, the right way up. And have you ever seen an image of a laugh that was more uncanny, more disturbing, more uncomfortable, than these two self-portraits laughing? And there’s something horribly naked… Actually, I feel he’s naked even where he’s clothed on the left-hand side. There’s a kind of nakedness, a vulnerability, naked in the sense of being, you know, baring yourself. And this painting on the right-hand side, nude self-portrait, life-size, that he painted the year he committed suicide in 1908. I think he could have turned into one of the great painters. There’s a wonderful panache and verve and something almost ecstatic, rather van Gogh-like, about this landscape, again painted the year before he died. This is 1907. And he’s a wonderful portraitist.
Like Schiele and like Kokoschka, he doesn’t seem to… This is a pair of sisters, Viennese sisters. Again, a rather disturbing portrait, a ghostly quality. So obviously, he’s painted their spirit rather than their physicality. The same with these two portraits. This is Alexander Zemlinsky, the composer with an unbelievably terrible and tragic life, actually, that I’m going to be talking about in my next talk on Sunday, a wonderful composer. If you haven’t heard of him, you need to hear of him, 'cause he’s really amazing, but a very sad life. And this is the other side of the disfigured self-portrait. And on the right is his sister Matilda Zemlinsky, who was the first wife of Schoenberg. And this is one of the last pictures that he painted, that Gerstl painted. He moved into the same block as Schoenberg and his family, and he had a brief affair with Matilda. She actually left Schoenberg briefly for Gerstl but then went back to Schoenberg. And Gerstl was so distressed by this that he hanged himself, and he stabbed himself and hanged himself, after having tried to destroy and burn all his work. So it’s really a terrible story. Now, this is the “Kunstschau” of 1908, again, with a poster by Kokoschka, Oskar Kokoschka. When he… He was of course of Czech origin, comes to Vienna. Like Klimt, he decides not to study at the Academy. He decides to study at the Kunstgewerbeschule, the School of Applied Arts. That building is now the Museum of of Applied Arts in Vienna, one of my favourite museums in the world. I love taking people to this museum.
It is a completely fascinating and wonderful museum. There, inserted, is the young, rather handsome Kokoschka around the time of his affair with Alma that I’ll be talking about in a week or so. So, and this is, oh. I want a little diversion here if I’ve got a couple of minutes. This is a drawing I bought yesterday by another artist who was a student at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna at just about this time, about a year or two after Kokoschka was there. This is the Polish artist Henryk Gotlib. And so I just picked up this drawing yesterday. I think it’s a very beautiful, touching drawing, and it may be a study for this picture, which I bought last year, also by him, dating from 1915. He was, as I said, a Polish artist who studied in Vienna. And then after the First World War he moved to Paris, became part of the Ecole de Paris. And then, luckily, just before the Second World War he arrived in this country. He married a Scotswoman. And so he lived the rest of his life as a refugee, not really very appreciated by the Brits. They didn’t really go for art of an Expressionist tendency. This is also by him. And I just wanted to mention that his descendants are actually dispersing his studio, and if anybody likes this kind of thing or is interested, I can put you in touch with the people who are dispersing his studio. And they don’t go for huge sums of money. I paid, what did I pay? I paid 475 pounds for the drawing, and I paid I think around 3000 pounds for the painting. Anyway, back to Kokoschka. As I said, trained as a decorative artist, as an illustrator. Gets his first breaks working for the Wiener Werkstatte, set up in 1903 by the Jewish entrepreneur Fritz Waerndorfer.
Again, as I said, you know, everything in Vienna seems to be Jew-ish. And these postcards he designed, you can buy these. You can find them for not enormous sums of money in Vienna. And this is an illustrated book that he was commissioned to make, again, for the Wiener Werkstatte, “Die Traumenden Knaben,” “The Dreaming Youths.” That’s sort of in the book. And a wonderful portraitist too. I think the great… Well, Kokoschka is a very, very long-lived artist. But I think the great Kokoschka is the pre-First World War Kokoschka. This is a portrait of the Swiss sexologist, neurologist, psychiatrist called August Forel. And you can… Again, it seems to be almost dematerialized. It’s the spirit of the man, the inner life of the man, that we seem to see. And a lot of these early self-portraits, so different from the lushness and sensuality of Klimt. The paint is very thin. It’s almost like stained into this canvas or scratched into this canvas. It’s scrappy. For comparison, here’s an unfinished Klimt, gorgeous, lush, fabulous in his sort of Belle Epoque way, and this very ascetic portrait of an aristocratic woman by Kokoschka on the right-hand side. Klimt on the left, Kokoschka on the right. Again, a very different take on a baby. That is a powerful creature. You know how babies, they don’t know how fragile they are? They think that they’re Napoleon or, you know, a small baby thinks it has to control the world. And I think you get a sense of that with Kokoschka, of this actually being a mighty creature, this little baby. But I’m going to move on to my final images. 1918 is, in so many ways, it’s almost like the end of the world in Vienna, because they’ve lost the First World War.
The city is starving, you’ve got the end of the Habsburg monarchy, and the Spanish flu really does them in. I said last time that Klimt died of Spanish flu. In fact, he had a stroke, so it was the stroke and the Spanish flu that finished him off. But Otto Wagner, so many key figures in Viennese culture, die in 1918. This is Schiele on his deathbed. He seemed to be on the brink of a new happiness, a new phase in his life. He was very happily married with his wife, Edith. She was pregnant. He was thrilled about that, about having a baby. And this is the last picture, unfinished picture, that he painted. Rashly, he literally counted his chicks before they were hatched. He painted this picture of his family, himself, his wife, and the baby, who was not actually born and never would be born, because Edith contracted the flu. And he knew she was dying, and he climbed into bed with her in order to deliberately infect himself, and he died a couple of days after she did. So that’s where I come to a very sad end of this talk. And let’s see what we’ve got in the way of…
Q&A and Comments:
Thank you. Yes. I mean, this is not the most comfortable place to live. I’m more comfortable in Paris. No, it’s not true. I’m sorry, Sandy, that’s completely wrong. Schiele had no daughters. He did not abuse his daughters. I don’t know where any of that comes from. And don’t feel guilty about enjoying his work. I mean, he’s… If he did commit sins, they’re not your sins. Just enjoy the work.
“Now in people come in torn blue jeans.” Yes, yes, very different.
“A plaque for Oskar, O.K., on our court in St. John’s Wood.” Yes, he also came here for a while as a refugee just before the Second World War.
“No blue plaque for Stefan Zweig in London.” Yes, , I agree with you. He deserves one. He should have one. He’s a hero for me.
“That you can visit the building Loos designed on the Michaelerplatz. We were able to go in the original bathrooms.” Oh, I’d love to see the bathrooms designed by Loos. That would be really something.
“Mengelberg was Dutch, although he was half German, and I’m not surprised that the notes were in…” Yes, you’re quite right. The notes are in German. But I think he was half German. Of course, he was later accused of collaboration in the Second World War.
“Dissonance in Schoenberg’s music, grotesqueness in images. There is an unintended foreshadowing of a world…” Yes, I think there is. I think that’s an interesting thing. It’s interesting to think about.
Q: Can I please define some basic ideas of modernism?
A: Well, beyond what I said in the lecture, I don’t think I can at this point. That’s another lecture, really, a lecture in itself.
Yeah, he certainly would’ve loved selfies. Oh, my god, the thought.
“Schiller and Schiele are, two names are homophones, also Millay and Millet.” I’m sure there are plenty, plenty, with all the Strausses I’m going to talk about soon.
“There seems to be a Klimt echo in the…” There is in the very early ones, but I’d say he… Griepenkerl, his name was, who… No, he wasn’t Jewish. And, well, of course there’s so much speculation about Hitler’s antisemitism, where it comes from, whether it came from his rivalry with Ludwig Wittgenstein, whether it came from the fact that his mother’s Jewish doctor failed to save him, et cetera, et cetera. I’m going to Courtauld Gallery, thank you, on Monday. I shall look out for that. Because he painted them for Count… He was an Austrian count who came to England as a refugee.
Q: “Was there any interaction between Viennese artists and the French Impressionists?”
A: Yes, but the influence is from the French on the Viennese, not the other way around.
The artists’ names are all spelled on the list that you were sent this morning. They are lovely landscapes, but they’re not the most important things, I think. You saw an exhibition of Schiele in Cesky Krumlov.
“The paintings of the buildings are gorgeous.” Yes, they are. Oh, somebody’s enjoying a sunset like one I showed.
“Are there any…” It’s not, you’ve got the wrong spelling there of Schiele. “In London galleries?” No, there aren’t. I don’t think there are. There’s one Klimt, of course, in the National Gallery. I think the Brits left it too late. And, as I said, they’ve never…
Q: What are my views on Hundertwasser?
A: Hmm, I’m not that keen, to tell you the truth.
“Reference seated nude self-portrait next to Klimt one, it might not be an ideal pinup, but what a superb…” Totally agree with you, Margaret, on that.
Q: “Did he practise any religion at all?”
A: I don’t think so. Glad I prepared you for the pubic hair in your… Yes, I know. This was… The Klimt is relatively easy way into all of this stuff.
“Gaunt, emaciated figures evoke images of the Shoah.” Yes, I mean, possibly. But of course that is a coincidence.
Q: “No women artists during this time?”
A: Yes, there are lots of wonderful women artists. The best of all for me is Paula Modersohn-Becker. She’s a fantastic artist. And there are, you know, Sonia Delaunay… Oh, there are lots and lots of women artists around this time, very good ones.
Q: “Why would anyone want to marry, knowing his reputation?”
A: Well, as I said, even Friederike Maria Beer, she told Alessandra Comini that she really found him attractive and had the hots for him. And she was a very respectable bourgeois woman.
“We’re all adults. We can look away if we’re offended.” Thank you very much for that.
“But if art is supposed to provoke, personally I prefer Klimt to Schiele. But they’re both artists of their era.” Thank you. I totally agree with that.
“Obvious Japanese Shunga influences.” Yes. As I said, Japanese really opened the eyes of many Western artists.
Q: “How did the Nazis view Kokoschka?”
A: They reviewed him as a degenerate artist, and he of course did his famous self-portrait. He was included in the Degenerate Art show, and his response was to paint “Self-Portrait of a Degenerate Artist.”
“Not many Jewish artists in the early years were allowed to make, were not allowed to make…” Yes, that is a theory which I think has a lot going for it, that it took longer for art. Once you get into the 20th century, the Ecole de Paris, it’s different. But it took an extra generation of assimilation, I think, before you could get major Jewish artists.
“Was Picasso influenced by…” No, I don’t think so. I very much doubt whether Picasso knew anything about Schiele at all. I mean, Schiele wasn’t, you know, Schiele didn’t really become known, internationally known, until after Picasso’s death. This is Ted saying he finds an echo of Goya. I think in, yes, the brutality, the truthfulness. They certainly all knew Goya’s prints, even if they didn’t know the paintings. They would’ve known “The Disasters of War” and “Caprichos.”
Q: “Is there another artist like Schiele who has drawn or painted in such brutal, up-front, honest fashion?”
A: Well, of course there is Freud, well, he’s not alive now, but, you know, who I think was attempt… I don’t think he’s as good as Schiele, but in that… I’m glad you like my purchases. I’m totally thrilled with them, especially the painting, I feel it’s… I have to think who to give that painting to, because it should be in a public collection, really. No, well, I mean, it’s unsigned. But I, you know, I got it from the family, and it’s pretty obviously by the artist. I did a tour of my Paris flat, my London house. Oh, my god, it’s such a mess.
Q: “Was bipolar disorder, which has often been associated with creativity, a frequent occurrence amongst famous artists?”
A: That’s interesting. There’s a book there or a TV programme. I can’t answer you right now. Well, I tell you what, Ilana, anybody who is interested in being put in touch with the family, why don’t… Just email me, and you can do that via Lockdown, and I will just put you in touch with the people who are dispersing the collection.
Q: Am I aware that Schiele’s “Portrait of Wally” is now at the Leopold Museum?
A: No. Well, I have been to both, of course, but it didn’t come to mind. Joanna has two portraits by Gotlib.
“Artist who painted himself upside down is…” Well, he didn’t paint it upside down. He turned it upside down. That’s Richard Gerstl. All names on the list that you were sent this morning.
Right. Lucian Freud, yes. I mean, Lucian Freud, obviously very influenced. On the elongated, very prominent fingers… Yes, there’s something very mannered about them, isn’t there? I’m not sure I can make a significant comment at this point.
Is there… I don’t think Kokoschka and Modigliani ever met one another. No, I don’t think that could be right.
Works by Heinrich Gotlib… No, it’s Henryk, Henryk Gotlib, spelled G-O-T-L-I-B. You can Google him. There’s quite a lot about him on Google. And if, as I said… Just contact me and I will just put you in touch with the people who are dispersing the contents of his studio.
Q: “What did the Nazis think of Schiele’s work?”
A: Do you know, I… He was not that well known. Of course, he was Aryan, inverted commas. He wasn’t Jewish. I’m not aware that they destroyed his work. They certainly, I don’t think they would’ve liked it very much.
Oh, Alyssa has three works by Henryk Gotlib. And there you see the right spelling of the name.
“Just got to mention that he signed one of my drawings and wrote some nice words on it, and I was a prize winner.” That, you’re talking about Henryk Gotlib, I suppose. This is Heather Kaplan, who wrote a paper on Schiele. Let me see.
Q: “What was the name of the composer, relatively…”
A: Alexander Zemlinsky. I’ll be talking about him. It’s gorgeous stuff. If you like Mahler, you’re going to love Zemlinsky. And just, anybody, yes, just… I’m happy to… My email, if you can write it down, is pjsbade@aol.com. I mean, if you email me either directly or through… Poor old Lauren, I’m giving her lots of work.
Q: “Any women artists painting sexual themes?”
A: Yes, there have been. I suppose later in the 20th century, there’ve been several.
Q: “Any note of the impact of this art on the development of Nazi philosophy? How did Hitler, who painted landscape…”
A: Well, of course he would’ve hated all of this thing. Hitler was fantastically ungifted.
You have to sympathise with poor Professor Griepenkerl. Thank you for your nice comments. Would I give you a lecture on Lucian Freud? I’m not sure I would. I don’t feel sufficiently in tune with him to really want to do a whole lecture on him. It’ll be better to get somebody else to do it for you.
My email, pjs, S for sugar, bade@aol.com. And which largest, largest collection of Schiele works? The two museums that have the largest collection would be the Belvedere in Vienna and of course the Leopold collection, also in Vienna. They have the largest collection. It’s quite hard to see his work away from Vienna. And, of course, works on paper tend not to be exhibited because they’re light sensitive. So that seems to be it.
Thank you very, very much. And please don’t be put off if you haven’t heard of Zemlinsky. I promise you, you will love Zemlinsky’s music if you like music. That’s it. Thank you. Bye-bye.