The MAN_Museo d’Arte della Provincia di Nuoro inaugurates the 2007 autumn exhibition season with the exhibition EGON SCHIELE (1890-1918) dedicated to the great Austrian artist, one of the main exponents of modern painting.
The exhibition intends to retrace the main themes of this illustrious master, who died at just 28 years old, with the aim of providing a complete overview of his production through eighty works including drawings, watercolors and gouaches.
In less than ten years of activity, Egon Schiele, a careful interpreter of that particular social reality that characterized fin de siècle Vienna, gave life to an immense graphic production: more than three thousand works including drawings and watercolours. Many of these sheets are dedicated to the human figure: most depict emaciated bodies, bony and angular figures, gaunt and emaciated faces, gnarled hands, melancholy gazes, vivid portraits finished with color, highly distorted expressions and experimental self-portraits of the artist.
In addition to this kind of subjects, there are some landscapes, descriptions of environments and buildings and, in some cases, still lifes of flowers or other objects. But the most relevant part of Schiele’s drawings is made up of the nudes, male and female, and the half-dressed figures that appear to us in unusual poses and attitudes, often in acrobatic positions, sometimes exhibiting their sexual organs. Other times, the objects of representation are pregnant women, child figures on the threshold of adolescence, fragmented bodies, double portraits and couples locked in an embrace. Schiele also loves self-portraits: in fact, the artist has left us an impressive number of his own images, in which the movements of the contorted body, the expressions of the face communicate the sense of alienation and anguished confusion experienced, thus strengthening the fame among contemporaries of a cursed, tormented and suffering artist. With such a considerable quantity of self-portraits, Schiele consciously attracted the public’s attention to his own person to the point of becoming, over time, a true icon of the twentieth century.
The exhibition, in giving ample space to the works on paper, highlights the extraordinary graphic ability of this artist, the perfect mastery of the line and the elegance of the refined and sharp expressiveness that emerges in particularly effective nudes. In his works, in fact, the drawing has an autonomous life: it crystallizes, with incredible precision and clarity, fleeting moments and sensations, bodies and glances. Egon Schiele is, first and foremost, a designer: his drawing is conducted with great mastery, the line flows precisely, lucidly calculated, docile and sharp at the same time, the contours are clear and defined. Another peculiarity of these works is the abolition of spatial references: generally, in fact, the artist renounces the description of the background and the
the environment to focus exclusively on the model. The human figure is the great, and extraordinarily effective, protagonist of these works, captured in portraits, self-portraits and nudes of an often erotic nature. The inappropriate contents of his works and the stylistic solutions adopted by Schiele appear completely natural today and have become part of our perceptive habits, but in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century those works were seen as the product of an anti-academic and sexually licentious artist , who was also sentenced to prison because he was accused of public immorality.
The MAN exhibition helps to highlight the evolution of Schiele’s art: from the works created in the years spent at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1906-1909) – characterized above all by the theme of landscape and which are still influenced by influence of Impressionism and Jugendstil – to the first period of stylistic emancipation (1909-1910), during which, alongside the ancestry of his friend and mentor Gustav Klimt, the bodies, caught in a nudity that seems to eviscerate the figure, appear almost disjointed in their essentiality.
The exhibition then deals with the years spent in Krumau and Neulengbach (1911-1912), extremely rich from a productive point of view and close to expressionist sensitivity, and those of the return to Vienna (1913-1918), during which the artist developed a rich and multifaceted production, composed of allegorical works and a series of portraits – which in the final period of his life are characterized by a new, and soft, plasticism – which guarantee him such recognition from the public and critics as to consecrate him among the absolute protagonists of the Viennese and European art scene.
Schiele’s death in 1918 due to an epidemic of Spanish fever was followed by years of oblivion for the artist, as if the reception of his art was inextricably connected to his person. Only decades later would Schiele’s contribution to the development of modern art be rediscovered and appropriately evaluated.
