Egon Šile: Radikalni akt
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Šile je bio moj pubertetski idol. Naravno, bio je svačiji, od fasciniranih klinaca Beča i Neulengbach-a do srednjoškolaca iz celog sveta: njegova neofitska opsednutost seksom, napućeni selfies i romantični ideal vitke gotske lepote, zaprljane erotike i patnje ga stavlja u isti tabor sa mladim sledbenicima vampirskih saga 21. veka. Još uvek drsko savremen stotinu godina posle smrti, Egon Šile (1890-1918) je konačno dobio izložbu aktova u galeriji Courtauld u Londonu. Prva velika muzejska postavka u Velikoj Britaniji posle više od dvadeset godina, The Radical Nude se fokusira na osam ključnih godina Šileove karijere pred kraj života, predstavljene lucidnim izborom 38 muških, ženskih i dečijih aktova – sumacija od preko 6000 crteža nastalih za vreme njegovog kratkog života.
Šileovi crteži, simultano teški i graciozni, nastanjuju preklapajući prostor gotike, orijentalne dekorativnosti, elegantne art deko linije i egzistencijalne analize koji je stvorila Bečka secesija, uzdižući se izvan buržoaskih parametara bečkog života. The Radical Nude uzima 1910.kao godinu pomaka u Šileovom radu, i jasno je zašto: forma je učvršćena, tretman boja i prostora postaje složeniji u saglasnosti sa tadašnjim umetničkim pokretima koji eksperimentišu sa fragmentiranjem i poravnanjem prostora i disperzijom jakog kolorita; sigurniji je u svoj kadar i dinamičnu, grafičnu kompoziciju. Šileovi autoportreti su puni neuroza i želje, u ritmu sa ‘Neurotičnim sustavom’ Alfreda Adlera ili Frojdovim principima zadovoljstva i tumačenjima snova. Njegov glavni subjekt, telo, je posmatrano iz blizine, lica su pod lupom, izrazi izvedeni na površinu, udovi istegnuti, rašireni i uvrnuti; mišići, tetive i kosti probijaju kroz providnu kožu, genitalije isijavaju životom i zasićenim bojama, dobivši fokus i značaj sličan erogenim zonama sa japanskih erotskih drvoreza – ali Šileovi aktovi su gotovo uvek sami. Razotkrivaju se, ali nisu naročito druželjubivi; nude podrugljivu nezainteresovanost umesto zavođenja.
Do 1910-e Šile je upoznat sa radovima Kokoške, Klimta, Javlenskog, Erika Hekela i drugih, što se vidi iz njegovog tretiranja akta. Međutim, Šileov subjekt – muškarac ili žena, skelet ili dete – biva prikazan sa novom, besramnom analitičnošću i privlačnošću. Početkom dvadesetog veka pornografija je vrvela Bečkim ulicama i salonoma, medjutim Šile ide korak dalje spajajući psihološku konstituciju svojih aktova sa sirovom neposrednošću poželjnosti. Za razliku od Kokoške , čiji rani radovi na sličan način istražuju angularnost forme (može se videti na primeru serije litografija iz 1907-e pod uticajem “bezmesne gotike” Žorž Minea, takođe u kolekciji Courtauld-a), ali iz aspekta egoističnog ženomrsca, ili od Klimta, čiji je impozantni studio zračio privlačnošću pozlaćene operetske erotike, Šile je vizionar drugog kova. Danas bi verovatno bio proglašen za umetnika društvenih manjina, ali Šileovi interesi ostaju ukorenjeni u fizičkoj i slikarskoj organizaciji prostora. Mršavi klinac iz Tulna na Dunavu koji opsesivno crta sebe i druge mršave klince, ulične siročiće i prostitutke nalazi izuzetnu snagu i želju u pojednostavljenom geometrizmu njihovih tela. Bez selektivnosti kada je u pitanju pol ili društveni status, Šileovi aktovi zadržavaju dostojanstvenu pribranost. Čak i najranjiviji subjekti (kao što je mlada kurtizana na Sedećem aktu sa kikicama) iskazuju neposrednost u prisustvu umetnika i posmatrača, bez potrebe za koketerijom toliko prisutnom na bečkim “erotskim” razglednicama iz tog perioda. Na crtežu Žena i dete (žena sa homunkulusom), kurtizana je prikazana sa preglomaznim detetom koje se drži za nju. Ovaj crtež predstavlja blisku vezu između želje, majčinstva i fizičkog propadanja, i može da se posmatra i kao nepoštovanje konvencionalnih predstava materinstva, ali i kao shvatanje kompletnosti ljudskog bića: kurtizana može istovremeno biti i majka.
Međutim, Šilea ne treba shvatati kao ranog feministu (u šta se prenaglašeno upušta Jonathan Jones). Dok je jasno da je voleo žene, nema dokaza da ih je smatrao ravnopravnim. Posle kraćeg boravka u zatvoru zbog ugrožavanja javne pristojnosti, Šile 1915 ostavlja svoju višegodišnju ljubavnicu, modela Vali Nojzil, ženi ze dobrostojećom Edit Harms i posle par meseci vojne službe u Bohemiji uspostavlja neku vrstu respektabilnog života u Beču. Eros i smrt još uvek dominiraju njegovim platnima i crtežima, ali radove otkupljuju veće zbirke i kolekcionari. Dvostruki crtež Edit (Dve devojke u zagrljaju ili Prijateljice) iz 1915 je opisan kao “gotovo lezbejski” ali poznata je i tadašnja bečka sklonost ka lutkama u prirodnoj veličini (Kokoška je imao jednu napravljenu po uzoru na svoju ljubavnicu Almu Maler), dok oči devojke na crtežu izgledaju kao dva prošivena plava dugmeta. Da li je ovaj matchy-matchy par jedna ista žena? Tokom 1915 Šile predstavlja telesnost kroz oštra skraćenja i preklapanja tela (napr. u autoportretima Samoposmatrač i Delirijum iz 1913 , ili Prijatelji i Preobraženje iz 1914). Takodje Šileov arhiv u muzeju Albertina u Beču poseduje duple ekspozicije koje pokazuju da je Šile uveliko eksperimentisao sa ukrštanjem formi. U svakom slučaju, sličan pogled lutke polako prevladava na svim njegovim slikama žena, pretežno Edith. Oči više ne gledaju direktno ili ispitujuće, nego su omekšane naivnošću i dosadom. Ovaj pozni period u Šileovim radovima je često okarakterisan kao zreliji i mirniji, sa složenijim tretmanom kompozicije i tela, ali interesantno je kako prazni pogled marionete podriva ova zdrava, čvrsta tela.
Šile je umro 1918-e, u 28-oj godini života, što se ne vidi iz savremenosti njegovih radova. Paralele se mogu naći sa psihološki prodornim portretima Lucijan Frojda, maskama i dečijim aktovima Marlene Dimas ili u fokusu na telo i autopercepciju Dženi Savil (što je tema tekuće zajedničke izložbe Šile / Savil u Ciriškoj Kunsthaus). Šileovi nekomformistički, ikonoklastični aktovi i danas ostaju aktuelni i radikalni.
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Egon Schiele: The radical Nude je u Courtauld galeriji u Londonu od 23. oktobra 2014. do 18. januara 2015. Figures of Expression and Transgression, seminar koji istražuje predstavljanje tela od strane savremenih umetnika i nasledje Egona Šilea u odnosu na umetnost i pornografsku sliku je u Drawing Room u Londonu 10. novembra 2014.
Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude
Schiele was my teenage hero. It is easy to see how he could be everyone’s teenage hero, from the fascinated youths of Vienna and Neulengbach to the precocious art schoolers the world over: his neophyte fascination with sex, pouty selfies and romantic ideals of slim gothic beauty, tainted eroticism and mortal suffering puts him in the same camp with the young vampire saga followers of the 21st century. Still outrageously contemporary nearly hundred years after his death, Egon Schiele (1890-1918) is finally awarded an exhibition of nude drawings at the Courtauld Gallery in London. The artist’s first major museum exhibition in the UK for over twenty years, The Radical Nude focuses on the eight key years of Schiele’s career recreated in lucid selection of 38 male, female and child nudes – a strong highlight of over 6000 drawings he produced during his short life.
Schiele’s works, simultaneously grim and graceful, inhabit that overlapping space of gothic revival, oriental decorativeness, sleek Art Deco lines and existential analysis that was Viennese Secession, thus elevating outside the bourgeois parameters of the Viennese life. The exhibition takes 1910 as Schiele’s breakthrough year: the form solidifies, the colour treatment of space gets more complex – decorative and patchwork, with a nod to current art movements that experiment with breaking and flattening of planes and pointillising paint – he is surer of his lens-wise crops and dynamic, highly graphic compositions. His self-portraits are riddled with neuroses and desire, in beat with Alfred Adler’s Neurotic Constitution and Freud’s pleasure principle and Interpretation of Dreams. Schiele’s main subject matter, the body, gets a close and unadorned look: faces are scrutinised and expressions brought to surface, limbs extended and stretched, splayed and twisted, the muscle, sinew and bone visible through translucent skin, the genitals gleam with life and saturated colour, gaining focus and importance similar to the those on Japanese erotic woodblocks – only Schiele’s nudes are almost always alone. They’re displayed, but not particularly sociable; the emotion is sneering disinterest rather than seduction.
By then Schiele was familiar with the works of Kokoschka, Klimt, Jawlensky, Erich Heckel and possibly much further afield, as is exemplified in his treatment of paint. However, he owns his subject matter, depicting the nude – male or female, infant or old – in an unashamedly analytic and engaging way. Shocking as it may seem today, porn was rife on the streets and parlors of Vienna; however Schiele goes further in marrying the psychological constitution of his subjects to the raw explicitness of their desirability. Unlike Kokoschka, whose early works explore similar angularity of form (for example, in 1907. lithographs influenced by the ‘fleshless Gothicism’ of Georges Minne, also in the Courtauld collection) but who was an egotistic misogynist, or Klimt, whose imposing studio exuded allure of gilded ornamentation of operatic eroticism, Schiele’s vision was of a different kind. In contemporary world he’d be called the champion of social issues, but his main interests remain the physical and painterly organisation of space. A skinny scruffbag from Tulln an der Donau, he obsessively drew himself and other skinny scruffbags, street urchins, prostitutes and lost youths, and found extraordinary strength and desire in simplification and geometrization of their bodies. Indiscriminate when it came to drawing bodies, Schiele was equally indiscriminate in allowing them the dignity of self-possession. Even the most vulnerable of subjects (such as the young prostitute on Seated Nude Girl With Pigtails) appear at ease with the artist and therefore the viewer, with no apparent need to crack a sly smile so prevailing on the Viennese ‘dirty’ postcards of the time. In Woman and Child (Woman with Homunculus), the young prostitute is depicted with a child clutching on to her side. The painting, showing a close relationship between desire, childbirth and decay, can be read as the disregard for the conventional depiction of motherhood, but also as an understanding of the completeness of a human being: the hooker can also be a holy mother.
It would be a push to understand Schiele as a feminist. While he clearly admired women, there’s no proof that he thought them equal. After a brief stint in jail following the accusations of public indecency, in 1915 he separates from his loyal model and lover Wally Neuzil, marries the middle-class Edith Harms and, following several months of military service in Bohemia, settles into an almost cosy and respectable life in Vienna. Eros and Death still loom in his works, but his work gradually finds way into larger collections and galleries. His drawing of Edith with a double, Two Girls Embracing (Friends) from 1915, is described as ‘almost lesbian’, but we know that Viennese had a penchant for life-sized dolls (Kokoschka had one made to the liking of his lover, Alma Mahler), and the eyes of the second girl look like two stitched blue buttons. Could the matchy-matchy couple be one and the same woman? By 1915 Schiele depicted corporeality by foreshortening and overlapping of bodies (as in self-portraits Self-Observer and Deliriums from 1913, or Friends and Transfiguration from 1914); the Schiele Archive in Albertina museum holds some double-exposure plates that show he was experimenting with intersections of forms. In either case, a similar doll-like gaze creeps slowly on all his paintings of women, predominantly Edith. Their eyes stop sneering or gazing sharply, instead softening to a deadly dull. Art history makes much of his calmer, more complex treatment of bodies in the last years of his life, going as far as to claim that he finally found peace and mature love; and yet the doll like gaze of his subjects defy the healthy, sturdy flesh.
Schiele died in 1918 aged only 28, which is hard to comprehend by the contemporaneity of his works. Parallels can be drawn with Lucian Freud’s psychologically penetrating portraiture, Marlene Dumas’ mask like faces and child nudes, or most recently with Jenny Saville’s focus on flesh and self-perception (as noted with the current joint exhibition Schiele/Saville in Kunsthaus Zürich). His discomforting, iconoclastic and painterly masterful nudes certainly remain as radical and questioning as if made today.
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EgonSchiele: The Radical Nude is at the Courtauld Gallery from 23 October 2014 to 18 January 2015. Figures of Expression and Transgression, a seminar exploring contemporary artists’ representation of the naked body and EgonSchiele’s legacy in relation to art and the pornographic image is at the Drawing Room on November 10, 2014.
