Egon Schiele ed. by Vienna Albertina

Abstract

Reviewed by: Egon Schieleed. by Vienna Albertina Alys X. George Albertina, Vienna, ed., Egon Schiele. With texts by Johann Thomas Ambrózy, Christof Metzger, and Klaus Albrecht Schröder and an essay by Eva Werth. Translated by Gérard A. Goodrow, Bram Opstelten, and Michael Scuffil. Vienna/Munich: Albertina/Hirmer, 2017. 379 pp. Exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition "Egon Schiele" at the Albertina, Vienna, 02 22– 06 18, 2017. "How often do you have to listen to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony before you become bored with it? How many times do you have to read Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountainbefore it is enough? Are two visits to Notre Dame in Paris sufficient for one lifetime?" (12). Klaus Albrecht Schröder, director general of the Albertina Museum Vienna, opens his foreword to the catalogue of the museum's most recent Egon Schiele exhibition with this series of rhetorical questions, posed with a twofold purpose. In addition to implicitly preempting a predictable reaction (yet anotherSchiele exhibition and catalogue? what could possibly be new?), Schröder uses this line of questioning to advance his conviction that the Albertina, among the world's foremost collections of prints and drawings, is culturally obligated to display its most significant holdings by key artists—Dürer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Klimt, et al.—every decade or so. Like clockwork, then, it was Schiele's turn again in 2017 after twelve years—and, in a surprising move, one year ahead of the centennial of his death. Recent scholarship has opened up new inroads into various facets of Schiele's creative output, touching off something of a paradigm shift. If the great achievement of the 2005–06 exhibition was highlighting and contextualizing the performative aspects of Schiele's work, the aim of the 2017 show was to present a new interpretive framework for Schiele's images: an ethical, spiritual iconography. Both approaches have in common a shift away from the psychobiographical readings of Schiele's art that even today tend to haunt Schiele scholarship. Moreover, they enable us to see beyond the oftenprurient focus on the erotic dimensions of Schiele's images. Johann Thomas Ambrózy, co-editor of the Egon Schiele Yearbook, board member of the Egon Schiele Research Society, and scientific advisor for the exhibition and catalogue, argues that Schiele "now proves to be not just the disturbingly haunting painter of existential loneliness, but also a champion of high ethics and impassioned spirituality" (18). Eight of the nine catalogue essays stem from Ambrózy's pen. His [End Page 88]contributions include requisite, albeit brief, texts on Schiele's figural work and self-portraiture, as well as on his landscapes and still lifes. Insights that will strike many readers as novel—and which reside well within the author's wheelhouse—include one in which he links Schiele's characteristic, splayed-finger V-gesture to a Byzantine Christ Pantocrator mosaic at the Chora Church in Istanbul. The artist, Ambrózy claims, would have known reproductions from a book about the church published in 1908 and held by the library of the Academy of Fine Arts while Schiele was a student there. Perhaps the most important essay is "Allegorical Works: The Spirituals," in which Ambrózy recounts and extends the central claim of his ongoing research, namely, that a Franciscan ideal underlies a number of Schiele's works. As Ambrózy has shown elsewhere, Schiele encoded figures of St. Francis of Assisi and his circle in several of his most significant oil paintings from 1912 ( Conversion, Caress, and Agony, for instance) and, as argued here, in a series of works on paper from 1913 (including Redemption, Devotion, and The Truth Has Been Unveiled). The only contribution not authored by Ambrózy, Eva Werth's "Fascinating Paris: Schiele between Rimbaud and Apache," sets out in a different direction, away from the spiritual readings of the other essays. It takes as its subject the influence of French culture on the artist's literary attempts and artistic persona. Werth connects Schiele's poetry, aphorisms, journal entries, and letters, as well as his rebellious artistic and social otherness, to an intellectual affinity with fin-de-siècle Paris...