![]() ![]() The irony is that in the process of resisting it – as I have done in my own work over a number of years – new facets of the artist’s relationships, preoccupations and motivations have been revealed that concern those very same relations between art, madness and masculinity that remain so central to the literature on modern art. Born into the generation of a family that suffered from the effects of congenital syphilis cast out by an uncle-benefactor following a defiant departure from the conservative Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (which had, nevertheless, introduced the young artist to life drawing) sustained by the production of sexually explicit drawings of girls and young women, many of which included depictions of his own naked self imprisoned for offenses against public morality and modesty dead at the tender age of 28 in the influenza epidemic of 1918, along with his wife, pregnant with their first child – the collapsing of life into work and work into life has proven hard to resist when thinking and writing about Schiele. ![]() The myth of the mad artist, that uniquely anguished genius, has been roundly critiqued by feminist art historians in the scholarship on modernism in particular, and yet it continues to be enshrined in the monograph (the study of the single artist’s ‘life and work’), the monographic exhibition, and the plethora of novels, films, and television documentaries that, in their different forms and modes of address, all go in search of the same, inextricably linked questions: who was this man, and what made him so extraordinary?īiographical material can make the pursuit of these questions all the more compelling and on this, Schiele – along with his immediate precursors van Gogh and Munch, artists he much admired – does not disappoint. Self-portraiture as a genre flourished during the modern period, the era that gave us Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch and, of course, Egon Schiele, and this went hand in hand with the reinvigoration of the relations between art, madness and masculinity that art history as a discipline has always revered – no more so than during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. More than any other image, the self-portrait declares the artist as the subject of the work of art, and the work of art as the means by which we might know him (my use of the masculine pronoun is deliberate here), in all his creative, spiritual and sexual torment.
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