What Egon Schiele Saw at the Hospital
How did Egon Schiele arrive at his particular vision of the human body? This has always puzzled me. If you go back and review his influences, such as Gustav Klimt and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, or survey the ambient intellectual milieu of fin-de-siècle Vienna—from Freud to the anatomist Josef Hyrtl—Schiele’s wiry creatures, all bone and sinew, still seem to come out of nowhere. In drawings and paintings, he disfigured men, women, and children. Flesh often seems bruised. Limbs are weirdly bent or over-rotated. Faces have a regurgitated aspect. Sometimes Schiele randomly lopped off part of a leg, or used bloody coloring to imply a flayed corpse. All of this occurred to him before the carnage of the First World War and continued mostly unabated until he died, in 1918, at the age of twenty-eight.
A new show at the Neue Galerie points to one possible source for Schiele’s bodies. The centerpiece is a 1910 portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff, a physician at a women’s clinic in Vienna, who gave Schiele direct access to patients: newborns, pregnant women, and the infirm. Although Schiele is remembered as a sort of high-art pornographer, his paintings an endless parade of genitals and splayed legs, the results are rarely pornographic. Perverse, unsettling, and morally suspect, yes—but erotic, not so much. There is a clinical quality that interferes. Schiele’s favorite trick was to surgically carve his subjects out of their environment and lay them on a blank page. Without the context of a studio or a bourgeois interior, there are only people made to look etherized, agitated, or ill, suspended in some empty and sterile place between life and death. You could argue that the closest thing to an implied setting is a hospital.
Before meeting Graff and his patients, Schiele made art that was largely derivative. He had studied at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts with mixed results, and landed a few pieces at a major international exhibition in 1909, but his style was still Klimtian and Jugendstil, full of decorative froth and languorous, dreamy bodies. Fast-forward a year, and everything had changed. His work was suddenly a rogues’ gallery of ghoulish figures with keyed-up colors and unnaturally shrunken or engorged body parts. Even Schiele knew it: “I went through Klimt until March,” he wrote in a letter. “Today I believe I am someone completely different.”
The cocktail of influences piped into Schiele’s brain around 1910 had a few key elements. He was repeatedly exposed to the looser brushwork of Max Oppenheimer and Oskar Kokoschka; newly enthusiastic about Javanese shadow puppets; and charmed by a wacky friend, Erwin Osen, a mime, an artist, and a cabaret performer, who drew Schiele’s attention to the body language of the mentally ill. There was also a flock of patrons around to puff up his confidence and provide some income. Heinrich Benesch, a railroad inspector, was so obsessed with Schiele that he begged him never to discard or burn any sketches, but to hand them over. “Please,” Benesch said, “write the following equation in crayon on your stove: ‘stove=Benesch.’ ” Schiele’s work was too crude for aristocratic tastes, unlike Klimt’s, but was well suited to a particular slice of the educated middle class with a penchant for bodily oddity: doctors. One of Schiele’s most devoted supporters was a physician named Oskar Reichel. Another was Erwin von Graff.
In the portrait from 1910, Graff looks like a nervous chimney sweep. His face and arms are mysteriously darkened, as if powdered with soot, but somehow—and this is the first of a dozen quirks in the painting—his white shirt is in near-mint condition. The exhibition catalogue puts forward the idea of radiodermatitis, suggesting that Graff’s frequent use of X-rays damaged his skin, which is plausible for his hands but might not explain what’s happened to his head: a swirl of black, sienna, and green, with white slits for eyes and teeth. The peculiar way he holds his arms, as if he’s about to sing the national anthem, is supposedly a surgeon’s hygienic pose. But there are too many stray details that cut against the grain of his professionalism, giving the painting an almost comic air. The most obvious is the little bandage wedged on his fingertip, like a pat of butter. Then there’s the shy pinky tucked behind his forearm, the torched eyebrows, and the crooked smile. Graff seems to be returning from Hell and having a chuckle about it.
Schiele could have placed Graff next to an operating table, like Rembrandt’s Dr. Nicolaes Tulp or Eakins’s Dr. Samuel Gross. He could have given him the dignity of Goya’s Dr. Arrieta, or made him look dashing, like Sargent’s Dr. Pozzi, with his crimson robe and Turkish slippers. Instead, Schiele strips Graff of a stethoscope and examination room, and reduces the background to platelets of white. Who would know that Graff was a talented doctor, or a hearty and athletic man who liked the outdoors and played the cello, or that he had two divorces on the horizon? His body, with its mottled face and hands, is the only wisp of narrative.
Doctors and painters both study the human body, but one does so with an eye to improving its condition, while the other turns it into an image. This inspires more jealousy than you would think. The choice of Goya and Eakins to put themselves in their paintings of doctors—regardless of how matter-of-factly or admiringly the doctors are rendered—is telling. The artist is there to remind you that, like the doctor, he has the power to give life and to take it away. But my guess is that Schiele wasn’t all that fussed about proving his social worth. Whether or not a painter had the importance of a physician, he could still exert his will on the world of appearances.
When Graff and Schiele met, in early 1910, the doctor was thirty-one and the artist was nineteen. How exactly Graff provided access to pregnant women and newborns, we don’t know. It’s possible that he recommended his patients to Schiele, and paid them a small fee, or that Schiele cosplayed as a doctor, following Graff on his rounds. There’s also a passing chance that Graff turned Schiele on to journals—produced at the Salpêtrière hospital, in Paris, originally under the guidance of the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot—that featured photographs of patients with all manner of pathologies, from hysteria to macrodactyly, a condition that involves enlarged fingers and toes. Schiele painted the picture of Graff as repayment, after the doctor treated a love interest, Liliana Amon. It’s a bizarre thank-you gift, less a professional portrait than an impersonal experiment. Schiele doesn’t seem to want to flatter or injure Graff; he just wants to please himself.
To call Schiele an Austrian Expressionist, like Kokoschka and Richard Gerstl, is to imply that his art moves from inside to outside: a molten core of angst and psychological tension canalized through the limbs, into a brush, and then released onto the canvas. This squares nicely with the Freudian world view of repressed thoughts welling up, in dreams or in slips of the tongue. But what makes the relationship with Graff a clever lens is that it reverses this reading. The Schiele of the hospital starts with surfaces. Once he’s put a subject on the blank page, he can turn the exterior of the body into an arena for all kinds of play, psychological and somatic. In one self-portrait, he gives himself blue hair; in another, he disappears his penis. There’s even one piece in the show where Schiele presents himself thrice: as snarling enfant terrible, in a caftan; as smiley angelic bystander; and as tight-lipped bureaucrat. He always seems to be palpating his sense of self, testing its variety with a little smirk—not bursting onto the page with emotion.
The exhibition has about thirty paintings, watercolors, and drawings, many of them from 1910; the curators, Renée Price and Janis Staggs, have smartly dilated this moment in Schiele’s development. Once the hospital entered his work, it never left. In “Seated Female Nude with Black Stockings” (1910), the sitter spreads her legs and tries to cover her naked torso with a bony, oversized left hand. Her pose seems adopted from a gynecological exam, but we know the person depicting her isn’t a licensed physician. In the reddish and purple “Newborn Baby” (1910), crinkly as the paper it’s drawn on, the flesh is bruised and raw, with no ounce of cherubic sweetness. It’s quite like a fresh newborn, in fact. We don’t think of Schiele as a realist, but his attention to skin that was inflamed, racy, or visually taboo is more honest than what most realists will show you. His work isn’t just uncensored but unflinching, aesthetically and emotionally. He cut everything close to the bone.
As Schiele was dying, from influenza, Graff gave him a final injection to ease his pain. The Neue has a photo of Schiele on his deathbed, along with a plaster death mask. It’s likely at this moment in the show—all of which is squeezed into a single room—that you’ll notice a certain analogy at work, which is that this room, like that of Schiele’s paintings, like that of a hospital, contains birth and life, sickness and death. It’s a room we all know, and generally want to avoid. Schiele gives us a few perverse reasons to stick around. ♦