Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  The biography in the MoMA exhibition catalogue disputes some of this melodramatic summary; for syphilis it substitutes “some kind of progressive paralysis,” and it says that Egon’s father was not “actually insane, as scholars would have us believe.” But he did die when Egon was fourteen, and Dabrowski in her catalogue essay assumes that venereal disease was the cause, so that Egon “lived in terror of the possibility of his own insanity and death related to his sexuality.” She also asserts that the young artist had “a rather complicated relationship with his mother, by whom since the early years he felt victimized and neglected.” His oil painting Dead Mother (1910) is vivid enough to support a notion that his mother was dead for him; even in the fine portrait profile of Marie Schiele done when Egon was a seventeen-year-old art student, she radiates little warmth.

  But psychoanalysis takes us only so far into an artistic accomplishment; suffice it to say that the first works in which Schiele unmistakably strikes his own note show naked males, usually himself, as fearfully thin and isolated. In the Kneeling Male Nude of 1910, a ruddy stick figure is striking an incongruously jivey attitude. In the Seated Male Nude of the same year, the drawing is more polished, even academic in its stylized anatomy; the yellowish body, so distinctly muscled as to look flayed, shows five red spots—two nipples, one eye, a navel, and the genitals—lit as if by a fire within. Emaciation, and a flesh coloring as if of decaying meat, become more pronounced in gouaches later in that same year; Nude Self-Portrait in Gray with Open Mouth and Nude Self-Portrait could be studies from a Buchenwald where the victims’ arms have been lopped off. Concave hairy bellies and tufted armpits have a weedy vitality that succumbs, in oils like The Poet (1911) and Self-Seer II (1911; also titled Death and the Man), to a tilted patchwork of monstrously elongated heads and hands, the fingers spatulate and stiff, like dead men’s.

  A kind of assault on the painter’s own image is in progress; in Grimacing Self-Portrait (1910) he has knocked out most of his teeth. Gazing even upon relatively undistorted self-portraits like the two showing him in a shirt, and upon the caricatural pair of the nude, dandified mime Erwin Osen, we uneasily feel ourselves in the presence of an ongoing process, a matter not merely of self-examination but of self-flagellation, in cells devoid of any hint of furniture or perspective. A gouache not in the show but reproduced in the catalogue, Self-Portrait in Black Cloak, Masturbating (1911), makes explicit a quality latent throughout his studies of males: a joyless, quizzical onanism, a morose fondling of a problem.

  The male to Schiele is the self, a realm in essence immaterial. The female is the other, whose material opacity awakens a sense of bulk, of linear grace. Most of us, I suspect, would not really like to live with his lurid male nudes on the wall—their blotchy skins, hectic stares, and dangling genitals. His female nudes, however, are among the great drawings of the century, and even those with the vulval cleft foregrounded have the guileless animation that occurs when self-absorption lifts and observation begins. True, Reclining Nude Girl and Three Nude Girls, both from 1910, have the jittery line and pained elongation of the male figures of the time, but the Sick Girl, Seated and the two sketches of pregnant women permitting examination (a friend and collector, Dr. Erwin von Graff, let Schiele draw women and infants at his gynecological clinic) show real presences, whether in the yellow-tinted, hot-eyed face of the first, the dramatic red sprawl of the second, or the intent appraising gaze of the third, who sizes up the viewer while exposing to view a densely curly pudenda and a distended, pale-green abdomen.

  Schiele, Nude Self-Portrait, 1910. Gouache, opaque white, and black crayon. (Photo Credit Ill.24)

  Schiele’s fascination with female genitals gives many of his pictures a double focus; Red-Haired Girl with Spread Legs (1910) and Black-Haired Girl with Raised Skirt (1911) are subdivided into two zones: an upper and a lower, a public and a private, a lightly but skillfully indicated face and a perhaps more studiously dwelt-upon sex. This is me, the models seem to be saying—for it is clear that in some of his models, recruited from the more liberated ranks of the fair sex, Schiele provoked a jaunty exhibitionism. Women in the age of voluminous long skirts and petticoats, we are more than once reminded, did not wear underpants, and a casual flash was more possible then than in our age of short skirts revealing only the impregnable crotch of pantyhose. Seated Woman Clasping Her Feet (1915) is a beautiful drawing because our eyes are led into the secret cave as if in life, by an inadvertence of natural intimacy, through a maze of lines every one of which reads as limning a woman’s figure—her arms and legs laid parallel as she clasps her feet, her sex centered but not pornographically highlighted.

  Our sensation is fond rather than lustful, and much the same could be said of such lovely late works as Reclining Female with Spread Legs (1913), Kneeling Girl (1913), Girl (Seated with Yellow Cloth) (1913), the two titled Crouching Woman in 1914, and Nude with Raised Right Leg (1915). Not all of the sketches disclose genitalia; Seated Nude with Red Garter, Seen from the Back (1914) contains the suggestion of masturbation only in a certain tension of the back, and in the more clearly masturbating Kneeling Woman with Head Bent Forward (1915), her labia and fingers and the folds of her red slip are indistinguishable. Female privacy, we feel, is observed without being exploited, because the draftsmanship is so evenly intent.

  Beauty lies, perhaps, not in the eye of the beholder but in the hand of the creator. Around 1910, Schiele took from Rodin the technique of “continuous drawing”—drawing directly upon the paper without taking one’s eyes off the model. The difficulty of so spontaneous a method lies in keeping the segments in proportion and properly integrated; Schiele developed a consummate fluidity, rendering the most complexly foreshortened poses with an apparently effortless fidelity—e.g., the Seated Woman praised above, and the very late Girl Lying on Her Back with Crossed Arms and Legs (1918). In the first, the roughness of the underlying drawing board or table was engagingly incorporated into the lines; in his last year he took to using a darker, softer pencil, and to shading with the side of the point. Nude Girl with Crossed Arms (1913) and Standing Nude Girl with Stockings (1914) could not be more confident; they have the squared-off, slightly metallic elegance of Modigliani’s pencil drawings, with not a line wasted or groped for.

  In his late paintings, Schiele approaches fussiness, which hitherto was never a trait. The lightly tinted attack of pencil line gives way to a dabbly oil color and a stolid naturalism. His models become conventionally voluptuous (Female Nude with Long Hair Propped Up on Her Arm, 1918) and, in two large unfinished canvases, Two Crouching Women and Three Standing Women, oddly static—labored studio pieces with which to claim the throne vacated by the death of Klimt.

  Schiele, Reclining Female with Spread Legs, 1913. Pencil. (Photo Credit Ill.25)

  His drawings and watercolors of females, usually with a peep at their genitals, contain most of this show’s electricity. In this narrow but central field Schiele went further than any artist of his calibre had quite gone before, unsentimentally searching out women in their sexual being. Sexuality acquires a nervous system in his best work, though his few renderings of embracing couples—Lovers (1914–15) and Act of Love (1915)—convey an effect almost comic, of a puzzlement, both wide-eyed and weary, at being caught in such a fix. Schiele’s vigorous voyeurism becomes inhibited; the man and woman of both couples are looking away from each other, outward at us, into the unhealthy mirror.

  Away from the grip of his own sexual fascinations, Schiele had yet to prove himself an interesting artist. His cityscapes, usually based on sketches of Krumau, his mother’s birthplace, suggest a darker, less witty Paul Klee; his topic paintings, such as Hermits (1912), a representation of himself and Klimt; Cardinal and Nun (1912), a blasphemous parody of Klimt’s The Kiss; and Blind Mother (1914), a variation on the theme of stony maternal inadequacy, all have Klimt’s hieratic flatness without the decorative dazzle. His superb drawing skill, when directed, during his military service, to desktops and packing rooms a
nd nondescript architecture, remains in the realm of craft rather than that of art. What he would have done with his talent had he lived—in 1950 he would have been merely sixty years old—cannot be known; he was moving, it would seem, in the direction of a safer, more pompous style. As it is, more than Klimt, more than Kokoschka, he seems a contemporary, a brief jagged flare on the edge of the scandalous, who expressed with a new forthrightness the link between sex and seeing, in the territory that Freud was simultaneously exploring, between sex and “modern nervousness.”

  New Kind on the Block

  NEW WORLDS: German and Austrian Art, 1890–1940, at Neue Galerie New York, November 16, 2001–February 18, 2002.

  Two questions come quickly to mind: (a) Does Fifth Avenue’s “Museum Mile”—stretching from the Frick Collection at Seventieth Street to El Museo del Barrio at 104th—need another museum, and (b) What will the new museum, Neue Galerie New York, at Fifth and Eighty-sixth, do for its next show? This inaugural exhibit, like a tell-all first novel, appears to hold little in reserve; the museum, as described in its own press release, “is a museum devoted to German and Austrian art, in particular the art created in … the early part of the twentieth century,” and the cream of its collections—a generous splash, but on Museum Mile a drop in the bucket—has been put on view. In answer to question (a), business was booming the rainy Monday of my December visit; a Viennese-style café on the ground floor, called Café Sabarsky, had lines waiting to get in, and the two floors of exhibition space above felt congested. The renovated rooms of even an opulent town house make cramped quarters for a rainy-day museum crowd, and no circulatory flow was established; our bodies became bumper cars, propelled toward their targets by the aggressive tendencies New Yorkers share with German tourists. To heighten the congestion, Monday seemed to be Ladies’ Day; the fair sex was disproportionately represented, and immovable gabfests developed in the vicinity of, but facing away from, the works of art.

  This six-story corner building was completed in 1914 for the industrialist William Starr Miller; later occupants were Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. In 1994 it was purchased by Ronald S. Lauder—chairman of Estée Lauder International and Clinique Laboratories Incorporated, chairman of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation and the Board of the Museum of Modern Art, and a collector of German-Austrian art since the age of thirteen, when he bought an Egon Schiele drawing with money given him for his bar mitzvah—and Serge Sabarsky, a purveyor and promoter of Austrian-German art who operated a Madison Avenue gallery from 1968 on and died in 1996, while he and Lauder were still realizing their dream of a Neue Galerie New York, an institution that would thrust modern art’s Germanic stepchildren into the bosom of the Manhattan museum scene, almost directly across from the Metropolitan, two blocks south of the Guggenheim, and a healthy northward walk from the Frick and the Whitney.

  Older museums have had to find accessory space for their increasingly important dining and shopping facilities; the Neue Galerie leads off with them, on the ground floor. As stated, the café, with windows on Fifth Avenue, was thriving; in my haste to get to the art I missed the bookstore and “design shop.” All these hotbeds of commerce are open six days a week, while the art can be seen during only four, Fridays through Mondays. The second floor, devoted to Austria, is attained by elevator or by climbing the curvaceous grand staircase of white marble and elaborately wrought iron; at the top, the hall landing is paved with black and white marble and the two principal display rooms retain the gilded glamour and fine oak panelling of their heyday as living quarters.

  Moving from marble to parquet, one first claps eyes on the large Gustav Klimt Portrait of Baroness Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt (c. 1914); she has a floating entourage of small Oriental figures, most conveniently interpreted as a species of wallpaper. The baroness wears an elongated white outfit, with high collar and pantaloons, behind which hangs a triangular train of Chinese symbols signifying, the catalogue tells us in a note, “the typical hopes and dreams of a young woman, which the painter attributes to her.” The formally symmetrical face gazes out with a touching, tentative vitality; away from the face, the painting slopes into the bejewelled flatness that was Klimt’s way of coping with the modernist question of the representational versus the abstract. No less fashionably elongated than the full-length portraits of Sargent and Whistler, Klimt’s cross over into abstraction while keeping intensely studied semblances of the human face, hands, and feet. The other such portrait in the room, The Dancer (c. 1916–18), even more boldly turns the space enveloping its subject into decoration; the flowers massed behind the model exist on the same plane as those on a table at her hip, and her robe sustains the pattern with no perspectival concession to the physical body it enwraps. It is customary to speak of Klimt’s flattened pictorial surface as jewel-like—as if he were offering up trays of the patterned brooches and tableware of the Wiener Werkstätte, whose artifacts are on view in the adjacent room—but his brushwork upon inspection is surprisingly rough and free, like the mosaic bits in the later Chuck Close.

  Klimt’s surfaces seem uneasy in these portraits; there is not the seductive, barbaric emanation of design out of misty flesh found in his Judith I (1901, in Vienna) or the Byzantine wall of pure gilt and bauble through whose gaps the lovers of The Kiss (c. 1907–8, also in Vienna) can be glimpsed. The Klimt landscapes on display, whether the early Tall Poplar Tree I (1900) or the Pointillist Pond of Schloss Kammer on the Attersee (before 1910), are untroubled by any homage to the human form; they make the portraits look attenuated and schizophrenic. So, too, from another direction, do his drawings, in the next room, of indecorously relaxed nudes caught in a flowing, confident pencil line. His sketches are less contorted than those of the artist with whom he is forever paired, Egon Schiele, and more amiably erotic. Klimt, the leader of the Vienna Secession and the embodiment of Art Nouveau, searched for styles other than his brittle, theatrical one of despatialized appliqué; the minimalist Pale Face (1907–8) shows him open to Munch’s undulant forms, and Forester House in Weissenbach on the Attersee (1912) suggests, with its decided outlines and flamelike, ominous vegetation, van Gogh.

  Klimt, The Dancer, c. 1916–18. Oil on canvas. (Photo Credit Ill.26)

  Schiele was twenty-eight years younger and pushed Klimt’s Art Nouveau into Expressionism and an exhibitionism that is not just erotic but psychoanalytical. In Freud’s Vienna, everybody was, it seems, neurotic, sex-obsessed, and tense. Schiele’s work is uncompromisingly linear; his more complex groups of figures, such as the large, grayish Man and Woman I (1914), are hard to read into the third dimension. Strange webs of linear subdivision spread across these ambitious nudes and the furrowed earth of River Landscape with Two Trees (1913), cementing their Kafkaesque impression of paralysis, of frustrated effort. But his drawings, and not his drab paintings, are the basis of his fame, both during his tragically short lifetime (he died in 1918 of the Spanish flu, at the age of twenty-eight) and after.

  The dozen or so drawings arrayed in the smaller room behind the Klimt salon are as a group one of the museum’s central treasures, though less scandalous and on the whole less beautiful than the Schiele drawings gathered at the Museum of Modern Art in 1997. That show included a number of female nudes with vividly depicted genitals; the most provocative example at the Neue Galerie of Schiele’s fierce, morose voyeurism is Seated Nude, Three-Quarter-Length (Moa) (1911), with her luxuriant spray of black armpit hair echoed by a pubic bush at the other end of a dramatically tapered anatomy. The Kneeling Seminude (1917) is shown fingering her own breasts, and two lean women are engaged in a spoon embrace in Friendship (1913) (“Freundschaft,” a female voice behind me said. “And how!”), but the sexual charge is muted, in part by Schiele’s later manner of stylized faces, thicker outlines, and dry touches of red and green. The drawings of 1910 are still exploratory, even to their eccentric placement on the paper, and include some hits—a skeletal, angrily glaring Self-Portrait with Arm Twisting Above H
ead, a blearily leaning Portrait of the Painter Karl Zakovsek—and some awkward misses, such as a perversely disaffected Mother and Child, wherein the mother presents a naked backside with a coy gaze over her shoulder while a large bald infant, with very long brown fingers, adheres in suckling position to her back, unsuckled and ignored. Birth and nurture are misbegotten processes, we are led to feel, and the contorted poses and bizarre emaciation of Schiele’s typical male figures imply—and this is 1910, remember, when Vienna was the thriving capital of an intact empire—that all is far from well.

  Oskar Kokoschka, whose youthful interim in Vienna, including his art schooling, wins him a place on the Neue Galerie’s Austrian floor, also drew gaunt, angular nudes and dreamy Klimtesque designs, but the architect Adolf Loos, Keith Holz tells us in the catalogue, “nudged Kokoschka away from decorative arts and toward painting by arranging numerous portrait sittings.” These youthful portraits remain among the peripatetic Kokoschka’s best work, and strike here a strong, sensuous note: the portrait of the poet Peter Altenberg (1909) is nervy, crusty painting and captures a moment of agitated gesture with the immediacy of a snapshot. The same year’s portrait of Martha Hirsch, her small red mouth pursed as if in the middle of a word, and her hands self-consciously twisted as if she thought them out of sight, has the same nervous presence, though its huge eyes verge on caricature; a drawing identified as Reclining Seminude Woman (1908–9) shows that her homely, long-chinned face can coexist with a voluptuous breast. Rudolf Blümner, in the portrait of him (1910), evoked excited painting; Kokoschka digs out white lines with the other end of the brush, applies raw red and sweeps of purple, and works the face with so rich a mix of stabbed-on pigments that he leaves his subject looking cross-eyed.

  Another Viennese with a wild brush was Richard Gerstl, who committed suicide over a broken love affair at the age of twenty-five. He was precocious but unruly, and consorted less with painters than with musicians, including the young Arnold Schönberg, who also painted, and is said to have studied with Gerstl. Many of Gerstl’s canvases remained rolled up in a warehouse until his family released them in 1931, to acclaim. He is represented here by the dashingly competent but not unconventional Portrait of a Seated Man in the Studio (1907) and, from the same year, the dramatically vague Portrait of a Man on the Lawn, a man virtually without features, gliding diagonally across a field of violently brushed impasto—a kind of ghost in pure paint, anomalous in German Expressionism before, by a route through Surrealism, it arrived at Abstract Expressionism. Possibly, the painting might be simply unfinished, a hasty laying-out that Gerstl’s short and hectic life never went back to; in any case, it is a show-stopper. The Austrian paintings and few sculptures, it should be said, are accompanied, in these sumptuous former living quarters, by furniture and household items—clocks, cutlery, glassware—from the Wiener Werkstätte, variously handsome and innovative and no doubt instructive to a craftsman’s eye but affording this viewer the sensation usually engendered by chairs one cannot sit on and eating implements in a sealed case, the sensation of having missed the party.