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Egon Schiele: Progress of a Rebel
| Article
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11987 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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6 / 1994 |
2,349 Words |
| Author
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Cynthia Grenier
Cynthia Grenier is contributing editor to the Arts section of
The World & I. |
Egon Schiele, that prodigiously gifted enfant terrible of the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, became the international icon he is today only in the 1960s. This is perhaps no coincidence, as college students in full flush of rebellion against everything from their parents to the American government found in Schiele's anguished, often sexually explicit works a reflection of their own alienation from society.
But was Schiele really such a rebel? If we consider his career in the light of Egon Schiele, the first major exhibition devoted to his work in the States since 1965, we find considerable reason to reevaluate his place in history as an artistic forerunner to the likes of a James Dean. And though interesting for what the paintings and drawings reveal about Schiele's inner turmoil and process of growth, the exhibition also has a special poignancy. It covers, in chronological and thematic order, a mature period that lasted only nine years, from when Schiele was nineteen in 1909 until he died of influenza in 1918 at the age of only twenty-eight.
Schiele was a product of the fin de siecle culture of Vienna, a culture that brought forth such major artists as Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka. Vienna, of course, was the city that during this same period witnessed the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis, the atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg, the functional architecture of Adolf Loos, and the youth of Adolf Hitler. Schiele's all too brief but brilliant life has lent itself to being mythologized, not unlike that of a number of rock stars who in decades since died young, leaving their full talents unrealized (Jim Morrison, Jimmy Hendrix, and Janis Joplin are but a few that come to mind). And like them, Schiele has been the subject of
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