Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes at Neue Galerie
October 17, 2024 – January 13, 2025
Egon Schiele is primarily known for unsparing portraits of angular figures and confrontational nudes, often set against stark backgrounds. He sketched feverishly, but the number of extant oil paintings is limited. He executed about 300 oil paintings during his life compared to thousands of works on paper. Schiele’s work, which is intensely psychological, is defined by a draftsman’s sensibility. That is, a commitment to linework. Outlines of shapes are not blended, they are emphasized. This is especially true of his landscapes, which are the focus of a recent exhibition at the Neue Galerie.
There were three galleries with artwork by Schiele and a fourth gallery with mostly biographical information and ephemera. The first gallery showed his earliest landscapes and still lifes. I don’t have very much to say about the first gallery and frankly I don’t remember very much of it, but early works are always interesting contextually to see an artist’s starting point. That sort of standard academic style that amalgamates other popular styles before he makes enough work to find his own voice.
The second gallery was a room of mostly portraits where elements of the natural world start to emerge—a sliver of landscape in the background of a self-portrait, for example. Still life sketches, like one of a wilting sunflower, receive the same focus as his pictures of people. Lines graze each other like the tangled bodies in the figure paintings he is better known for. Schiele’s drawings of pottery are not so different from the sketches of fellow artist Max Oppenheimer, which are displayed next to each other in this room. A line is just a line.
The third gallery included later landscapes executed from around the 1910s to his death in 1918. This is the meat of the exhibition and includes what for me is the highlight, Town Among the Greenery (The Old City III), from 1917. The painting is in the museum’s permanent collection and is among the latest works in the exhibition. Schiele died at 28 from Spanish Flu. The arrangement demonstrates his impressive growth as an artist in a short period between even, say 1914 and 1917. Works like Town Among the Greenery mark a stylistic departure, introducing a bolder use of color, saturation, and looseness.
His landscapes tend to feature impossibly titled perspectives and extreme vantage points. Landscapes like Town Among the Greenery are fictionalized composites of multiple places. Schiele is not concerned with the accurate depiction of a specific locale. Instead, the painting harmonizes webs of plants and buildings. Tiny people in bright clothing dot the narrow gaps that render the roads and alleys. The houses in Town Among the Greenery cascade like water. Positive value and color are balanced, but there is often little breathing room between shapes. There are no big skies or open expanses here. Despite this, there is harmony in the way his eye organizes the scene. Often in early or mid-period landscapes, I find the preparatory sketches more successful than the larger oils. For example, I prefer the smaller study on paper to the full-size oil of The Bridge (1913). On a smaller scale it seems electrifyingly unified, like a complete circuit.
The landscapes in this exhibition are typically organized on a grid with either very low or very high horizons, which resemble the square format landscapes that his mentor, Gustav Klimt, is known for. A formal approach that emphasizes flatness and decoration is characteristic of Nabi (see: Vuillard or Bonnard) and symbolist (see: Gauguin, de Chavannes, Redon, Klimt) painting. It’s also worth noting that most of these artists collected and took inspiration from the compositional format of Japanese ukiyo-e prints. Schiele was well acquainted with Klimt’s large collection of Japanese art. I’m digressing slightly, but this is all to say that Schiele’s formal approach to the landscape is legible within the overall trends of early 20th century European modernist art.
Although Schiele’s compositions conform to the symbolist style of his contemporaries, they are not as rigidly geometrical as his contemporaries. Schiele’s lines move with the curvature of life. Both his figures and his flowers wilt. His pottery is chipped and he depicts the sitters of his portraits as cracked and spindly. The earlier landscapes tend to be more opaque, muted, and darker in palette. Bright reds zip through earthy browns and yellows. When the brighter, more uninhibited color emerges in Schiele’s later landscapes, it’s not as sickly nauseating as Kirchner or Nolde’s expressionism (no offense). There is also a pallid elegance in even his most feeble subjects that distinguishes him from another contemporary like Kokoschka.
The visible line undergrids (pun intended) Schiele’s style and career. There is no doing away with or diffusing the line, and in this sense is kind of the opposite of someone like Monet, where shapes fade into a mist. Drawing is primary. Schiele’s work, which is intensely psychological, is defined by its edges. And at the risk of overemphasizing the point, his drawings of bridges have the interiority, the sense of animation of his drawings of people. It’s as though all matter is off the same stuff—everything is animated by some invisible energy, which in his work, is the wavering line. There is an inescapable sense that things have gone a bit sour, curdled.