Thought #4: Egon Schiele and Sexuality.

Let me take a minute to art history nerd out to you in this post…

I recently wrote an in-depth research paper on Egon Schiele’s images of the contorted female nude—comparing them to other viennese artists’ portrayals of naked women—and have since been mesmerized by his work. While Schiele’s art has often been dismissed as explicitly erotic, I am fascinated by the dangerously progressive artistic dimension tinged with a feminist message he fearlessly enters…so I thought I’d share some of my findings.

In his self-portraiture, Schiele draws the viewer in by revealing his internal character, rather than simply painting his façade. His self-portraits reflect his hunt to find a unified and true inner being. Schiele embraces the theory of gender fluidity that was being critically examined by his contemporaries: Sigmund Freud, Otto Weininger, and Wilhelm Fliess. He does this by creating parallels between his self-portraits and his paintings of women. With his contorted positioning, facial expressions, and far-from-idealized approach to depicting the human form, Schiele’s resemblance to many of his paintings of nude women is truly uncanny.

Schiele succeeds in representing an authentic, stripped-down essence of the woman as a person in his technical choices as well as in his content matter. This artist’s wavering use of lines that intertwine and overlap, varying in width and saturation, does not hide the humanity that went into the artwork. By presenting the women in his paintings centered in the foreground, with an untouched background, Schiele forces the viewer to really confront the importance of his subject. By capturing his models in unconventional, distorted positions that often extend outside the boundaries of the paper, Schiele encapsulates the motion and vitality within them. Schiele’s women not only refuse to be ignored in their true physicality but also resist being objectified.

The personal agency of Schiele’s models is emphasized in their expressions, as Schiele often creates eye contact between his subject and the viewer. By painting these women unapologetically looking at the viewer, Schiele creates a two-way relationship between the two. These naked women are no longer a passive object of the male gaze. He pushes past this antiquated approach to depicting the female nude, individualizing them not only corporeally, but also through an emphasis on their gaze. These relationships form naturally, as they do in real life between two people, and, as in real life, the relationships may be sexual, empathetic, or amicable. Nakedness and a certain emphasis on positioning do not enhance the subject of Schiele’s paintings, but rather create a connection between them and the audience.

His choice of models adds to this normalization of women as humans, by producing portraits of women who come from lower socio-economic classes, prostitutes, lesbian, and pregnant women. A sense of person-ness is accentuated in Schiele’s portrayals of genitalia, as he embraces the reality of pubic hair and the asymmetry of the female body. Presenting the female body from such a wide range of perspectives, Schiele reveals parts and angles usually intentionally ignored or avoided by other artists. This is especially prominent in Schiele’s depiction of female genitalia, shocking his public not only with his use of perspective, but also depicting a series of women touching their vaginas—this overt acknowledgement of female sexuality was not yet accepted at the time.

Rejecting, in his art, the prevalent essentialist notion of woman as needy, somehow otherworldly, and/or dangerous, and even, preferably, as dead or unconscious, Schiele chose to portray women as individuals, endowed with unique physical and personal traits that make them human…these are a few of the reasons why I love Egon Schiele.

photos from:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Egon_Schiele_-_Nude_Self-Portrait_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Egon_Schiele_-_Squatting_Female_Nude_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

#art #feminism #gender #schiele