Egon Schiele’s art is dominated by the sexuality of the human form. Though he is often labeled as a pornographer, particularly by peers of his own time, Schiele’s paintings are something far more important than pornography. In his short life, Schiele was able to beautifully capture the excitement and the angst of human sexuality in his portraits of the nude figure. Schiele’s depiction of sexual emotion often contains morbid or anxious undertones. Schiele had a mental connection between sex and mortality because his father died of syphilis when Schiele was 15. This link brought a certain uniqueness and character to his art. Schiele also, perhaps for the same reason, had a difficult time uniting sex with love. He had two prominent women in his life, Valerie Neuzil, or Wally, who was his mistress and model for many of his paintings, and Edith Harms, later to be his wife. Schiele separated women into two classifications that corresponded to these two women. Wally was the sexualized model, from whom he distanced himself emotionally. Edith was the innocent, chaste woman, whom he saw to be more human, yet also sexless. This posed a severe dilemma when Schiele married his wife Edith, because he wanted to keep his relationship with his mistress. When he was not able to carry on his affair, Schiele saw his marriage as a loss of his sexual freedom as well as a loss of himself. In many of his late self-portraits, Schiele depicts himself as being blinded as a metaphor for this loss. Edith was also not comfortable enough with herself to be a good figure model, yet she did not want Schiele drawing other women. After his marriage, much of Schiele’s later work lost its powerful sexuality and energy.
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Eros (Self-Portrait) - 1911 - This self-portrait demonstrates Schiele’s comfort with his own sexuality. The depiction of himself masturbating with a large erect phallus exemplifies his vanity. Though this is a relatively common theme in Schiele’s self portraits, he more often depicts himself castrated representing his own fears and anxieties about sex, due to his father’s death from syphilis. |
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Recumbent Female Nude with Legs Apart - 1914 - Unlike many male artists, Schiele depicts his female nudes in a direct confrontation of their sexuality and its power. He would rarely use professional models, instead he often paid prostitutes to pose for him in non-traditional positions .The focus on the model’s genitalia suggests Schiele’s openness to the entire female body and creates a distinctive compositional design. |
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Two Girls Lying Entwined - 1915 - This double portrait represents the two female archetypes in Schiele’s life; his mistress, Wally and his wife, Edith. The nude figure is the sexual woman, representing Wally. She is posed provocatively and appears alive and dynamic, where the clothed figure, which represents Schiele’s wife, is limp and sexless, much like a rag doll. |
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Embrace (Lovers II) - 1917 - Schiele painted Embrace one year before he died and was one of his last paintings. It has a significantly different context than most of his earlier works. After several years of marriage, Schiele seems more in tuned to personality rather than solely sexuality. The tender embrace between the lovers is much more emotional than the anxious sexual grip of his earlier portraits. |
