«Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine
Tranquille.»
Egon Schiele
The expressionist painter Egon Schiele—a little less famous than his friend and mentor Gustav Klimt but with equal if not superior talent—died from the Spanish flu at 28, a few days after his wife, herself six month pregnant.
This is a picture of a corpse.
He is famous for his ultra-intimate, exposed, tortured, raw depiction of himself, among others. Like all of us, he was given the task to look at the world he was brought in. Not an easy business. Especially if you realize that at the center of the world is yourself! Like few of us, he decided to comply and show us what he saw, which was unlike anybody else.
His mother lost three children at birth, and a daughter who could grow up a little bit before dying of syphilis, contracted from the mother who herself contracted it from her husband, who had visited a brothel on their honeymoon following her refusal to "consummate" the marriage from sheer fear of the act. She delayed the penetration by a few days but because the husband couldn't wait that much, the series of above tragedies cursed the family. Go and paint the world after that...
Egon actually started with trains, which he liked, but the father thought this was stupid and destroyed everything. Again. Egon liked butterflies too. He also liked his younger sister, Gerti, whom he brought (by train) to an hotel room in Trieste to spend a night with her. She was twelve. He was sixteen. When the father died (of syphilis), the rest of the family was left with only the syphilis and misery. The father had destroyed all his railway stocks. Egon's life is a story of horrors that orbit between trains and sexual depravity. Go and paint the world in such conditions...
Like all tortured artists, he travelled far from his hometown and far from himself. He acquired, if not the friendship, at least the attention of Klimt, who became his mentor. The influence is obvious, but the trauma piercing through even more. Egon's art is a mirror. I could have written Ego here. Nobody else painted the self as faithfully as he did. He started to draw nudes, especially of nubile girls. When he got arrested for immorality, hundreds of artworks which would be today considered as pedopornographic were seized. One was set to fire in court. He also started to explore looming themes, death, in particular. During World War I, he served in a POW camp, where he drew Russian prisoners. Fitting subjects for his style and the mood of the time. One of his most famous paintings, Death and the Maiden—initially, the much more universal Man and Girl—explores the relationship between life and death, or, as some people would put it, Eros and Thanatos. His wife Edith is the unmistakable model. The man is a monk, looking at the abyss like Egon was looking at the world. With horror. They are holding themselves in a painful embrace (another early title for the work was Entwined People). They are shielded with a bedsheet from a mass grave of corpses below them. Love and Death. Not much more to look at... go and paint it!
I like him and his work because it demands considerably more than artistry and talent to express what you are, who you are, it takes courage and humanity. And to do the same but not even with yourself, with others, to extrude the holiness out of their violation, it requires a blessing and sanctity. He drew beautiful, simple things too, but even those are tortured. His Four trees are torn apart by colors. His Hafen von Triest is fractured by the water. He liked butterflies... what he drew best is the female nude. The exposed genitalia only partially covered by pubic hairs and/or the hands of the often masturbating subject. His Schwarzhaariger Mädchenakt is one of the most representative masterpiece of his style: three red spot maculate the female body: the lips, the breast and the vulva. The rest is a skeletic, bony figure, resigned yet still imploring our understanding, our complicity, our acceptance of the human condition... He went on and did paint the nakedness of the world.
I like the photo of his body on the deathbed maybe almost as much as his art, because it summarizes all of his life: it is immodest, it is shocking, it is painful, it is intimate, it is private, it is not something we should have seen. But he would have wanted to. And he's decent, he is clothed, with flowers resting together with him, who rests with one arm below the neck, as if he is—not even sleeping—dozing. He is free, at last. He has shown us everything he couldn't keep for himself alone, so much he has seen into it. Now that it's done, he can leave and carry on, elsewhere, dreaming no doubt of the trains and the butterflies. During the three days that separated his death from that of his wife, he drew a few sketches of her. He probably thought "let me draw one last thing before I go."