Tim Marlow TV - Mary Beard TV - Egon Schiele: Dangerous Desires TV - Stephen Smith TV -
Portrait of the Painter Karl Zakovsek 1910: He could almost have stepped off the set of La Boheme ... I am a big fan of Egon Schiele. Tim Marlow Meets Renee Fleming
Egon Schiele has become one of the most celebrated artists of the last hundred years. A controversial figure in his own short lifetime who was jailed on an obscenity charge. His work is starkly honest and provocative. Intensely powerful images where the human figure is stripped down to base essentials both sexually and psychologically. He’s one of the great draughtsmen in art history. And perhaps the most obsessive painter of the Self ever, whose influence has struck a neurotic as well as erotic chord throughout the twentieth century. Great Artists with Tim Marlow s1e26: Schiele, Sky Arts 2003
Egon Schiele only lived for twenty-eight years and he worked for barely ten of those. But his life and his art were dominated by the cultural centre that was Vienna. ibid.
Encouraged by his art teacher at school Schiele applied to the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and was accepted. A few months earlier the Academy had refused entry to another young hopeful – Adolf Hitler. ibid.
The Vienna Secession was an art movement set up in the 1890s and broke away from the official academies which were regarded as too traditional. Within a few years of its founding the Succession built its own eye-catching headquarters in the heart of Vienna. An independent forum for artists, designers and architects. In 1907 Schiele met Gustav Klimt. ibid.
With Schiele it was always his self-obsession, his narcissism, that manifests itself in these nude self-portraits. ibid.
The second area that Schiele made his own and which also generated a substantial income for him and which also led to the production of confident almost brash erotic masterpieces like this later in his career was of course the female nude. ibid.
When Schiele actually got out of prison it’s widely believed that this was the work that he produced. A double portrait of him and Wally in an embrace and in a way paying a distant homage to an iconic Viennese painting produced by Gustav Klimt called The Kiss. ibid.
It’s called Death and the Maiden and undoubtedly is one of Schiele’s great masterpieces. ibid.
The Family, where father, mother and child are presented in a composition that is like an inverted pyramid. ibid.
Egon Schiele: the naked body, how it is represented, and what it means. Schiele painted his own body again and again in an act of repeated self-reflection. Mary Beard’s Shock of the Nude II
‘Schiele’s nudes still stock audiences. There is clearly something still provocative about his work.’ Egon Schiele: Dangerous Desires, Professor Gemma Blackshaw, BBC 2018
Died 100 years ago aged 28. ibid.
‘There’s a sense in which the works are more monstrous than they are ideal.’ ibid. observer
First Love: Wally Neuzil – his muse, his model, his girlfriend. They were very young when they met. ibid.
‘Everything by my hand that appeared over the last two or three years – be it painting, drawing or writing – prefigures what is to come’. ibid. letter to Uncle Leopold 2011
The story of Viennese Art Nouveau is a story of beauty. Stephen Smith, Sex and Sensibility: The Allure of Art Nouveau III, BBC 2013
There’s so much more than Klimt. ibid.
Vienna’s artists were the last to arrive at the Art Nouveau ball. ibid.
Klimt didn’t care; he was up for the fight and agreed to become president of the Secessionists. ibid.
YugenStyle was sexual ... There were no rules or dictats. ibid.
Above the door in big gold letters it reads: Der Zeit Ihre Kunst Der Kunst Ihre Freiheit: To the Age Its Art; To the Art Its Freedom. ibid.
The Viennese art revolution coincided with a social revolution in the city. ibid.
Otto Wagner designed these spectacular stations of the Viennese underground. ibid.
Koloman Moser: the great all-rounder. ibid.
They were creating the first Art Nouveau buildings here in 1893. ibid.
Brussel’s Art Nouveau star was Victor Horta. ibid.
The sheer decadence of Art Nouveau made it ripe for criticism. ibid.
The enfant terrible of Viennese art – Egon Schiele. ibid.
Art Nouveau suddenly felt archaic. ibid.
Art Nouveau is as much the last artistic flourish of the nineteenth as it is the first of the twentieth century. ibid.