The courtroom fell silent as the judge lit a match, the spark burning bright in front of him. He paused, briefly addressing the accused – Egon Schiele, a young artist, then 21 years old – before placing the flame to the scandalous artwork at the heart of the case.
The piece of paper, confiscated from Schiele’s bedroom – upon which, the artist had drawn a nude figure – ignited quickly, and fell to the ground as a smoking swirl of ashes. Those gathered in the gallery that day in 1912 gasped, and the artist hung his head in desperation at the loss of his precious work. Among those witnesses to his downfall was Walburga Neuzil, a young woman, just 17 years old, who modelled for the charismatic, controversial artist. She’d become integral to Schiele’s life and the production of his art.
Walburga, or Vally as she is known in my debut The Flames, proved her loyalty by standing by the troubled artist throughout his darkest days – the 24 days of his imprisonment in a tiny cell, in the small Austrian town of Neulengbach, on charges of “public immorality” relating to his artwork. Further charges of kidnap and seduction of a minor – resulting from an incident where Schiele and Vally accompanied a 14-year old girl to Vienna – had been dropped, but there could be no denying that the artworks Schiele created were explicit, erotically charged. The locals had been angered by the artist and his “mistress”, and the fact his works were displayed in his home, viewed by schoolchildren, tempted by the forbidden.
It is rumoured that Vally met the young Egon Schiele in the studio of Gustav Klimt, the great Austrian artist, famous for grand, art-nouveau works such as The Kiss, laden with desire and gold-leaf. Klimt himself was no stranger to controversy. Father of at least 14 children, he’d founded the Viennese Succession in 1897. At nearly 30 years Schiele’s senior, he was something of a mentor for the young artist, who, at 17 years old, had approached the more established artist to ask if he had any talent. “Much too much,” was Klimt’s reply.
Vally Neuzil did not come from wealth or have much by way of education. She was born in Tattendorf in 1894, and moved to Vienna with her mother age 12. She became an artist’s model, an occupation which, at that time, was akin to prostitution. This was a time when husbands hardly saw their wives undressed. So it was not an honourable role to take one’s clothes off for money, much less to have to deliver those artworks to Vienna’s elite, who had a taste for the explicit and were willing to pay handsomely to have their appetites sated.
Once the trial in Neulengbach was concluded, the disgraced artist returned to Vienna with Vally, scandal hot on his heels. But far from destroying the reputation of this thrusting young man, disgrace had merely solidified his reputation as the enfant terrible of the art world. His star was rising. Within a matter of months, Schiele had moved to Heitzing, a wealthy district of the capital, and soon met his well-to-do young neighbours, Adele and Edith Harms, who would have been seen as well-bred, educated, and very suitable wives-in-the-making.
Schiele was still intimate with Vally while he surreptitiously courted, and eventually proposed to, one of the Harms sisters. Class was definitely at play in his decision. Vally would never have been seen as “marriage material”, despite inspiring some of his most profound artworks, including a portrait of her alongside a physalis, painted after his release from prison in 1912. She worked hard, she was loyal, but according to the customs of the day, because she was of a lower class, she wasn’t deemed good enough to become his wife.
On their break-up, Schiele also went on to paint Death and the Maiden, a hauntingly beautiful oil painting that captures their shared distress at their separation. Still, Schiele married the nice girl who lived across the street. But days before the wedding, he made a bizarre proposal of his own to the woman who’d stood by his side: in one of Vienna’s famed coffee shops, where sachertorte could be enjoyed while people’s discussed Freud’s ground-breaking theories, Schiele presented Vally with a contract that promised them two weeks together each summer – his way for things to carry on as they had been.
She declined – and I enjoyed imagining precisely the words she used to express her dismay and sense of betrayal during that pivotal scene, in The Flames – and never saw him again. This was during the first World War, and Vally left Vienna not long after, to become a military nurse with the Red Cross, stationed in Dalmatia. She died of scarlet fever soon after, and was buried in an unmarked grave. Happily, in 2018, it was restored to give this dynamic and determined young woman a headstone and the recognition she deserved.
I explore Egon Schiele’s relationship with Vally, and that of three other significant women in his life and art, in my debut novel. We also meet Gertrude, the artist’s little sister. Together they share a troubled childhood, at the mercy of a strict father who was slowly going mad as a result of syphilis . She goes on to pose for her brother in the nude. Their intimacy baffled me, and sparked my imagination. I wanted to know how she felt posing in this way. We also see Schiele through the eyes of Adele and Edith Harms, those well-to-do neighbours who vie to become his wife, upsetting the balance of their sisterly love in the process.
The Flames is a work of fiction, based on explosive and compelling historical facts. As soon as I encountered the intimate portraits of the “muses” who inspired Schiele’s greatest artworks in the Courtauld gallery in London, I knew I had a great story on my hands – full of sex, scandal, betrayal and heartbreak. Each of the four women I researched and wrote about got burned in their encounter with Schiele. It has been a privilege to breathe life into the bones of their stories, and give them a voice after a century of silence.
I think of how the judge ignited Schiele's artwork in that courtroom more than a hundred years ago – burning, but also illuminating – and I hope The Flames shines a new light on the models who made that troubled man one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.
The Flames by Sophie Haydock is published by Doubleday on March 17th
