Egon Schiele was no stranger to scandal, but his expressionist work has been widely celebrated for the way it creates beauty from decadence, writes Derek Scally in Vienna
Vienna is saying farewell to Golden Adele. Billboards around the city bear posters reading "Ciao Adele" over the image of Adele Bloch-Bauer as immortalised a century ago in the swirling golds and silvers of Gustav Klimt.
In January, after years of court battles, an arbitration panel ruled that the painting and four other Klimt works seized by the Nazis in 1938 and displayed for six decades in the Belvedere Palace belong to the niece of Adele's husband, a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor living in Los Angeles.
The Austrian government has abandoned plans to try and buy back the works and "Golden Adele" will soon leave Vienna for good, breaking Austrian hearts as she goes.
One way of easing the heartache is the stunning retrospective of Klimt's direct successor Egon Schiele, once dubbed the "charming cadet of decay".
Vienna's Albertina has combined 130 works from its own Schiele archive with dozens of loans to trace the transition from Klimt's romanticised erotic of brilliant colours and sensual lines to Schiele's portraits of sinewy, bony figures with red-raw extremities, nipples and hairy bodies which, paradoxical as it may sound, sexualised the erotic.
As part of the Vienna Modern movement which broke with tradition to deliver a fresh artistic view in the early 20th century, Schiele's art also reflects the theories of Freud that were gripping Vienna at the time, including the idea that sex takes hold of us in infancy and never releases its grip.
His sketches and painting also reflect his openness to the supernatural theories popular at the time and his diaries are filled with talk of "astral light" and the "inner spirit".
Schiele was incredibly prolific, producing 3,000 sketches and paintings from 1908 to his premature death a decade later aged just 28.
Egon Schiele was born on June 12th, 1890 in the small Lower Austrian town of Tulln. His father, Adolf, was a railway officer, and Schiele had a distant relationship with his mother Marie.
He was close to his younger sister Gerti, a little too close for their father's taste, who once broke down a locked door to see what his two children were doing together. As teenagers, Egon and Gerti ran away together to Trieste and spent a night together in a hotel room.
IN 1904 THE family moved to Klosterneuburg near Vienna because of Adolf Schiele's poor health. He died in 1905 and a year later, aged 16, Schiele overcame family objections to enter the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.
After just a year in the academy, he tracked down his idol, Gustav Klimt, and asked him whether his work showed talent. "Yes," replied Klimt, "much too much."
Some early Schiele works featured in a 1909 international show celebrating Klimt, and the older artist introduced his young acquaintance to the Wiener Werkstätte of the Seccession.
At the same time, Schiele's ongoing rows with his conservative art school teachers flared up and he walked out of the Vienna academy and set up the "Neukunstgruppe", the New Art Group, with fellow students Paris von Gütersloh, Franz Wiegele and Anton Faistauer.
They put together a show at the end of 1909 where Schiele met Arthur Roessler, an influential critic who would become his greatest patron and collector.
"Many will certainly perish along the way, but some I consider strong enough, internally and externally, to break through," wrote Roessler in a review of the exhibition for the Arbeiter-Zeitung newspaper. "Among these is the unusually talented Egon Schiele."
Roessler helped open the doors of Vienna society to Schiele, a slim figure with unruly hair, an earnest expression and what Roessler later described as "a laconic way of speaking and impression of an inner nobility in no way feigned".
The Albertina exhibition focuses on the work that so excited Roessler and others, following Schiele's expressionist breakthrough when he began producing works with colours as jarring as subject matters such as naked, pregnant women at a gynaecologist friend's practice.
In 1911, he met the 17-year-old Wally Neuzil who became one his best-known models, and they left Vienna, moving from one village to the next and eventually settling in Neulengbach.
His studio there soon became a hang-out for pre-pubescent delinquent boys and girls whom he sketched in suggestive poses. His notoriety spread and in April 1912 the local police descended on the studio, seizing more than 100 pictures and throwing Schiele in prison on charges of seducing an underage girl.
The Albertina exhibits the bleak, hopeless series of paintings he produced during his 21 days in prison before he went on trial, with inscriptions such as "I do not feel punished, but purified" and "To restrict the artist is a crime."
He faced up to 20 years in jail, but the charges of abduction and seduction were dropped. Schiele was found guilty of exhibiting an erotic drawing in a place accessible to children, and one of his works was publicly burned, but he was released after a further three days in prison.
After escaping the first wave of conscription for the first World War, he was signed up in 1915 and sent to Prague. At the same time he left Wally to marry Edith Harms, a middle-class heiress who, along with her sister Adele, would become Schiele's favoured models.
SCHIELE CONTINUED WORKING through the war, producing sketches of Russian prisoners-of-war, and his reputation grew after exhibitions in Germany and Switzerland. But it was an exhibition in March 1918 at the Vienna Seccession that finally brought him widespread artistic acclaim and financial success.
It would be a short-lived triumph. Seven months later, his pregnant wife succumbed to the Spanish flu that claimed 40 million lives in Europe, including, three days later on Hallowe'en, Schiele himself.
Schiele's audacious, scandalous work continued to grow in popularity after his death, anticipating the expressionism of Otto Dix and Francis Bacon's use of the body to depict the human condition.
Austria may be losing Klimt, but, through the Albertina exhibition, they have regained Schiele.
Egon Schiele is at the Albertina, Vienna, until Mar 19. See www.albertina.at
