Schiele’s Not Just for Nudes Anymore

The Neue Galerie’s Schiele landscape show and book examine the last Old Master.

E gon Schiele: Living Landscapes, at the Neue Galerie in New York, is the gratifying and weightier bookend to last year’s Klimt’s Landscapes exhibition, also at the Neue Galerie. Neither Schiele (1890–1918) nor Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) was well known for landscapes. Klimt was Schiele’s mentor. Both are Austrian, and both are icons of an age when Vienna was cutting-edge and last-gasp, a hub of so much creativity and the center of an empire in extremis.

The Neue Galerie couldn’t get the loans needed for its Klimt show. There wasn’t a profound need for it, either, since a Klimt landscape survey in 2002 at the Galerie Belvedere in Vienna and the Clark Art Institute covered much of what was to be said about these very pretty things. In Living Landscapes, the museum had better luck with loans. There’s so much to say about Schiele, too. Though he died at only 28, he’s a gift that keeps giving. It’s a very good exhibition as well, with a beautiful, balanced book. Schiele always intrigues, and not only because his work is so eerie, even weird. Of the two artists, Klimt is far more famous and likable for his dazzling color and fin-de-siècle elegance, seasoned here and there with a hint of turpitude. He looks back. Schiele seems to look forward.

Schiele is best known for his kinky portraits, especially his nude self-portraits, which still might startle, repel, and engross, often in that order. He stretches his figures without adding bulk, so they look skeletal, less emaciated or enervated than bizarre and squirmy. Though “anguished” is the tag usually placed on his work, with “taboo” next in line, I wouldn’t use either at all. A close look at his landscapes and cityscapes brings us, so to speak, back to terra firma. Schiele did more landscape oil paintings than oil portraits, about 170 to 130, in a career that lasted ten years. That he did many hundreds of watercolors and drawings as well shows us how prolific he was. Yes, these are heavy on portraits and allegorical figures, but landscape was central in his big, studio oils, many his showpieces.

Living Landscapes presents Schiele as a man especially wedded to the land — Austrian land — in a way that’s part nature mysticism and part patriotic. At one point in the 1910s, he was certainly the bad boy of Austrian art, its James Dean, but he was a Vienna art phenomenon while he was still a teenager, disdained convention, and ran with, not from, a white-hot, relentless libido. Today, this seems quaint. As he got into his 20s, maturity — and, I think, landscape painting – house-trained him.

I’d never seen Self-Portrait with Peacock Waistcoat, Standing before. It’s from 1911 and has to be one of his best self-portraits. He gives himself a nimbus as he stands in a meadow of flowers. His fingers are drenched in a rainbow of paint. Peacock indeed, but a serious, thoughtful one. Schiele wrote a poem in 1910 about religion and art, which he called “the highest sentiment.” Of God he writes, “I sense Him powerfully, very powerfully, most powerfully.” I’d never thought about Schiele as religious, or as much more than a wonderful artist who was also a rascal.

Schiele’s not the first artist who saw God in flora and fauna. Nearly every religious painter knew the religious iconography of flowers — lilies are for purity, hyacinths for constancy, and on and on — and deployed it. Klimt painted tall, gangly sunflowers, and so did Schiele, but his Sunflower I, from 1908, done when he was Klimt’s student, is more of a life-and-death parable about humanity. Three young flowers press against decaying leaves, with branches looking like failing limbs. In Wilted Sunflowers (Autumn Sun II), from 1914, we see resplendence and death in different plants at different moments, with the sunflowers finished for the year while other flowers in a meadow are bright and lush.

Klimt’s landscapes owe much to the Impressionists, especially Monet and Pissarro, and also to Van Gogh, Seurat, and Signac, and there’s nothing wrong with that. He painted many of his landscapes while on long summer vacations on the Attersee, one of Austria’s mountainside lakes. Together, this makes for art that’s beautiful, chromatically rich and high-keyed, and altogether easy on the eyes. Schiele’s preferred palette is autumnal, with russet, earth-red, amber, gold, and deep yellow ruling landscapes, cityscapes, and even the nudes. Red Earth, from 1910, is bracing, a brown, ocher, and red mountain, somber and austere. It’s one of the very few landscapes he chose for his first one-man show in 1911. As landscapes go, it’s rough and tough.

River Landscape with Two Trees, from 1913, has the look of stained-glass forms, with subtly mottled color not unlike windows designed by Tiffany or John La Farge and the uncanny look of filtering light. Schiele wasn’t inspired by either. He probably didn’t know who they were. Rather, he had ample models in Gothic stained glass, not only in Vienna, where he studied, but in the small towns in Austria and Bohemia where he grew up or where he had family. “People in the Middle Ages, yes, that had culture,” he wrote, “and yet people stupidly speak of the Dark Ages.” Schiele was the most Gothic of the avant-garde artists of his day.

River Landscape starts with the formal quality of stained glass — fragmentation — linked to Cubism, which was bleeding-edge when Schiele was coming of age. Together they stimulate his cityscapes. Schiele lived off and on in Vienna, but his cityscapes depict not the city of the Ringstrasse boulevard but small, old, dense towns where, surprisingly for a renegade, he felt soothed and naturally comfortable. His perspective is high above towns like Krumau an der Moldau in Bohemia, near his mother’s hometown. The Small City I (Dead City VI), from 1912, a view of the town, is heavy on square and rectangular roofs, with views of houses that seem to cling to one another. They’re not pieces of a puzzle. Geometric shapes are irregular, a bump here and curve there, asymmetrical, with windows that look like eyes. Buildings, like medieval society, seem organically related. They cling, not from habit or desperation but from a culture of mutual and beneficial dependency centuries in the making.

Schiele painted views of small towns closer to Vienna. They’re picturesque but gray, quiet, and archaic. Is this a city slicker’s critique? Not at all. The melancholy and soulfulness of these towns, Schiele felt, put them closer to God and more in tune not with the glossy, busy work of city life but with what he called the “decrepitude” of life, the bloom-to-barren cycle of sunflowers.

Kimberly Smith’s catalogue essay on Schiele’s late landscapes as war propaganda pushes the artist’s thoughtful, yearning patriotism, but it’s still smart and absorbing. Schiele was neither a nihilist nor a flake. During Austria’s disastrous years in the First World War, he wasn’t in the trenches but served honorably as a back-of-house soldier. He dug trenches, guarded prisoners of war, and served as a weapons-depot clerk. He evolved from a skeptic of the war, though a marginal one, to a confirmed patriot, though not a saber rattler.

In her past scholarship, Smith has positioned Schiele’s landscapes not only as what she calls “a paean to the charms of Austria’s vistas” but also as his conception of what would glue a postwar Austria together. By 1917, both the empire and its monarchy were, in Schiele’s mind, headed down the drain. For hundreds of years, both had united the country, vast and disparate that it was. Could small-town Austria, the Austria of Gothic style and history, become a new national identity?

Schiele might have thought so, Smith writes, and might, in his late landscapes, have visualized an Austrian Exceptionalism. She doesn’t reference our Hudson River School artists, who invested in the landscape a range of American civic values, but proposes Schiele as a proselytizer for a new Austria, a skinnier one, rooted in rural, or at least bourgeois, values. Town among Greenery (Old City III), from 1917, one of Schiele’s last cityscapes, also has a muted summer look rather than a bright, flashy palette. Is this his look of a new Austria? It’s certainly a gorgeous picture.

Smith’s evidence isn’t the strongest, but, in my view, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Schiele did indeed try to get a post in the military’s propaganda unit, but that would have placed him in Vienna and as a full-time artist. Polemics seemed to figure far less. He also did indeed submit a dozen landscapes to a 1917 exhibition of Austrian art in Stockholm meant to rouse support for the Central Powers in neutral Sweden. Schiele was a prolific letter writer, and there’s nothing there. We don’t know how avowedly political he was in 1917 and 1918. In any event, his death on October 31, 1918, came eleven short days before the end of the war.

Living Landscapes is more or less chronological, with an introductory gallery on Schiele’s early savant landscapes, mostly small. Klosterneuburg in Fog, from 1907 is gray, brown, and white, a farmed field covered in snow in the foreground receding to a church in a cityscape in the mist. It’s spectral and enchanting. Current of Youth, from 1909, thought possibly to be Danaë showered in gold, is among Schiele’s work when he was Klimt’s student. It recalls the highlights of Klimt’s days as a Secession star.

Man and Woman I (Lovers I), from 1914, which is one of the Neue Galerie’s showstoppers, is in the exhibition, though it’s not, strictly speaking, a landscape. It’s a view of a man and a woman in bed or on the floor, both buck-naked, gluttons of lust and not nice lust. Whatever the surface, they seem to be lying in a field, the blanket partially wrapped around them becoming a mountain. I wanted a deeper dive when I read the catalogue, but none’s offered. Still, it’s always great to see, though it doesn’t seem to belong. I suppose we can say the birds and the bees are carnal but not smutty.

Two galleries, one with hunter-green walls, another with not-quite-pumpkin walls, show the key landscapes. The art is both grave and glowing and feels like religious painting. I’ve seen Schiele’s death mask, owned by the museum, many times. To say death doesn’t become him is an understatement. Best to have used the catalogue photograph of him on his deathbed, still fitful and alive.

I liked the catalogue. Living Landscapes runs only at the Neue Galerie and, in any event, it’s the book that lasts as a tangible record and where most of the scholarship resides. Christian Bauer, the curator at the Schiele Museum in Tulln in Austria, curated the exhibition. His introductory essay sets the tone, which is a close look at the landscapes but also, for me, a look at Schiele the man and philosopher. Franz Smola’s essay on what he calls Schiele’s “faded towns” will be a revelation for Schiele beginners. Kerstin Jesse wrote on figures in Schiele’s landscapes. Kim Smith, who was my classmate at Yale, is the brave pioneer in the study of Schiele in the context of Austria’s tumultuous Teens. Her book on Schiele’s landscapes, published in 2004, is the first close, penetrating look at these works. Verena Gamper wrote about nature in Schiele’s letters and poems. I didn’t realize she was such a good writer.

Like all of the Neue Galerie’s books, it’s sumptuous, as is the presentation of Living Landscapes. My apologies for writing this review only days before the exhibition closes. The weeks drifted, as they do especially around Christmas. Many of Schiele’s landscapes are in private collections or at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, which, odd to say, didn’t lend. Austrians are squirrelly about their Modernist paintings, possibly because they are well aware of provenance issues and prefer to keep them in the country. The Neue Galerie has the best collection of work by Schiele outside of Austria. It’s one of my favorite art galleries anywhere, so I always look at the Schieles on view whenever I visit.