Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic I have lived more than twice as long as Egon Schiele and can measure my shifting responses to his fixed and truncated oeuvre by the regular rhythm of shows at New York’s Neue Galerie. In my youth, I thrilled to his adolescent anger and relentless self-absorption. The theatrically neurotic self-portraits struck me as righteously honest. Later, I found myself repelled by those same qualities, which now revealed a bitter, twisted view of humanity — the quasi-pornographic studies of young girls, the bleak dissection of his Viennese cohort.Now the museum has supplied me with a less familiar, more appealing side of him to contemplate. Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes presents the painter venturing into the open air. A few photographs show us a serious young man in suit and tie, preparing to read trees and rivers as if they were scripture.And so they were, in a way. He felt that putrefying flowers, wintry forests, and tottering townscapes connected him to a kind of spiritual force. “In nature, the artist felt and found the divine,” he wrote: “Nature is purpose, but God is there and I sense him powerfully, very powerfully, most powerfully.” He made little distinction between God, nature, and his own psyche.In the end, context can’t define an artist like Schiele, who mixed grandiosity and pessimism into an almost messianic sensibilityAlthough this compact show comes equipped with a straightforward point — that Schiele was a landscape painter first and last — it quickly wanders off topic. Curator Christian Bauer undercuts his own argument by interspersing vistas with a suite of portraits that come across as filler. And Bauer, who runs the State Gallery of Lower Austria in Krems, one of Schiele’s favourite haunts, sees him in strictly parochial terms, despite the artist’s voracious approach to influence.He also suggests, counter-intuitively, that one of the 20th century’s most radical modernists resented the time he was born into. In this reading, Schiele evaded the present by gravitating to medieval centres like Krems, Stein, and his mother’s birthplace of Krumau (now the Czech town of Český Krumlov). Text panels refer to his loathing for Vienna: “Everybody is envious and deceitful,” he wrote. “In Vienna there is only shadow, the city is black, and everything is done by recipe.”This version of Schiele — the nostalgic neomedievalist with nationalistic tendencies — does come across in “The Vision of St. Hubert” (1916), painted for a prisoners’ station during the first world war. A white stag bearing a cross between his antlers appears to a hunter and his dog. And yet, for all its Gothic wistfulness, it could just as easily have been an enemy artwork, in the style of the Englishman Edward Burne-Jones.From the time he was a teenager, Schiele used landscape to try out various artistic identities. With a preternaturally assured hand, he produced virtuoso sketchbooks of trains slicing through countryside, of tidy medieval villages, onion-domed churches, dappled clearings and misty fields.It didn’t take him long to land on a mood of deep melancholy that he stuck with for the rest of his life and that attracts me afresh. “Forest, Hirschbergen” (1908) guides the eye downward, where trunks, roots, earth and rocks brood in purple shadows. “Summer Night” (1907) waxes even darker, with its great evergreens rising like a range of granite mountains against the bruised sky. That early painting recalls Munch’s “Starry Night,” an 1893 nocturne in which a dark, hulking stand of trees presides over heaven’s blinking spectacle.The Munch connection is one of many that the show underplays or downright ignores in the effort to present Schiele as a local loner. It’s easy to spot the links with Austrian contemporaries such as Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, but Picasso and Cézanne exerted an equally potent, if subtler hold from their perch in distant France. Schiele’s black-crayon portrait of Dr Franz Martin Haberditzl (1917), for instance, would be comfortably at home in Montmartre, along with Picasso’s pristine line drawings of Stravinsky and Erik Satie.One of the tiniest artefacts in the show is a postcard view of Krumau that Schiele acquired in 1909. He drew a minuscule, gridded frame around one corner, where houses jam together, eave against gutter, window to wall. From then on, he painted dense and clotted townscapes, mazelike arrangements of alleys, high walls and chimneys, with almost no people in sight. In works like “Town among Greenery (The Old City III)”, from 1917, peaked roofs jostle against one another in shifting, faceted surfaces and fragmentary planes that recall Picasso’s cubist renderings of Horta de Ebro.But it’s the spectre of Van Gogh that really haunts this exhibition. Schiele sniffed out the desperation that runs through the Dutchman’s most ostensibly cheerful scenes. Van Gogh presented his friend Gauguin with bouquets of flaming sunflowers, then painted them at every stage of their brief lifespan, from youthful bloom to terminal desiccation. Schiele plucked those warped, wilted, utterly defeated flowers from their vase and set them down in a wintry landscape, where they huddle in a crowd of skeletal stalks.The vibe is irredeemably gloomy, with none of Van Gogh’s hope of rebirth, only death and despoliation. Dylan Thomas’s lines come to mind: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer. / And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose / My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.”In the end, context can’t define an artist like Schiele, who mixed grandiosity and pessimism into an almost messianic sensibility. “A divine human being always leads the crowd!” he proclaimed in a 1911 letter. “The true work of art is the revelation of a special nature of the artist; the object is unimportant; he is immortal.”Seven years later, the self-anointed immortal died in the great flu epidemic, but not before he produced a disturbing intimation of a possible unrealised future. Schiele became fascinated by the theories of the anthropogeographer Erwin Hanslik, who promoted a scientific basis for the Austro-Hungarian Empire and argued that variations in physiognomy arose from different geographical areas. (“Such pseudoscientific classifications helped lead to devastating historical events two decades later with the rise of the Nazis,” a text panel remarks. It neglects to say that the Nazis murdered Hanslik in 1940.)Enthused, Schiele illustrated Hanslik’s book Essence of Humanity with a grid of phrenological sketches of male heads. You might see those drawings as promoting a close relationship between environment and species: who you are and how you look depends on the landscape you inhabit. Unsurprisingly, the analysis is self-serving. The skull in the “weak” row has a jutting chin, thick neck, and sloping brow. The “strong” head looks gaunt, and thin-nosed, which is to say an awful lot like . . . Egon Schiele. He had somehow managed to negotiate the passage from extreme expressivity to scientific neutrality with his narcissism intact.To January 13 2025, neuegalerie.orgFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
