Egon Schiele: The Beginning ed. by Christian Bauer (review)

Designed to accompany an exhibition at the Egon Schiele Museum in Tulln, Austria, Egon Schiele: The Beginningreproduces a group of mostly unseen or little-known drawings and paintings by the child, adolescent, and youthful artist. It includes informative essays by the book’s editor, Christian Bauer, together with contributions from two other Schiele scholars, Nicole Fritz and Carl Aigner. More information has recently become known through research about the early family life of Schiele and the cultural influences that gave him educational direction as a young artist developing his unique, personal art during the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Aspects of this research underpin much of this invaluable new book. Included in the volume are various family photographs as well as photographs of Egon Schiele’s father, Adolf Schiele, who was the station master at the Tulln railroad station during the 1890s, as well as period images of Tulln and facsimiles of pages from his father’s railroad cargo books, used by Egon Schiele as an inventory to keep track of the library he inherited after his father’s death.

Carl Aigner’s essay “Egon Schiele—Collected Early Works: An Outline” describes the different provenances of the varied collections in Austria and Germany of Schiele’s juvenile drawings, watercolors, ink drawings, and gouache and oil paintings. The manner of these early works gives some evidence of his rapidly evolving skills as a draftsman through his practice of nineteenth-century realism and influences from Jugendstil design. His confident drawing style after 1910 becomes easier to grasp when related to his earlier art practice as an adolescent. Nicole Fritz’s essay “Lolitas in Glory: On the Development of the Child Portrait in the Work of Egon Schiele” discusses the child portraits, especially the girl portraits, in Schiele’s work as a young artist. Fritz believes that Schiele was aware of the landscape images with posed, adolescent female nudes found in the paintings, drawings, and woodcuts of Dresden’s “Die Brücke” artists of the early 1900s. Schiele’s approach, however, was radically different. His posed nude girls reveal more intense psychological states through individual portraiture of the models without the distraction of backgrounds, revealing an unsettling eroticism in the nature of the girls’ nude poses and facial expressions. Egon Schiele’s revelation of the individuality of the children’s sexuality in these images still has the power to shock. Christian Bauer’s biographical essay “Egon Schiele: The Beginning” updates current scholarly knowledge of Schiele’s early life and artistic achievements and gives a succinct overview of his brief existence.

The book is indispensable, however, for its inclusion of the first complete reproduction of Egon Schiele’s sketchbook from the summer of 1906, which was dedicated to Margarete Partonek. It was recently purchased from a private collector and is now part of the Egon Schiele Museum. The drawings from this sketchbook are instructive; from a very young age, Schiele was able to visualize complex technical structures with line, value, and color. Christian Bauer, in his research, also writes about the little-known love story of the fifteen-year-old Schiele’s affections for Margarete Partonek, a schoolmaster’s daughter who was younger than him. Bauer includes a love poem composed for Margarete in which Schiele “uses the German Knittel verse meter,” which suggests to Bauer “his intimate familiarity with the poetry he found in his [father’s] library” (188). There are also marginal drawings of Margarete’s face on the upper right- hand front cover as well as some of the pages of the 1906 sketchbook. The ink drawings convey a Jugendstil approach.

Included in the volume, besides pages from the 1906 sketchbook, are some remarkable childhood drawings of locomotives and train cars in pencil. Later, the teenage Schiele made images from landscape and urban scenes with gouache, watercolor, and oil paint. Finally, there are the academic drawings of nudes and portrait paintings of profiles and faces Schiele produced while...