The Intimacy of Body, Self and Art Egon Schiele Nude Self Portrait Squatting (1910)

Austrian artist Egon Schiele’s Nude Self Portrait Squatting (1910) used to be considered as one of the most iconic paintings to represent the raw opening of Expressionism. The self-portrait shows no hidings. With his signature graphic style, embrace of figural distortion, and bold defiance of conventional norms of beauty, Egon Schiele was the pioneer, in which he chose to give an unexpected twist to the definition of self-portraits. He squatted down, tilting his head and crawling the torso. His eyesights are radiant like the sunshine of the autumn dawn, alluring and apathetic, to the self or, to the brand new 20th century world he was living in. In this drawing, the artist has created an intense and almost horrifying vision of himself: emaciated, with legs deformed and most of his body exposed, yet his face partially hidden, suggesting a sense of shame. He exaggeratedly executed the brushstrokes to employed direct turgid emotional state.

from left to right: Self-Portrait with Raised Arms(1914), ,Mime van Osen Portrait(1910), Self-Portrait with Hands on Chest(1910) PHOTO CREDIT TO ARTSY

As most of his works are amorphously strong and emotionally intense, Schiele is always be analyzed as an Expressionist. His portraits are not only for the frequency with which the artist depicted himself, but for the manner in which he did so. Characteristics of the Expressionist mode that Schiele was increasingly practicing at this time, he expressed his anxiety through heavy lines, chaotic contours and colors with low brightness. What we usually see in his works are the primitive and vivid human emotions. The visions are thick and heavy, but the emotions is not difficult to feel. The arrival of the Expressionists announced new standards in the creation and judgement of art, which pointed out that art now was meant to come within the artist, rather than from a depiction of the external visual world, and the standard for the quality of a artwork became the character of the artist’s feelings rather than an analysis of the composition. It’s said that the Expressionism is a response to a widespread anxiety about humanity’s increasingly discordant relationship with the world, and those Expressionists were dealing with the world lost with feelings of authentic and spirituality. Through their confrontation with the urban world of the early twentieth century, Expressionists developed a powerful mode of social criticism in their serpentine figural renderings.

EGON SCHIELE Nude Self-Portrait Squatting(1910) PHOTO CREDIT TO ARTSY

However, if we take who Schiele’s mentor was into the stereotyped analysis of his paintings, there’s going to be a possibility that we could view them in the lens of gender and body art. Schiele’s painter and friend— Gustav Klimt, was the trigger for Schiele to start focus on erotic images of the female form. Schiele sought out Kimpt, whose work he already greatly admired in 1907. He inherited Klimt’s focus insatiable sexual appetite, but recreated a style totally extraordinary from Kilmt’s, whose paintings were more brilliant palette and glimmering patterned surface. Due to the large amount of human flesh that Schiele choose to exposed on the canvases, it’s not all about the psychological by-product of recent urbanization. It’s not that protesting to capitalism’s role in distancing of individuals. Now we are about to leap out of the concept of expressionism, leave alone the emotion-densed jargons which desperately trying to unlock the artists’ moody secrets. Taking a step back from obscure aesthetic concepts, I want to talk about Schiele’s Nude Self Portrait Squatting (1910) in the terms of body and psyche in which the way people found primitivism as the start of life, the end of lie.

Born in the turn of two centuries, found himself in the midst of an artistic revolution that stroke to overturn the norms of Renaissance and Romantic portraiture. As a results the subjects of classical portraits are deeply embedded in a scripted world of custom and convention. It’s said that art helps us to explore ways of being human, grants glimpses of lives beyond our own, aids empathy with others, alleviates distress, and widens our circle of awareness. Ironically, while we desperately dig in pretentious reasons to feel resonances of art, we just don’t get what artists want audiences to hear. Audiences scrutinize every detail in a tiny painting, flock to museums and galleries just to see that specific so-called artwork which you heard some of your rich friends went to see last week. Further, while people are arguing “the ultimate right answer” to the real meaning beneath these confusing strokes, something actually matters is overlooked. That’t the openness that we can all find on ourselves, including our own personal emotions and body image. Art is not all about the encoder. Art is not about what’s the artist want to tell us or shout out to either this dirty hell or celestial heaven that we all dream of. The meaning for the artworks come to life in the dialogue of encoding and decoding. Schiele’s large amounts of portraits blur the lines that we are trying to erase between audiences and the paintings. He helped us to get back to the center of the perception toward the universe, which appositely happen to be our own selves. Breaking down conventions, he hold a few sacrosanct which have long been admired since Stone Age. That’s our own body and wild sentiments.

His portraits make up two of the many pairings that appear in Schiele’s oeuvre, which abounds with mirroring and double portraits. The idea of doubles or “doppelgängers” was very much in the air in early 20th century Vienna, where Sigmund Freud had popularized the notion. For Freud, the “doppelgängers” allowed for productive self-scrutiny: it was alien enough to allow for ritual distance, yet familiar enough to allow recognition. Implicitly paired with this subject, the portrait is a double in its own right, entreating us to tune our gaze on ourselves. Schiele’s doubling demands that we traverse the distance between the fluid that calls its own subject into question. This logic extends to even most of his other portraits, which represent bizarre and baroque alternatives to this subject’s “real” appearances.

There’s a small interview of online magazine AEON that could support the idea of body reflecting. Stuart Franklin, who is the former president of Magnum Photos, was interviewed by the writer/philosopher Nigel Warburton. When talked about the conflict between sophisticated cameras and phones, Stuart Franklin talked about the eloquence of speaking of art. “For great photography, a level of depth is necessary, but also an openness to interpretation. Memorable photographs have this quality of openness. They don’t bring closure, necessarily, to the moment or internally, they allow viewers to bring their own thoughts to bear.” This clarified why these portraits are so vivid and standing out in the art history. While traditional portraiture maintains that the way we look is reflective of who we are, or who someone else is — that the self is just an extension of a social presentation — Schiele’s work rejects the idea of an internal/external correspondence. Instead, his portraits highlight the tension between the self and the image, rising to the impossible challenge of capturing the space between two.

To create this dialogue between the self and that body image every individual is always insecure and not aware about, Shiele sought for a radical method to perceive the body. He obsessed with framing and repetition of fragmented and almost distorted body. In Nude Self Portrait Squatting (1910), he adapted the head lean toward the right knee, the angle is so dramatic that seems to separate the head from the body. The dissonance of the strained tension of the arms and the hostile yet apathetic facial expressions offered a completely new sign of epigrams, or internally, an epiphany.

Broad culture response to insanity fin-de-siècle Vienna was not only due to Freud’s “discovery” of psychoanalysis. Instead, it’s built on already-existing and wide-ranging discourse on hysteria, neurasthenia and double consciousness. Around 1900, hysteria advanced to become a “cultural artifact” that inspired and fascinated many artists, including Schiele. Klaus-Albercht Schroder explains, “What is brought onto the stage of these paintings as a psychophysical reflection as visual citations from very diverse sources.” The fragmented and distorted body provide a new vocabulary for the scrutiny deep down inside of the very most primitive human being nature. Putting body in the centre of his works, the raw materiality of the deformed body is the preferred medium for the manifestation of psychic conditions. The fixation on the body as an immediate medium of a state of mind. The splitting of souls no doubt are informed by the shadow of war — the looming European conflagration that finally broke out in 1914; and after 1945 the widely ignored and pressing need to face up to the Nazi Era. Schiele’s portrait makes a remedy for himself, clarifying the appearance of the person in the painting. The traumatic events happened in the reality and were rendered in his portrait, which served as an instrument of healing.

“Schiele marks the beginning of an expansion of the concept of art that, in its aestheticization of the sexual and the pathological, too leave of the opposition of the beautiful and the ugly proclaimed by idealistic aesthetics. […] The diseased body, the pathological breakdown of the personality is also exalted as art.”

Art has caught up with sheer madness, and for modern consciousness, the artist is the exemplary sufferer. One of the most gripping characteristic in Schiele’s portrait is the embrace of “madness” in his perspective art forms and in the self-presentation of himself. He extorted his own emotions, and blackmailed himself just to understand the scars that would never be healed. He kidnapped the hurting experiences which is so difficult to narrate, nevertheless, he probably had no interests to tell anyone.What he wanted to say had all been captured onto the canvas, and that’s the intimacy between his own works and himself. There’s no reasons to let anyone know about it. He presented his body solely for his soul.

The process of giving birth to art —writing, drawing, sculpting, designing, singing— is the most intimate miracle in the universe, and what audiences have to cut out immediately is the unstoppable scrutinization. The way we have to adopt to see art is the way that Schiele adopt to see his own work. He embraced the void, and leap into the emptiness. Unveiling his naked body, Schiele’s found himself getting back to an unfamiliar comfort zone, which he always dreamed of but never had seen before. Like most of the Expressionists, he found he himself to be the best and one-of-a-kind muse for his art.

“I can’t see it...is it me?” I watched a young woman step closer to the canvas titled, Uncle Rudi. She was now physically closer and she was looking hard, but the image kept its distance. […] This is the artist’s uncle, the man his grandmother favored and the adult the young Richter was to model himself after. But nothing in this painting is clear. Not the relationship between the artist and his uncle, not the tension between Rudi’s innocent awkwardness and his participation in Nazi violence, not even in the relationship between the photograph and Richter’s painting.

The artist has drawn a dry brush across the wet surface of the nearly finished painting, and by doing this, he obscures the clarity of the photograph, denying us the easy certainty we expect. Richter reminds us that Uncle Rudi, like all images, promise and then fail to bring us closer to the people, things or places represented.

There’s no formula to understand any kind of art, but so what? Although now I close my eyes, I can still see his portraits clearly. The meaning of each art is an one-in-a-million jackpot credited to every unique individual. This essence is irreplaceable, and can’t be translated. We all have our very own language to speak it out, like Egon Schiele. Die young, stay pretty, live a playful life that no one would invade.

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