Egon Schiele: The Making of a Collection

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Belvedere, Egon Schiele: The Making of a Collection, Kerstin Jesse, MuseumsQuartier, Vienna

Egon Schiele: The Making of a Collection

Curated by Kerstin Jesse

Orangery, Lower Belvedere, Vienna

19 October 2018 to 17 February 2019

Egon Schiele, Four Trees, 1917
© Belvedere, Vienna
Oil on canvas, 110 × 140 cm

I caught the tail end of this exhibition, just a few days back.

It featured all of Egon Schiele’s works held by the Belvedere: about twenty or so, I think. Most are portraits, though there are self-portraits (naturally), landscapes, cityscapes, symbolist tableau, etc. The bulk of Schiele’s work is to be found across the city someways, ensconced in the Leopold Museum in the MuseumsQuartier.

Together with the artworks, there was some background information (not entirely complete) about how the works were acquired. When the Nazis entered Austria in 1938, many Jews had to give up their possessions, including art works they had collected, or sell them at a pittance, in order to leave the country and escape with their lives. That’s one common, recurring scenario. But even when a family had managed to keep hold of a precious artwork, or in the unlikely event that it had been returned to them after 1945, they were not able to take it out of the country (an export ban saw to that). So they were often reduced to selling it for below market value, either to a collector (the ubiquitous Leopold), or a museum, or the Austrian state.

What one should say is that Austria is probably the most up-front, proactive country in the world when it comes to being open and transparent about the provenance of the art held in its museums, and that is due in no small part to the efforts of the brilliant Sophie Lillie, author of Was einmal war. Most other countries: the USA, Russia, Italy, and (yes) the UK are way behind. They are reactive and often fight claims for restitution, tooth and nail.

As a first step, all museums should know the provenance of all artworks in their collections acquired between 1933 and 1945 (or even slightly later). Where there is doubt or uncertainty, there should be a presumption of foul play.  You might well ask: why aren’t they doing this now?

Further details of Egon Schiele: The Making of a Collection can be found here.

Klimt / Schiele

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Albertina Museum Vienna, Beethoven Frieze, Egon Schiele, Expressionism, Gustav Klimt, Jugendstil, Klimt / Schiele, Royal Academy of Arts, Secession

Klimt / Schiele

Drawings from the Albertina Museum, Vienna

Royal Academy of Arts, London

4 November 2018 – 3 February 2019

In this impressively staged exhibition we clearly see how Egon Schiele fell under the spell of Gustav Klimt – not surprisingly, perhaps, since when Schiele was a student Klimt was the alpha artist bar none, and many naturally emulated him – but in time became his own man.

Mind, Schiele always retained a supreme respect for Klimt. There is the marvellous Secession poster (included here, thankfully) that Schiele made the year after Klimt’s death: Schiele and the rest of the artists sat around a table, an empty chair marking Klimt’s absence.

The artists’ contrasting approach to drawing is also evident here, and is worth remarking upon. Consider, first, that Schiele’s drawings are almost always finished, polished works of art (in most cases, they have been coloured in), whereas Klimt’s drawings are usually (though not always) preparatory studies for paintings, frescoes and the like. Here we see the preliminary sketches for his seminal Beethoven Frieze. Klimt didn’t apparently see drawings, in and of themselves, to be a primary medium for his art.

Second, consider another curious contrast between the two men. Klimt, whether through reticence or because his energies were deployed elsewhere, never made a self-portrait in all his days. Whilst Schiele played with the genre of the self-portrait in manifold ways (his self-portrait masturbating being perhaps the most extreme or most daring example; it is not included here), and it crops up often in his drawings. Even in the era of the selfie stick, Schiele takes some beating in this regard. Surveying the prodigious profusion of self-portraits (‘Me, Me, Me!’), Schiele manages to make even Durer look like a wilting wallflower.

In the area of the erotic, there is a marked difference too. Klimt’s women are desirable creatures. They can be elegant and lovely (as in the society portraits), or dreamy, playful kittens (think Degas) when the artist has been commissioned to be deliberately explicit. Klimt’s explicitly erotic work – I am thinking in particular of the drawings he made for Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans – would count as little more than classy, soft porn had his phenomenal talent not transformed them into art. By contrast, Schiele’s women cannot help looking corrupt and diseased, ill-limbed harbingers of death. You are not tempted.

Then there are the drawings Schiele made when he was arrested and spent some time in prison: Klimt did not have this experience. Safely ensconced in his studio in Vienna, his life was never at risk in quite the same way. He at times faced scandal, it is true, but his social existence was never really threatened.

This wonderful exhibition is well worth a walk through or two. And your journey will inevitably shadow Schiele’s own: from a Klimt-derived, sunny Jugendstil to a gritty, benighted Expressionism.

Klimt / Schiele: Drawings from the Albertina Museum, Vienna is showing at the Royal Academy of Arts until 3 February 2019. Details here.

Sunken cities: Egypt’s lost worlds & Sicily: culture and conquest

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Antinous, British Museum, Byzantine, Canopus, Christoph Gerigk, Franck Goddio, Greece, Rome, Sicily: culture and conquest, Sunken cities: Egypt’s lost worlds, Thonis-Heracleion

Sunken cities: Egypt’s lost worlds & Sicily: culture and conquest

British Museum

London, May 2016

Colossal statue of god Hapy, Thonis-Heracleion, Aboukir Bay, Egypt (SCA 281). Height 5.4 metres, depth 90 centimetres, weight 6 tonnes. Early Ptolemaic period, 4th century BC. Photo: Christoph Gerigk © Franck Goddio / Hilti Foundation

These two superb exhibitions, now on show at the British Museum, gave rise to learning, wonder and insight – quite unlike the prissy concurrent RAI conference on climate change, which I also briefly visited. That conference was blessedly quarantined in the basement, where it belonged.

The take home-message common to both exhibitions, an important one in light of the upcoming EU referendum, is that there is no such creature as a mono-culture. That beast simply does not exist.

Sunken cities: Egypt’s lost worlds took as its subject Thonis-Heracleion (named in part after the Greek god Heracles) and Canopus, two Egyptian cities submerged under the Mediterranean. Through myriad magnificent recovered artifacts, not least colossal sculptures, we learnt how Egypt was changed by Greek and later Roman conquerors and how Greece and Rome were transformed in their turn. One tablet showed Alexander the Great as a Pharaoh. The exhibition ended with an account of the cult of Antinous, Hadrian’s lover beautiful lover, who drowned in the Nile, but it could well have continued on. Egypt’s greatest contribution to European culture lies perhaps in the notion of divine kingship, a notion which found its most potent expression in the figure of Charlemagne, leading to the birth of an empire that lasted a thousand years.

Statue of Arsinoe, Canopus, Aboukir Bay, Egypt (SCA 208). Cut in hard, dark stone, this feminine body has a startlingly sculptural quality. Complete, it must have been slightly larger than life-size. The statue is certainly one of the queens of the Ptolemaic dynasty (likely Arsinoe II) dressed as the goddess Isis, as confirmed by the knot that joins the ends of the shawl the woman wears, which was representative of the queens during this time period. The statue was found at the site of Canopus. ©Franck Goddio / Hilti Foundation – Photo: Christoph Gerigk

Whilst BP’s sponsorship of Sunken cities is to be welcomed (contra Greenpeace), the contrived analogy in the introductory blurb (BP excavates for oil in the world’s oceans and seas as Franck Goddio and his team excavated in the Mediterranaen to rescue these treasures of the ancient world) is wholly self-serving.

Sicily: culture and conquest took a long look at the largest island in the Mediterranean, an island successively settled by Greeks and Romans, Arabs and Normans, and others before and since. An island yet also part of the main – a magnet, in fact – by no means isolated.

Byzantine mosaic showing the Virgin as Advocate for the Human Race. Kept at Museo Diocesano di Palermo, originally from Palermo Cathedral, c.1130-1180 AD. Copyright: Museo Diocesano di Palermo

There is a breathtaking Byzantine mosaic of the Madonna in this exhibition (above), amidst much else. My eye was also taken by an ivory casket with a mesh of Muslim motifs and Christian iconography (incidentally there is a very similar casket on display at the minute in one of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Europe galleries) and the curious object below, a tombstone in four languages (Latin, Greek, Arabic and an Arabic-Hebrew hybrid):

A tombstone in four languages, Marble, Palermo, Sicily, 1149 AD. Soprintendenza di Palermo © Regione Siciliana

We ended in the reign of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily. As a polymath, Frederick was ideally suited to rule over Sicily’s richly diverse culture. During his reign it must have seemed as though the island of Sicily stood at the centre of the world.

Sunken cities: Egypt’s lost worlds is on show until 27 November 2016, while Sicily: culture and conquest, runs until 14 August 2016. Both are highly recommended. Further details can be found at the British Museum website, here.