Last years

Egon Schiele, Sitzende Frau mit hochgezogenem Knie, 1917. © Národní Galerie, Prag. Photo: National Gallery Prague 2024.

Opening tomorrow, March 28, at Vienna’s Leopold Museum, Egon Schiele: Last Years provides a comprehensive overview of Schiele’s work from 1914-1918 — the First World War — following the radically aggressive and discordant work of his earlier career. I’ve always been rather more fond of this late work; one of my favorite Schiele drawings, “Sitzende Frau mit hochgezogenem Knie,” dates from 1917. Unlike the early work, Schiele’s later art consists of rather less sensational landscapes and portraits, but to me they seem to exhibit a more compassionate perspective without sacrificing the sensuality of that early work: the erotics of the body shade into an erotics of the spirit.

The exhibition, per the Leopold Museum’s web site,

weaves together biographical and artistic elements, focusing on the ruptures and transformations in Egon Schiele’s “late works” from 1914 to 1918, a period that has received comparatively little attention until now. During this time, Schiele gradually abandoned the radical formal experiments of 1910 to 1914 and developed a more realistic style characterized by deeper empathy. His linework became calmer, more fluid, and organic, and the figures he depicted gained greater physical fullness. The exhibition also offers new insights into this pivotal period by incorporating contemporary archival materials, such as the previously unpublished diary of Edith Schiele.

The exhibition runs through July 13. There is a digital exhibition here, and the catalogue is available here. A short teaser trailer is below.

My five minutes and 25 seconds of fame

A special birthday gift this past weekend was a shout-out from radio klassik Stephansdom, and needless to say I was flattered and honored. They were also kind enough to accommodate my request for Scott Joplin’s “Reflection Rag” from my wife’s Syncopated Musings CD of a few years back. A tip of my hat, then, to Ursula Magnes, Christoph Wellner, and the rest of the gang at rkS. You can hear both their kind words and the music below.

The idea of community

Stefan Zweig in 1917

From Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (1942), translated by Anthea Bell:

In fact, it must be said in all honesty that a good part, if not the greater part, of all that is admired today in Europe and America as the expression of a newly revived Austrian culture in music, literature, the theatre, the art trade, was the work of the Jews of Vienna, whose intellectual drive, dating back for thousands of years, brought them to a peak of achievement. Here intellectual energy that had lost its sense of direction through the centuries found a tradition that was already a little weary, nurtured it, revived and refined it, and with tireless activity injected new strength into it. Only the following decades would show what a crime it was when an attempt was made to force Vienna — a place combing the most heterogeneous elements in its atmosphere and culture, reaching out intellectually beyond national borders — into the new mould of a nationalist and thus a provincial city. For the genius of Vienna, a specifically musical genius, had always been that it harmonised all national and linguistic opposites in itself, its culture was a synthesis of all Western cultures. Anyone who lived and worked there felt free of narrow-minded prejudice. Nowhere was it easier to be a European, and I know that in part I have to thank Vienna, a city that was already defending universal and Roman values in the days of Marcus Aurelius, for the fact that I learnt early to love the idea of community as the highest ideal of my heart. (44-45)