Egon Schiele Austrian artist born 1890 and dies in 1918 of Spanish Influenza. He had four sisters, he was the eldest. His youngets sister was Gerti born 1894 and dies in 1981. He had an incestuous infatuation with his younger sister, which his father greatly disapproved of.
famous for depicting the female figure, young pre-pubescent girls mainly, in paint, line drawings and etching/printing. The girls are in sexually compromising positions, either laying bare with their legs open, waiting, or caught in a moment of masturbation. In 'Nude with Green Turban' 1914, Schiele shows the female gently touching her vagina, wering stockings and shoes, heavily detailed, but wearing a mask like face, like a puppet, its hard to sense the presence of a person.
Whats fascinating and of interest to me is that the females in his pictures, wether posed for or not, seem to bear an 'uncanny' (Freudian pun) resemblance to the artist. Schiele has a very individual appearance, eyes bulging and skinny bony face structure, peering out. This character is recurrent in many of his 'potraits'.
He uses the female body,in a similar way to Klimt, his mentor and friend from his student days. Also links between Munch and contemporary artists like Tracey Emin. Schiele uses the female body as a site of expression of anxiety, fear suffering and pain.
In her reading of the Biblical book Genesis published in The Female Body in Western Culture, Mieke Bal points out that women are viewed dangerous because of what she calls the "retrospective fallacy: so attractive in body, so corrupt in soul...Eve's body is claimed to be a lesser performance than Adam's, she is the morally weak" The male is fearful of the otherness of the female body, what Freud coined the Castration theory. The female body, in masculine terms, therefore offers itself as the embodiment of these forces of corruption and deceit, rooted to the beginning of time, in the body of Eve. As i will show, in my account of Mieke Bal's reding, the Genesis account written by Paul has many flaws through literary errors and she points out that infact this misreading has led to the mis representation of women as the lesser other figure to the male.
Schiele's art developed and matured in execution , but he maintained the same postures throughout his lifetime, offering the women (or himself throught the body of the women) as a site of expression of inner thought and feelings routed in sexuality, in keeping with the Freudian psychoanalytical generation he was of.
