The PANY Bulletin

Psychoanalytic Association of New York
Volume 43, #3 Fall 2005

Art and Psyche: Egon Schiele

by Janice S. Lieberman, Ph.D. and Danielle Knafo, Ph.D.

Janice S. Lieberman:
An exhibition of 150 drawings and paintings “Egon Schiele: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections” is on view in New York at the Neue Galerie.( October 21, 2005- February 20, 2006). It is of great interest to psychoanalysts. Schiele (1890- 1918) lived and worked in Vienna during the time when Freud produced his seminal works. Both artist and psychoanalyst advanced the psychological understanding of the body and the genitalia. Both men were praised and vilified for their work. However, they never met. Schiele died of influenza at the age of 28, a few days after his young pregnant wife passed away from the same disease.

Schiele's best-known works are drawings of himself and of young women in which his wildest sexual fantasies are portrayed. The exhibition, not to be missed, also contains portraits of the artist's friends and relatives. His early works and his landscapes show the influence of Klimt, his mentor. Schiele was arrested and put in jail in 1912 on charges that he had abducted and molested a 13 year old girl. The charges were then dropped. But the poses in which he draws young girls, women making love to one another, his focus on the genitalia, make understandable the questions that were raised as to whether his work was pornographic or not. As psychoanalysts, we can wonder about Schiele and the relation of his psyche to his work and about his relationship with his models. What was being sublimated? Was sublimation successful or not? One can wonder to what extent Schiele was trying consciously to shock the public, a question asked about other artists e.g. Hans Bellmer and Balthus. Was he perverted or just perverse? Can we assume that an artist has a perversion on the basis of his art? These are just some of the questions to ponder while viewing the exhibition. At the very least, Schiele's ambivalence toward women is apparent in the wide range of emotions evoked in his works.

In 1993, psychoanalyst Danielle Knafo published a compelling picture of Schiele in her book Egon Schiele A Self in Creation: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Artist's Self- Portraits (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated Universities Presses, Inc.) with a forward by Jane Kallir, eminent Schiele scholar. It is a study of the artist's childhood and of changes in his self-portraits during four phases of his adult life. Knafo infers that Schiele's self-portrait-making enabled him to consolidate a rather fragmented self. Rather than review the book myself, I have asked Dr. Knafo to write an essay that captures the essence of the book and of Schiele's life and works.

Danielle Knafo:
I want to tear into myself, so that I may create again a new thing which I, in spite of myself, have perceived.
--Egon Schiele

So many young girls! Nymphets. Naked, undressing or fetishistically flaunting their stockings and shoes, they masturbate when alone and embrace when together. Though childlike in their simplicity, they deftly strike erotic poses reminiscent of adult pornography. Some express hesitancy or shy embarrassment by hiding their eyes. Others face forward, daring one to voyeuristically behold their private pleasures. Still others gently close their eyes to reveal the sleepy aftermath of sexual fulfillment. Genitals are exposed. Labia are exaggerated and drawn in obsessive detail. Color is sometimes added to accentuate sexual desire. Engorged nipples and lips shine in bright red hues. White auras produce an electric effect. An arm grows redder as it approaches swollen, spread fingers burning for touch. Patches of color blend into one another signaling excitement as it travels across the body.

By 1912, such visions of childhood sexuality proliferated in the art of Austrian Expressionist artist, Egon Schiele (1890-1918). In these drawings, Schiele repeatedly demonstrated that innocence and lasciviousness exist side by side. At the turn of the century, Freud shocked the scientific community with his theories of infantile sexuality. For years afterwards, he was accused of being a "Viennese Libertine" who engaged in "mental masturbation" and encouraged perversity and illegitimacy. It did not take long before the same straight-laced society that denounced Freud would also accuse Schiele of a crime. In the thousand years of the Habsburg Empire, Schiele was the only person imprisoned because of his art.

Replete with depictions of androgynous, masturbating Lolitas, emaciated trees, uninhabited towns, psychologically penetrating portraits in bizarre pantomime poses, and, most of all, convulsing, gyrating, amputated and castrated nude self-portraits, Schiele's oeuvre can easily be understood as containing a statement about the culture in which he lived. It mirrored fin-de-siècle Vienna's sense of fragmentation and doom and unmasked the hypocrisy of its superficial values. Karl Kraus, the fierce Viennese polemicist, described fin-de-siècle Vienna as “an isolation cell in which one is allowed to scream.” Schiele's numerous portraits depict him and others in an environment akin to Krauss's isolation cell and his images were very much a response to and a symptom of his social reality. As one of the first to cultivate an art centered on the self, Schiele, like Freud, revealed the face of modern man. Schiele's compelling explorations of his own psychic depths, primarily through repeated, merciless confrontations with his identity, sexuality, and mortality, paralleled the growing concerns of psychoanalysis at that time.

Yet, when one carefully analyzes Schiele's art, with particular emphasis on his self-portraits, it is easy to discern that it bears an intimate relationship to his life experiences as well as the historical period to which he belonged. Two sets of formative events are crucial for their effects on Schiele's life and art. His preoccupation with sex, death, and masculinity derive from the sexual origin of the disease responsible for family deaths, including those of his four siblings, and, most importantly, that of his father, who died paralyzed and completely insane from syphilis. A failed early mirroring experience with his mother during the formative stages of his self-development additionally led to his near-pathological obsession with his own image. (He produced more self-portraits than Rembrandt and Van Gogh combined.)

As a consequence of his adverse childhood experiences, Schiele's was a lifelong journey in which he searched for his lost parents in himself and for his lost self in his art. Art represented a substitute for his frustrating and lost objects, and his perpetual use of self-portraiture proved a constructive means of mastering these losses. Schiele often escaped his unsavory reality to find refuge in the quiescence of the surrounding nature. The two aspects of his early life—on the one hand, disturbed, sick humans and, on the other, serene images devoid of people—came to comprise the dual themes of his oeuvre.

It is perhaps significant that Schiele turned to self-portraiture following the death of his father. No longer having an adult male model with whom to identify—and his memories of his father were of an emotionally and physically handicapped man—Schiele was now the only male in an all-female household. Needing to reaffirm his masculinity and intactness, as well as to grieve his loss, he turned to the self-portrait. During the years 1910 and 1911, noted for Schiele's departure from the influence of his mentor and substitute father-figure, Secession artist, Gustav Klimt, Schiele developed his own artistic idiom. The large majority of his most disturbed and disturbing self-portraits were produced during this time.

Schiele's body is portrayed as mutilated or fragmented, often castrated, and distorted into awkward positions. Floating heads with expressions of angst and horror, clawlike hands, amputated limbs, emaciated torsos, and skin transparencies abound in Schiele's art of these years. He is utterly alone and thoroughly exposed, both physically and psychically. His physical contortions and facial grimaces are intensified by the expressive force of his brittle, angular lines. Schiele's water color also seems to derive from these powerful linear rhythms; almost as an afterthought, colors follow, enhance, and fill in the spaces that the firm contours made with black chalk have created. His colors produce independent forms whose major purpose is the expression of mood and emotion. Purples and blues evoke a sense of spreading decay in a disintegrating body; oranges, reds, and whites create the effect of fevered rage or passion about to flare up and explode.

The fragmentation he experienced during this period was so great that Schiele even began to draw split-off parts of himself in double and triple self-portraits, some of which represented his attempt to bring back his father back to life as his alter ego. In these and other paintings, Schiele either glorifies or gouges out his penis, the very physical appendix that causes him so much pain. The seemingly playful hide-and-seek game with his genitals reflects the artist's power in treating reality as plastic material for him to shape as well as his ambivalence vis-à-vis his sexuality. Autoerotic excitement is transformed into guilt and shame and ultimately culminates with castration as its unavoidable punishment. Touching and caressing himself on canvas with his phallic brush, Schiele's art in 1910-1911 became a form of masturbation; it was not only erotic, it was autoerotic. It is as if he realized that only by coming to terms with his sexuality could he achieve a true sense of identity.

The inevitable consequence of Schiele's revival of his father from the dead was the need to scrutinize his own identity, to question the ways in which he resembled his father and whether his penis was doomed to become a diseased death dealer like his father's. Expressing his deepest anxiety, he exclaimed; "I carry the seeds of decay within me.” Schiele's double self-portraits, then, became vehicles through which he attempted to buttress his masculinity and desire for immortality, yet they eventually took on a double-edged meaning: as a second self, they protected him from mortality but, as a persecutory object, they both symbolized and threatened death. In the end, his double became the enemy itself, the doppelgänger, the spectre of death come to claim the living.

While he brought his father back to life as his alter ego in his double self-portraits, Schiele was busy killing his mother in a series of Dead Mother portraits. In his mind, it appears that the wrong parent had died, and one function of his art was to try and correct this painful reality. “My mother is a very strange woman ... she doesn't have the least bit of understanding for me and unfortunately not much love either," wrote Schiele, in one of his many statements describing her lack of responsiveness. In Schiele's numerous “mother” paintings, her glance noticeably turns to the side, always avoiding eye contact; many of these portraits are profiles and most show her as either blind or dead. In addition to suffering an unempathic mirroring experience in infancy, Schiele lost his mother's attention and interest at the beginning of his oedipal attachment to her because she was consumed with grief over his older sister's death and pain over a most difficult birth to his younger sister.

Serving a dual purpose, therefore, Schiele's Dead Mother portraits expressed his anger toward his mother by killing her off and the inner deadness he experienced from her emotional withdrawal. Confronted with his mother's self-involvement and depression, he came to experience her as psychically dead: identifying with her deadness, he compulsively drew cadaverous images of himself floating in a comatose state. Through his self-portraits, Schiele seemed to be painfully striving to obtain what he did not receive from his mother's eyes: confirmation that would serve to delineate his own sense of self. His art simultaneously represents his problem and its solution. He tried to master the most painful childhood experience over which he had no control by recreating it over and over again. Not only did he struggle artistically with the theme of his mother as a faulty mirror but, through his self-portraits, he replaced her by becoming the mirror he never had.

Indeed, mirrors always held a magnetic attraction for Schiele. He never passed a mirror without approaching it to closely examine the reflection of his features. Interestingly, the life-size mirror, from which he drew his numerous self-portraits and which he took with him wherever he went, originally belonged to his mother. His relationship to this mirror seems even to have taken the place of his relationship to his mother and, as such, ironically became the most intimate, and perhaps the most important, relationship of his life.
The loss he felt at his mother's abandonment led Schiele to sexualize his relationship with his younger sister, Gerti. His heightened sexuality, in turn, overwhelmed him and created intense anxiety, mostly related to fears of bodily disintegration. Schiele wrote of the painful feelings his sexuality caused in him: “Have adults forgotten how they themselves were incited and aroused by sex impulses as children? Have they forgotten how the frightful passion burned and tortured them while they were still children? I have not forgotten, for I suffered excruciatingly from it.”

To repair the damage he felt, Schiele turned to his mirror. Like the child who becomes attached to his blanket or teddy bear as a substitute for his mother's warmth and affection, Schiele's mirror became his transitional object. Creating the “illusion” that his mirror-as mother replacement-could adapt to all his needs, Schiele used it to perpetuate his tie to her. At the same time, his mirror facilitated his separation and individuation from his mother. Through his mirror, he would express himself and heal himself all by himself.

It is apparent that for Schiele, psychosexual issues were intimately intertwined with those of self-consolidation and identity formation. His sexual development and self development interacted with each other and together worked to mutually enhance his sense of himself as a mature and stable sexual being. Consequently, although Schiele's career was brutally truncated by his premature death from Spanish Influenza at the age of twenty-eight, his oeuvre possesses a sense of completeness and resolution. When considered chronologically, Schiele's self-portraits reveal his transformation from a solitary adolescent tormented by his sexuality and morbid fears of body damage and psychic dissolution into a man with an integrated character structure. An unfolding of his personality as well as an increasing maturity in his work become evident over time. His view of himself as an isolated and misunderstood artist diminished, as reflected in the introduction of background objects and scenery into what was once Krauss's “isolation cell.” From a stylistic viewpoint, his brittle line, previously employed as an outer contour to emphasize strong body boundaries, softened and began to work together with his increasingly realistic use of color. In his final paintings, Schiele is no longer depicted as a conglomerate of parts that do not always fit (often because they are incomplete); the man as a whole, rather than his feelings of angst and despair, is portrayed. Schiele's mirror, in which he once saw reflected a hateful, fragmented self, became in the end a benevolent and true-to-life interpreter of reality.

Schiele's art strikes a deep emotional chord in viewers regardless of whether they are captivated or repelled by it; living at the turn of the last century or in the present. It is important to realize that like Schiele, we too live in a time of transition, a time when our surroundings lack the stability or predictability that facilitates identity consolidation. As a result of the dehumanization and mechanization of our culture, and the brutal and massive deaths from wars, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters, we witness, and may feel, an overriding anxiety concerning the helplessness of the individual in the face of forces far beyond her control. As a result, many contemporary artists reflect not only a "culture of narcissism," as it is so often referred to with derision, but a pervasive need for self-definition. In his search for refuge from an oppressive external reality, Schiele paradoxically discovered even greater danger on encountering the nightmarish inhabitants of his inner world.

As we comprehend the underlying motivations in Schiele's art, we can better appreciate not only the meaning his art held for him, but also, the fascination it continues to hold for us. It may initially seem surprising that an artist's personal struggle could possess such widespread appeal. Yet, we discover that Schiele's problems are merely an exaggeration of problems found in all of us. As spectators, we are repulsed by the emotional turmoil expressed in his art and, at the same time, attracted to the release of powerful feelings. Through his art, we can identify with and vent emotions that we were not even conscious of having without needing to take direct responsibility for them. We can project ourselves onto his image and empathize with his derangement and personal trauma as well as his search for order and wholeness. Thus, we are not mere voyeurs happening upon the artist's private world, intruders on his isolated cri de coeur. Rather, we share in his creative authority as he transforms his image before our very eyes and watch with excitement and suspense as he fits together the lost pieces of a puzzle to create a new self. Through his art, Schiele invites us to enter a mésalliance with him, to participate in an ambivalent dance of intimacy and distance where sexual fantasies flow and nothing is considered off limits. At other times, he is the predator, as aggressive to us as he is to himself; and we find ourselves unwittingly engaged in a one-to-one combat. Either way, the image in his self-portraits holds us spellbound and we cannot look away; his penetrating eyes haunt us and lure us to ogle his gesticulating ravaged body, to embrace his burning raw flesh. It is impossible to escape for the feelings he expresses also exist within us.