Drawn to each other
With pencil in hand, friends and mutual admirers Klimt and Schiele were very different artists, finds Michael Prodger
Great artists alike in talent and working in harmony is not so common in the history of art, where competition usually prevails. It does happen, however: titian and Giorgione managed it, as did both rubens and van Dyck and Picasso and Braque. and so did the two great figures of early20th-century Vienna, Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) and egon Schiele (1890–1918).
Schiele was Klimt’s junior by 28 years and, although the older artist never taught him, they were friends, admirers and, to a degree, mentor and mentee. they also died within eight months of each other in 1918, victims of the Spanish influenza epidemic that decimated the war-weakened world. the royal academy’s superb ‘Klimt/schiele: Drawings from the albertina Museum, Vienna’ is, therefore, not only an examination of an aspect of their joint practice, but a celebration and memorial.
When Schiele arrived in Vienna as a precocious 16 year old in 1906, Klimt was already the most celebrated painter in the country and someone who came with an attractive frisson of danger, too. Klimt was both the guiding hand behind the Vienna Secession—the exhibiting organisation designed to promote avant-garde art and design—and notorious for a series of nudes painted for the University of Vienna.
He had also cultivated an extremely lucrative portrait clientele, largely of Viennese Society women, who paid him handsomely to turn them into golden Byzantine icons—it was rumoured that he also slept with all his female sitters.
When Schiele, already chafing at the traditional artistic training he was receiving, introduced himself to the great man, he determined to learn everything he could. In fact, as the exhibition shows, the connection was primarily one of emotional sympathy rather than the passing of technical knowledge.
Klimt drew primarily by way of preparation for his paintings —numerous figure studies of varying degrees of finish that would help him find his way towards the final picture.
Schiele, on the other hand, rarely made preparatory drawings; the pencil for him was a way of recording the human figure in all its physical complexity. It was also a way to confront an unflinching sexuality.
Schiele was a young man and, therefore, unsurprisingly, fascinated by women and sex. His most
regular male sitter was himself (he drew more than 170 selfportraits; Klimt drew none), but he sketched a range of women, from his sister Gerti, his lover Wally Neuzil and his wife, Edith, to a motley range of professional models and prostitutes.
Sex is prevalent, but he also drew to stretch himself: he put his sitters in complex poses—knots, entangled limbs, cropped figures, unusual perspectives—so that he could master the compositional challenges he set himself.
Klimt was no more immune to sex than Schiele; in the show, there are two breathtakingly explicit drawings of a woman masturbating, for example, but women as archetypes and figures of myth were what really interested him. In his more finished drawings, hair flows like water; the emphatic, often jagged outlines of Schiele’s figures are, instead, smooth lines. Klimt couldn’t help being elegant, just as Schiele couldn’t help being raw.
Where Klimt did directly influence the younger man was in the way he used the full height of the paper. In a series of studies for portraits, the sitter appears as a sinuous column running from top to bottom, her head and feet often cut by the sheet’s edge. The focus is on the whorls and patterns of her dress, rapidly depicted.
Schiele adapted this sense of distortion, often removing limbs to concentrate attention on the face and torso of his sitter, where Klimt would leave faces as vague suggestions rather than precise features. These differences make looking at the drawings an experience of contrasts.
Schiele’s sitters stare you down —his women are not compliant and certainly not subservient; indeed, they are often confrontational and knobbly. Klimt’s subjects are part of an agreed interaction, whether he turns them into a rhythm, as in a lovely 1901 drawing of a pair of lovers embracing, or a memory, such as his tender sketch of his ageing mother.
What the exhibition confirms is that, whereas Klimt may have been the greater painter of the two, Schiele, although he died at a mere 28 a matter of days after his pregnant wife (what could he have gone on to achieve?), was the greater draughtsman. His drawings have an energy and potency that make Klimt’s seem almost tentative by comparison.
It is rare to see a major artist so comprehensively overwhelmed, but it happens here. ‘Klimt/schiele: Drawings from the Albertina Museum, Vienna’ is at the Royal Academy, London W1, until February 3, 2019 (020–7300 8000; www. royalacademy.org.uk) ‘Egon Schiele’, featuring some 120 of the artist’s works, is at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Bois de Boulogne, Paris (www. fondationlouisvuitton.fr), until January 14, 2019 Next week Gainsborough: early life, family and theatre