Reflecting on the Spanish Flu: A Tribute to Egon Schiele’s Loves, Lives, and Depiction of Pandemic
I remembered visiting Fondation Louis Vuitton in late 2018, just in time; to see Schiele’s pieces — in which I was unable to comprehend through online snippets and debatable comments from aliases. It felt great to see Schiele’s artworks with my own eyes, stared and (tried to) comprehend, with whispers of visitors discussing one piece and another.
What Schiele taught me, it takes nothing but your eyes and your mind to look into the depth of his artworks. As an expressionist, figurative painter, Schiele mostly paint nudes (especially after 1910-ish). The raw sexuality was drawn so frontal that I need to take time to comprehend the meaning behind its rawness. No frisson greater than enjoying his artworks directly — the way he rawly created silhouettes and the way he stroke the brush, the bare bodies he fret not to expose.
Autumn of 1906, Schiele was successfully admitted to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, one of the most topnotch art school. In the following year, Schiele made his first contact with Gustav Klimt. Successfully impressed, his career was jumpstarted as Klimt’s protege.
At that time, Sigmund Freud was known with his in-depth investigations into psychology and his studies of sexuality of Viennese, recasting the fits and the classy poise, longed and adored by the bourgeois.
In contrast, we need to be aware of how around that time, the popular Sigmund Freud symbolically exhibited the pleasure (and the repression) principle of the bourgeois society of Vienna, through fitted corsets and flowy, bulging gowns. Schiele dared to confront the question of form and beauty standards. He upbrought questions of self-consciousness, sexuality, and freedom, through his artworks. It hits me.
What Schiele also taught me, was, his life. Most interestingly, self-potraits of Schiele explained a lot just like an(y) autobiograph through his love journey: lost of motherhood love, love affair, and finally, the love that makes a good wife.
Through pictures, he depicted his life and phenomena that occured in between; it speaks loudly to those who see.
Mother-Son Estrangement
One of the most notable Schiele’s traumas, none more than his fraught relationship with his mother. In Schiele’s various letters and memoirs, he bitterly exposed how his mother was “the least bit of understanding for me … not much love either.” Loss of maternal bound was clearly shown on his self-portraits titled Dead Mother and Dead Mother II, where Schiele paints himself as an infant inside his dead mother’s womb, stating implicitly that he has only himself to be credited for his own existence.
Schiele failed to understand how his mother does not support him to pursue his aspirations in art, thus creating distance because of “lack of understanding and love.” At the age of twenty, he requested permission to draw some patients at a maternity clinic, where he did a number of drawings of pregnant women and babies, both alive and dead. Completed in 1914, the three works: Young Mother, Mother and Child, and Mother and Daughter show different depictions. Later, it somewhat healed his relationship with his mother, peaked at the early of his marriage with Edith Harms.
PS: Do a research on his abovementioned paintings, and you’ll set to see the way Schiele expressed such magnitude of a love — by depicting a life and a death, both at the same time.
Love Affair 1.0
In 1911, Schiele met Walburga Neuzil in Vienna, whom he called Wally. She served as a model for lots of Schiele’s paintings, easily underlying the reason of both moving in together. They moved to small towns several times as Schiele’s lifestyle was condemned by Viennese residents, knowing the fact that Schiele hired local underage girls to be nude models of his paintings.
Love of His Life (That Makes a Good Wife)
Across Hietzinger Hauptstraße, the road from Schiele’s Vienna studio, lived the Harms sisters, Edith and Adéle. Schiele thought that it would be great if he could marry Edith, a poised woman from a middle-class family. Comparing to Wally, who was assumed come from a poor background and may have worked as a prostitute in her youth. Following his debut in 1913 and the success afterwards, he found it important to keep up his reputation, including his social class standing.
In 1915, Schiele decided to marry Edith, but greedily he was intended to keep his existing relationship with Wally Neuzil. Schiele promised Neuzil to always spend summertime with her, but she strongly refused this idea and left Schiele, yet Schiele never saw her again.
He painted “Death and the Maiden” in response to the split with Neuzil, then he married Edith on June 17, 1915.
Love Affair 2.0
To note, not a sweet ending here. Upon first years of his marriage, Schiele found Edith “was no longer lean and fragile”, how he preferred his models to be, as he found a reason to approach Adéle. More than just being his model, he was unable to resist the charm and the chaste between two.
Loveliest Year of His Life-and-Death
Maybe he was confronted by 1918 like our then-2020; unpredictable.
The year was primarily the year of Schiele.
In 1918, at the age of 27, Schiele experienced a lot — yet a tad too heavy for him to bear. The Spanish Flu strikes and knocked Vienna down. Tram operators were sick, public transports were restricted. Schools and churches were closed, doctors were overwhelmed, military and private hospitals were overloaded. At that time, the officials was unable to conduct systematic reports; no numbers to exhibit how the pandemic has been catastrophic as it was widely spreaded.
Gustav Klimt, his mentor, passed away in February 1918. (His declining health conditions worsens that year, after suffering stroke the winter before the pandemic strikes.) The devastated Schiele painted Klimt on his deathbed, as his respected tribute to the mentor.
Revived, then came a huge opportunity where he stole the spotlight and receive higher commissions.
But soon, out of the blue, indeed, Schiele felt sentimental about how family means a lot to him at that time. He survived the first half of the year with his pregnant wife, yet he painted the three of them as if a complete family he projected in Die Familie (The Family). At the same time, Schiele designed a mausoleum for himself and his wife. How did he know, despite being self-proclaimed able to foresee, of his nearing death?
The optimism of Schiele shown by the “family picture” above, yet the pessimism was anticipated by how he designed a mausoleum, knowing they will not survive the pandemic.
In his last letter to his mother, Schiele expressed his concern about his life and his pregnant wife, who was dying of the flu. “Dear Mother Schiele, Edith got the Spanish Flu eight days ago and has pneumonia. She is six months pregnant. The disease is very serious and life-threatening; I am preparing myself for the worst.”
The letter was a way he reconcile to his mother, then-ailing of the syphilis contracted by Schiele’s father.
His letter about Edith and him was intuitively timely; Edith passed away the day after he composed the letter.
The pandemic took Schiele’s life on the funeral day of his wife, exactly 3 days after Edith’s death.
Little did Schiele know, Wally passed away as she contracted Scarlet Fever in 1917 on her duty as a nurse in the area now called as Croatia.
The pandemic took lives and a toll of Schiele’s love(d one)s. Gracefully living his life to the fullest and savoring mirthlessness in the deaths, Egon Schiele summed up his artworks in a poem he once wrote:
“Ich bin Mensch, ich liebe
Den Tod und Liebe
Das Leben”
(I am a human, I love/the death and the love/they are alive.)
With his own way, he reconciled all the lives and the loves to find peace within himself. How’s your take on the pandemic so far — how would you be grateful, reflecting on Schiele?
This pandemic told me once: Resilience is needed, although many more were desired.
