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The Pathological Body: Modernist Strategisingge in Egon Schiele’sm Self-Portraiture shaw Gemma Blackshaw Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021 The Pathological Body: Modernist Strategising in Egon Schiele’s Self-Portraiture

Gemma Blackshaw

This young Vienna was like a lad who has grown too quickly, tremendously tall but shockingly thin, weak of bone and precociously diseased.1

1. Julius Meier-Graefe, Modern Art: Being a

Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics (William In 1910, the twenty-year-old Egon Schiele asserted his artistic independence Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021 Heinemann: London, 1908), p. 307. First from his mentor Gustav Klimt and Vienna’s dominant Secessionstil by published in German as Entwicklungsgeschicte der embarking upon an intense project of self-portraiture. The resultant works modernen Kunst (Julius Hoffmann: Stuttgart) in 1904. embraced a seemingly new aesthetic of the body that we have since valued as being quintessentially ‘Schiele’: to use the words of Julius Meier-Graefe, 2. Meier-Graefe was a key figure in the ‘shockingly thin, weak of bone and precociously diseased’. However, organisation and promotion of the seminal 14th Secession exhibition Entwicklung des Meier-Graefe’s description of modern art in Vienna, with its interesting Impressionismus in Malerei und Plastik of 1903. metaphor of the pathological male body, did not evolve out of viewing such Austellung der Vereinigung bildender Ku¨ nstler works as Schiele’s Seated Male Nude (Self-Portrait) of 1910 (Fig. 1). O¨ sterreichs (Vienna: Secession, 17 January to 3 Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics February 1903). For an assessment of the impact Meier-Graefe’s of this exhibition see Robert Jensen, Marketing was published six years before the self-portrait’s production. Meier-Graefe’s Modernism in Fin-de-Sie`cle Europe (Princeton influence in Vienna’s modernist circles through his curatorial work for the University Press: Princeton, NJ, 1994). Secession during Schiele’s formative years raises the interesting question of 3. See Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits how self-consciously Schiele fashioned himself as ‘The New Vienna’ so 1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History described by the art critic.2 It is fascinating that this question has – (Thames & Hudson: London, 1992). For a however – been somewhat avoided in the Schiele scholarship, with art further discussion of the variant strategies used by Vienna’s young artists to launch themselves historians hanging back from tying his self-portrait project into wider 3 out of the Academy see Gemma Blackshaw, debates on the canny strategising or ‘gambits’ of the avant-garde. ‘The Jewish Christ: Problems of The question of what caused Schiele’s turn to the self-portrait genre, and the Self-Presentation and Socio-Cultural Assimilation in Richard Gerstl’s attendant dramatic shift in style and aesthetic, has certainly fascinated scholars. Self-Portraiture’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 29, However, the persistence of the modernist legacy – with its emphasis on no. 1, pp. 25–51. the artist-individual and their ‘pain’, ‘anxiety’ or ‘exclusion’ as badges 4. See, for example, Alessandra Comini’s of authenticity – can be clearly read in their variant explorations of the 4 seminal Egon Schiele’s Portraits (University of question. With remarkably few exceptions, the tendency is to emphasise California Press: Los Angeles and London, Schiele as a traumatised individual who used the self-portrait as a means of 1974). Comini’s chapters, entitled ‘The Radical articulating angst.5 Such a notion is admittedly made compelling by his Portraits and Self-Portraits – Into the Void’, and ‘Isolation and Thematic Absorption in the imprisonment in 1912 on (unsubstantiated) charges of sexual immorality and Self’, are structured around Schiele’s biography, the seduction of a minor, and the mental decline and death of his father from with shifts in subject matter and style being syphilis. However, this personal history, along with Schiele’s early death in linked to personal, as opposed to cultural wunderkind change. She argues: ‘There is now no interest in 1918 at twenty-eight-years old, has driven a cult of the anguished indicating the artist’s connection with his work, which negates the influence of a cultural context. Schiele’s self-portraits have 6 with another artist, or with society. The thus tended to occupy a space outside of culture, accessible only through a content is self; there is no frame of reference form of retrospective psychoanalysis. As Danielle Knafo writes: except self’ (p. 50). Similarly, Patrick Werkner writes: ‘In Schiele’s painting we are confronted with images that grow out of a very private As a consequence of his adverse childhood experiences, Schiele’s was a lifelong journey in creative mythology of the subconscious mind. which he searched for his lost parents in himself and for his lost self in his art. Art Even those letters of the artist in which he represented a substitute for his frustrating and lost objects and his perpetual use of supplies explanations or information on the self-portraiture proved a constructive means of mastering these losses ... Like a patient in content of his pictures can provide us with little psychoanalysis, he deconstructed his self-image in order to reconstruct it anew. He employed more than general orientation, and indeed his art as a corrective emotional experience whereupon he repeatedly nurtured, and reflect a highly intuitive kind of apparently repaired, a battered psyche.7 self-interpretation’; Patrick Werkner, Austrian Expressionism: The Formative Years (Society for the This article will explore an alternative reading, one that will argue that Schiele’s turn to this particular genre, style and aesthetic at this particular

# The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.3 2007 377–401 doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcm020 Gemma Blackshaw Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021

Fig. 1. Egon Schiele, Seated Male Nude (Self-Portrait), 1910, oil and gouache on canvas, 152.5 Â 150 cm. Leopold Museum, Vienna.

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moment was a strategic move, showing his astute awareness of market taste and dynamics. I hope to show that Schiele’s self-representation was not an ‘inward-looking’ art practice. Rather, it was a practice that was geared Promotion of Science and Scholarship: California, 1993), p. 126. specifically towards a local art market. Seated Male Nude (Self-Portrait) put a formal distance between Schiele and Klimt, in its embrace of the 5. The exception to this is Robert Jensen, who argues that, ‘alienated artists, like Egon Schiele, self-portrait genre, and its rejection of the ornamented passive/erotic would have learned by 1910, if not long before, bodies of what was being criticised as an increasingly feminised Secessionstil 8 that alienation sells, that to be alienated was as visual culture. Such a departure, considering the waning popularity of the much a role, a way of establishing a professional Secession, was timely and quickly attracted an interested group of almost identity, as occupying a position in the academy’. Jensen, Marketing Modernism, p. 10. exclusively male patrons and collectors. The self-portrait – measuring  152.5 150 cm – was part of a series of five that included a further two Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021 6. Interestingly, this is not the case with nude images of Schiele, all of which were completed in 1910 (see Figs 2 Schiele’s rival Oskar Kokoschka. Kokoschka’s 9 portrait-project has recently come under and 3). They were the largest paintings Schiele had so far produced. scrutiny, with scholars highlighting its Interestingly, the only painting from the group to be exhibited to the self-conscious, derivative and strategic nature. public was a female nude, shown in Vienna in 1910 – a move which See, for example, Tobias G. Natter (ed.), Oskar perhaps illustrates a concern about audience reactions to Schiele’s Kokoschka: Early Portraits from Vienna and Berlin 10 1909–1914 (Yale University Press: New Haven representation of the male body. Nevertheless, all three of the & London, 2002); Claude Cernuschi, Re/Casting self-portrait paintings, and at least one of the two female nudes were Kokoschka: Ethics and Aesthetics, Epistemology and bought in the same year by the industrialist Carl Reininghaus. Moreover, Politics in Fin-de-Sie`cle Vienna (Associated University Presses: New Jersey, London & Schiele remarked in a letter of 11 June 1913 that Reininghaus had paid Ontario, 2002); Blackshaw, ‘Breaking the highly for the works, giving 1200 kronen for just one of the ‘unappealing’ Mould?’, review article of Cernuschi, Re/Casting paintings.11 Schiele’s bodies clearly had market value. I would like to Kokoschka, Art History, vol. 27, no. 22 April argue even further that the particular type of body Schiele chose to take on 2004, pp. 335–40; Blackshaw, ‘The Eye of God?’, review article of Natter (ed.), Kokoschka: as his own effectively enabled the artist to launch himself into Vienna’s Early Portraits, Art History, vol. 26, no. 1, narrowly circumscribed and competitive art market. February 2003, pp. 127–9. The key area I aim to explore is what made this self-portrait so marketable? 7. Danielle Knafo, Egon Schiele: A Self in Creation Where did the ‘new’ aesthetic of the body come from, and what was the (Associated University Presses: Cranbury, New nature of its appeal? In contrast to studies which stress the Jersey, 1993), p. 165. ‘inward-looking’ nature of Schiele’s self-representation, this article will 8. See, for example, Adolf Loos’ lecture explore the relationship between his iconography and that of photographs ‘Ornament and Crime’, delivered in Vienna in of patients suffering from diseases of the nervous system, published in 1908. Loos considered the presence of Paris-based neuropathology journals in circulation in Vienna. I will argue ornament in culture to reveal an effeminate and degenerate civilisation. Biting references to the that the journals provided Schiele with a new vocabulary of the body Vienna Museum of Applied Art clearly signalled which could be used powerfully to underscore – in a truly modernist that it was specifically Vienna’s Secession fashion – his ‘suffering’ and therefore his ‘genius’. Cultivation of such culture that Loos was attacking. Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays (Ariadne an identity was crucial amongst a group of patrons tired of the Press: California, 1998), pp. 167–9. artist-collective ideology of Secession culture, and keen to promote young men representing the ‘new blood’ – for which there were many 9. For further details of this group of nudes, including provenance, exhibition history and contenders. The fact that Schiele’s peers and competitors, such as Oskar literature see Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele: The Kokoschka and Max Oppenheimer, made similar use of this iconography of Complete Works (Thames & Hudson: London), the body, speedily working it into their own portrait portfolios, shows p. 294. how aware this group of young men were of its appeal to their supporters. 10. This work is lost. It is known only though a The article will explore this area of neuropathology, the body and photograph of the 1910 exhibition, published in modernist strategising in Vienna from a series of different angles. Firstly, Die erste internationale Jagd-Ausstellung Wien 1910: Ein monumentales Gedenkbuch (Vienna, 1912), how was the image of the pathological body disseminated and popularised p. 31. during this period, and what was the extent of Schiele’s exposure to it? 11. In a letter of 11 June 1913 Schiele wrote What characterised the Viennese interest in neurological disease during that Reininghaus paid this sum for just one of the this fin-de-sie` cle period, and how widespread was it? How did the ‘unappealing’ works. Christian M. Nebehay, pathological body operate as ‘spectacle’, and who was this spectacle Egon Schiele 1890–1918, Leben, Briefe, Gedichte directed towards? Could the dissemination of the pathological body in the (Residenz: Salzburg & Vienna, 1979), letter no. 516. form of paintings and drawings amongst collectors be seen as a means of identifying a group of like-minded men and asserting their homo-social bonds? And finally, how might we incorporate this work into an analysis of

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.3 2007 381 Gemma Blackshaw Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021

Fig. 2. Egon Schiele, Male Nude Kneeling, with Raised Hands (Self-Portrait), 1910, 150 Â 150 cm (approx.). Present whereabouts unknown. (Photo: Galerie St. Etienne, New York.) the strategies used by Schiele, his fellow artists and supporters in the defining 12. Klaus Albrecht Schro¨ der, Egon Schiele: Eros and launching of a new avant-garde? and Passion (Prestel: Munich & New York, 1989), pp. 83–8.

The Image of the Pathological Body Klaus Albrecht Schro¨ der was the first to point to photographic journals popularising nervous disorder as possible sources for Schiele’s self- representation, concentrating on the striking iconographic parallels.12 Schro¨ der takes his examples from the Iconographie Photographique de la

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13. Jean-Martin Charcot, D.M. Bourneville, Paul Regnard, Iconographie Photographique de la Salpeˆtrie`re (IPS), vols 1–3 (V. Adrien Delahaye: Paris, 1876–1880). 14. Charcot, Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpeˆtrie`re: Clinique des Maladies du Syste`me Nerveux (NIPS), vols 1–4 (Lescronier et Babbe´ : Paris, 1888–1891), vols 5–8, (L. Bataille: Paris, 1892–1895), vols 9-30 (Masson et Cie:

Paris, 1896–1918). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021

Fig. 3. Egon Schiele, Standing Male Nude with Hands on Hips (Self-Portrait), 1910, 150 Â 150 cm (approx.). Present whereabouts unknown. (Photo: Galerie St. Etienne, New York.)

Salpeˆtrie`re (IPS) journal, which was produced in three volumes from 1876 to 1880 under the direction of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Paris hospital for diseases of the nervous system, La Salpeˆtrie` re, and disseminated widely across Europe.13 The journal concentrated on the variant manifestations of hysteria – a condition deemed more common in women than in men, which was typified by hallucinations and a susceptibility to hypnosis. The allure of the journal lay in its photographic documentation of the female body when released – via hypnosis, the inhalation of vapours or the pressing of hystereogenic zones of the body – from its civilising bonds of bourgeois behaviour. Photographs sensationally captured female patients in the midst of attacks, convulsing in their hospital beds. The violence of the attacks recorded, the voyeuristic appeal of watching the body as it moved through hysteric sequences or ‘attitudes passionnelles’, and the bewildering array of patient-responses (such as limb contracture or re-enactments of the crucifixion) made the image of the hysteric a popular one. Indeed, the popularity of the IPS can be seen in the fact that the Salpeˆtrie` re team produced a further, bi-monthly journal from 1888 to 1918 (surviving Charcot’s death in 1893) under the new title Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpeˆtrie`re: Clinique des Maladies du Syste`me Nerveux (NIS).14 Yet despite the frequency of publication and the longevity of the NIS, this later

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.3 2007 383 Gemma Blackshaw journal – separated from the IPS by a period of eight years – has received far less critical attention than its predecessor. This is perhaps because it diversified significantly, moving the focus away from hysteria to 15. This is certainly reflected in the critical neurological disease as it was signalled in both the male and female body. literature, which has tended to focus exclusively Photographs of fibrous skin growths and spinal deformity, conditions that on Charcot’s imaging of hysteria. See Georges were included under the umbrella of neuropathology are perhaps not – Didi-Huberman, The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot initially – as interesting as the dramatic gendering and eroticising of and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpeˆtrie`re 15 (The MIT Press: Cambridge MA, 2003). First hysteria we see performed in the IPS journal. Furthermore, in its published in French in 1982 (Macula: Paris); Jan reluctance to further investigate the concept of the mind as it was opened Goldstein, ‘The Hysteria Diagnosis and the up through the practice of hypnosis, the NIS journal moved increasingly Politics of Anticlericalism in Late Nineteenth-Century France’, Journal of Modern

away from Sigmund Freud’s contemporaneous development of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021 History, vol. 54, no. 2, June 1982, pp. 209–39; psychoanalysis. Our tendency to privilege Freud’s cultural position has Sigrid Schade, ‘Charcot and the Spectacle of the perhaps meant that we focus on Charcot’s early pioneering of hypnosis – Hysterical Body. The “Pathos Formula” as an which Freud travelled to Paris in 1885 to study at first hand.16 This bias is Aesthetic Staging of Psychiatric Discourse – a Blind Spot in the Reception of Warburg’, Art reflected in the scholarship. Schro¨ der, for example, chooses to concentrate History, vol. 18, no. 4, December 1995, on the links between Schiele’s self-portraits – with their grimaces and pp. 499–517; Douglas Fogle, ‘Die Passionen 17 histrionics – and the IPS photographs of female patients. In doing so, he des Ko¨ rpers’, Fotogeschicte, vol. 13, no. 49, misses a fascinating and distinctive iconography that emerged out of the 1993, pp. 67–78; Ulrich Baer, ‘Photography and Hysteria: Towards a Poetics of the Flash’, later NIS, in which photographs of predominantly male patients were used Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 7, no. 1, Spring to construct a canon of the physical extremes of the body-in-pain. 1994, pp. 41–77; Felicia McCarren, ‘The Despite Charcot’s assertion that, ‘hysteria is met with frequently enough “Symptomatic Act” Circa 1900: Hysteria, in men, and is attended with all the characteristics obviously seen in the Hypnosis, Electricity and Dance’, Critical Inquiry female sex’,18 male patients were not the focus of the IPS journal. With , no. 21, Summer 1995, pp. 748–74. the advent of the NIS journal, and the expanded photographic 16. Freud studied under Charcot from October 1885 to February 1886. This experience first documentation of conditions considered under the far wider area of ignited his interest in hysteria and hypnosis, neuropathology, men entered the frame. In a series of photographs entitled which he developed in such seminal texts as ‘Macrodactylie’ (Fig. 4), a young, male patient stands against a dark Studies on Hysteria (1895), The Interpretation of background, his mouth blanked out to obscure his identity. Close-up Dreams (1900) and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). Sigmund Freud, ‘Early Papers photographs of the fronts and backs of his hands display the progression of on the History of the Psychoanalytic the disease. These photographs are used to frame the central image of the Movement’, Collected Papers, vol. 1 (The patient’s cropped body. The display of his arms and hands against the black Psychoanalytical Press: London, 1924), p. 23. cloth of his trousers throws their distortions into sharp relief. The patient 17. See also Werkner, ‘The Child-Woman and is partially undressed to highlight the contrast between his skinny torso Hysteria: Images of the Female Body in the Art and the swollen arms and hands. We are drawn to the braces dangling of Egon Schiele, in Viennese Modernism, and Today’, in Werkner, Egon Schiele: Art, Sexuality, from his trousers, the white lining of their waistband just visible, and the and Viennese Modernism (The Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship: California, 1994), pp. 51–78. 18. Charcot, Clinical Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System, delivered at La Salpeˆtrie`re, T. Savill (trans.) (The New Syndeham Society: London, 1889), p. 77.

Fig. 4. ‘Macrodactylie’, Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpeˆtrie`re: Clinique des maladies du syste`me nerveux. (Photo: UCL Institute of Neurology.)

384 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.3 2007 The Pathological Body peculiar left eye, which rolls away from the camera to an object (person?) standing to the side. A photograph of the ‘giant’ Charles (Fig. 5), aged thirty years and measuring 2 metres, 4 centimetres, is taken next to a metre-rule. Charles, diagnosed with gigantism and infantilism, is naked, his arms held away from his body with hands and fingers flattened against the wall. His left leg is longer than his right, and is bent at an awkward angle towards his right knee. We see him from the front and back view, noticing the contrast of the pale skin and ruddy hands, the lack of body hair, the defensive raising of the shoulders, the indentations of the ribs and – oddly – the tuft of

dark hair above his left ear. We see, in a dramatically lit photograph, the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021 torso of an elderly patient with an indentation of the thorax (Fig. 6). The patient tilts his head towards his wasted body. Thin, lined skin stretches and sags across the protruding bone structure. The ball and socket joints of the shoulders are knotted like fists above arms covered in flaking sores. We are unsure at first if we are looking at a swathe of fine, creased fabric draped across his stomach, or skin. Other examples, such as a patient with curvature of the spine photographed seated and standing (Fig. 7), show the harrowing extremes of the body documented in the NIS. Despite the number and array of bodies and conditions photographed, the NIS quickly developed a specific way of presenting the patient which could be considered in terms of the formation of an iconography. With the exception of those few who needed physical support in order to stand, all of the patients

Fig. 5. ‘Gigantisme et Infantilisme’, Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpeˆtrie`re: Clinique des maladies du syste`me nerveux. (Photo: UCL Institute of Neurology.)

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.3 2007 385 Gemma Blackshaw are photographed on their own or (less frequently) standing next to another patient for force of contrast. Metre-rules, either held by the patient or propped against a wall, along with canes, chairs, footstools, adjustable stands and blocks for supporting the head, often frame the patient, highlighting – through their linearity and precision – the disorder of the body they measure and support. In most cases, the patients are photographed against a neutral background, such as a wall or curtain of dark fabric, in order to focus attention on the body.19 The body is predominantly photographed entirely or partially naked. It is photographed both as a whole and in parts, with details of a swelling, a lesion or a

deformed joint often framing the larger, central image. Almost without Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021 exception, the patient’s face is shown, staring directly at the camera. The patient is often shot in different positions – sitting, standing, bending or stretching upwards. For example, in a series of shots (Fig. 8) we see front, back and side views of spinal deformity, arms held in progressive positions to demonstrate the movement of the scapula, head raised and lowered. The shots are labelled alphabetically and are displayed on the same page, in order to give the viewer a totalising image of the patient’s body, and the effects of Fig. 6. ‘Thorax en Entonnoir’, Nouvelle movement upon it. This ability of the photograph to capture the movement Iconographie de la Salpeˆtrie`re: Clinique des of the body was considered by Charcot to be its key strength. Moreover, the maladies du syste`me nerveux. (Photo: UCL gap between the clinical examination of the patient and the photographic Institute of Neurology.) image of the patient’s body was not considered problematic. Indeed, Charcot claimed that the photograph was more accurate than the medical observation, in that it fixed the pathology under scrutiny thus permitting 19. Such backgrounds are always disrupted – by a scuffed skirting board, a heap of discarded the doctor to study it repeatedly. The imaging of the patient’s body was trousers or the corner of a stained sheet. We therefore central to the diagnosis and treatment of neurological disease. The might consider such disruptions as the photographs provided doctors with a visual vocabulary with which to define photograph’s punctum, the term used by Roland neuropathology, enabling categories of disease to be constructed and Barthes to describe, ‘the accident that pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’. disseminated amongst medical communities. Similarly, loose threads, buttons, braces and Charcot’s claims for the photograph as a diagnostic tool were in keeping drawstrings always disturb the photograph, with the late-nineteenth-century celebration of the camera for its operating as ‘sting, speck, cut, little hole – and ‘disinterested’ and ‘empirical’ reproduction of the object. However, as we also a cast of dice’. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Vintage: have seen through the descriptions of the photographs above, the gaze on London, 1993), p. 27. The length of this article the patient’s body, and the subsequent representation of this body, was far does not unfortunately allow for further from clinical or detached. Interestingly, this seems to have been interpretation of the NIS photographs, such as the intention. In the second volume of the NIS Charcot claimed that the their fetishistic presentation of the body. gaze of the doctor had to be fused with the gaze of the artist, with one 20. NIS, vol. 2, p. 492. effectively guiding the other: ‘Le me´ decin est inse´ parable de l’artiste. L’un guide de l’autre; ils s’entraident mutuellement’.20 As far as Charcot was concerned, the act of looking at the patient’s body was made medically sophisticated only when conditioned with an appreciation of aesthetics. Accordingly, many of the photographs were published alongside comparable figure types in predominantly Old Master painting to highlight what Charcot considered to be a necessary interchange between the medical and aesthetic gaze. Charcot considered the Salpeˆtrie` re photographs as making an important contribution to the representation of the human body in art, both growing out of and developing a visual tradition. Accordingly, the journal included details of the representation of leprosy in works by Albrecht Du¨ rer, syphilitic facial deformity in Francisco Goya’s oeuvre and St Anthony tortured by demons in Matthias Gru¨ newald’s altar paintings to not only ‘prove’ the historical precedence of neuropathology, but to also stress the aesthetic value of the patient’s body. A visual lineage of the pathological body was thus constructed, and the

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inter-relationship of the fields of medical and art historical interest and investigation stressed. The importance of this project can be seen in the fact that the journal became a collaborative effort between the Salpeˆtrie` re medical team and individuals such as Paul Richer, the artist in residence, and Albert Londe, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021

Fig. 7. ‘Myopathie Primitive Ge´ne´ralisee´’, Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpeˆtrie`re: Clinique des maladies du syste`me nerveux. (Photo: UCL Institute of Neurology.)

Fig. 8. ‘Paralysie du grand dentele’, Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpeˆtrie`re: Clinique des maladies du syste`me nerveux. (Photo: UCL Institute of Neurology.)

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.3 2007 387 Gemma Blackshaw the photographer in residence. The popularity of their search for the visual evidence that united the projects of medicine and art is evident in Richer’s increasing autonomy. His Les De´moniaques dans l’Art (1887) was followed by 21. Paul Richer, L’Art at La Me´decine (Gaultier, a second volume Les Malades et les Difformes dans l’Art (1889) and L’Art et La Magnier & Cie: Paris, 1902), p. 4. Me´decine (1902). The image of the pathological body – whether in 22. Sigmund Freud & Joseph Breuer, Studies on contemporary medical photography or Old Master painting – clearly had Hysteria, James and Alix Strachey (trans.), market value, with Richer’s books being geared towards general (Penguin Books: London, 1991), p. 392. First consumption. Moreover, the work completed by Richer was considered by published in 1895. his contemporaries to be ‘the most curious manifestation of contemporary 23. This is not surprising considering that art’, for which Richer was elected to L’Acade` mie des Beaux-Arts in 1905. Freud’s formative years were spent in neuropathology. In 1882 he worked at the

Richer’s publications emphasised not only the aesthetic value of the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021 patient’s body, but also the way in which doctors could shed new light on Vienna General Hospital, publishing his work on cerebral anatomy, in 1885 he was appointed the representation of deformity (les difformite´ s) in art, a project defined by University Lecturer in Neuropathology, and Richer as the visual tracing of ‘L’invasion de la pathologie dans l’Art’. This, from 1886 to 1893 his research included he claimed, evolved out of the NIS journal: ‘une large place a toujours e´ te´ projects on the cerebral palsies of children at the re´ serve´ ea` la critique scientifique des oeuvres d’art ayant quelque rapport Kassowitz Institute in Vienna. avec la me´ decine’.21 What we perhaps see in this sustained effort to highlight the ‘invasion’ of pathology into art, and art into the imaging of pathology, is the expectation that the NIS journal would appeal not only to doctors, but to artists.Iwould like to argue even further that in its privileging of the image, the journal effectively marketed itself as a source book for modern artists searching for new iconographies of the body. The striking visual links between the photographs, with their obsessive repetition of the image of the fragmented and distorted body, and Schiele’s self-portraiture should perhaps lead us to consider exactly what impact the NIS journal and its notion of what constituted neurological disease had on Viennese medical and visual culture. How was the journal imported, how did it capture the public imagination, and what was the nature of its appeal to the city’s artists?

Disseminating the Image: Charcot in Vienna In his evaluation of his analyses in Studies on Hysteria of 1895, Freud makes the following comment:

I have often in my mind compared cathartic psychotherapy with surgical intervention. I have described my treatments as psychotherapeutic operations; and I have brought out their analogy with the opening up of a cavity filled with pus, the scraping out of a carious region. An analogy of this kind finds its justification not so much in the removal of what is pathological as in the establishment of conditions that are more likely to lead the course of the process in the direction of recovery.22

Freud’s description of psychotherapy as a surgical investigation of the diseased body – though metaphorical – is significant in that it illustrates the absolute centrality of the body to Vienna’s psychiatric community. Such faith in the body’s communicative potential was undoubtedly part of the legacy of the New Vienna Medical School, led by the celebrated pathological anatomist and consultant to the Ministry of Education, Carl von Rokitansky (1804– 78), who pioneered the use of the autopsy – reputedly performing more than 80,000 post-mortems. Despite Freud’s rejection of the organic basis of hysteria, the metaphor he uses to describe his new practice is therefore cannily embedded in the language and tenets of the psychiatric community in which he was immersed.23 William M. Johnston has described these

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tenets as ‘therapeutic nihilism’, arguing that the post-mortem and the epikrisis (the critical discussion following the anatomical investigation of the cadaver) were the focus of medical training and research in The Austrian Mind: An 24. William M. Johnston, late-nineteenth-century Vienna, with Freud emerging out of a diagnostic – Intellectual and Social History 1848–1938 24 (University of California Press: Berkeley, Los as opposed to therapeutic – culture. Angeles, London), pp. 223–37. Johnston perhaps overly polarises these two types of culture. In Vienna, 25. For example, Rokitansky’s pupil Theodor the University-based pathological anatomical approach to psychiatry Meynert, whose research lay in the structure championed by Rokitansky actually existed alongside an Asylum-based and function of the brain and spinal cord, held therapeutic approach, which focused on the daily observation and the post of Prosektor (doctor responsible for 25 performing autopsies) at the Asylum from 1866, institutional treatment of the mentally ill. However, Rokitansky’s

and was promoted in 1870 to director of the authority certainly meant that the pathological anatomical approach to Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021 Asylum clinic. The diagnostic and the psychiatry carried the professional prestige. I would argue that the status therapeutic were therefore brought together in of pathological anatomy in Vienna’s psychiatric circles made the city ripe the same institution, albeit somewhat uncomfortably – Meynert was forced to resign. for the dissemination of Charcot’s work. Despite Freud’s privileging of Rokitansky’s influence was such that Meynert Charcot as the ‘founder’ of the mind through his ‘discovery’ of hysteria was soon ‘re-located’ to become director of a (and our critical tendency to follow suit),26 Charcot resolutely refused to new, second psychiatric clinic in the Vienna separate such conditions as hysteria from multiple sclerosis, General Hospital created in 1875, a post which he held until his death in 1893. See Erna Lesky, neuro-syphilis, paralysis or Parkinson’s Disease, increasingly championing The Vienna Medical School of the Nineteenth Century through the NIS journal the somatogenic basis of all neuropathology. In (John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, contrast to Freud, Charcot considered hysteria as having an organic basis 1976). in the brain and spinal cord (albeit one which had not yet been 26. See Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The discovered, despite ‘the most penetrating anatomical investigations’).27 French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Our centralising of Freud has meant that we tend to limit Charcot’s Century (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1987). Goldstein’s reading of impact in Vienna by considering him solely in terms of the influence of Charcot’s contributions to psychiatry has been his early work on hypnosis on the development of psychoanalysis. But is problematised by Mark S. Micale in ‘Hysteria there an alternative picture? and its Historiography: the Future Perspective, Charcot’s entire oeuvre of work was certainly well represented in History of Psychiatry, vol. 1, 1990, pp. 33–124. Micale convincingly embeds Charcot in the Vienna’s libraries. Heinrich Obersteiner, director of the large nervous French Laennecian and Cruveilhieran tradition clinic Ober-Do¨ bling in Vienna’s nineteenth district, donated the extensive of pathological anatomy, and the Bernardian library built up by himself and his father (who preceded him at tradition of experimental physiology. Micale Ober-Do¨ bling) to the University of Vienna’s neurological institute, which argues: ‘In accordance with this etiological 28 outlook, Charcot’s methodology for the study of he founded in 1882. This library, which both doctors and medical the nervous disorders was an students had access to, held the complete run of both the NIS and the IPS organic-pathological one in which the essential journals. Charcot publications were also held in the University’s central scientific exercise consisted in correlation of ante-mortem clinical observations with library: for example, Oeuvres completes (a 9 volume publication which ran autopsical data. What intrigues Charcot most from 1886 to 1890, acquired in 1889); the Archives de physiologie normale et about these curious disorders was not their pathologique journal (produced under the direction of Charcot, E. F. A. intermediate severity ... but their ability to Vulpian and Brown-Le´ quard, running from 1868 to 1898); Lec¸ons sur les mimic physical disease’, p. 67. maladies du syste`me nerveux faites a` la Salpeˆtrie`re (5 volumes, running from 27. Charcot writes: ‘A great number of morbid 1872 to 1893, acquired in part in 1885); Lec¸ons sur les localisations dans les states, evidently having their seat in the nervous maladies du cerveau (2 volumes, published in 1876 and 1880, acquired in system, leave in the dead body no material trace that can be discovered. Epilepsy, hysteria ... 1882); Neue Vorlesungen u¨ber die Krankheiten des Nervensystems insbesondere u¨ber come to us like so many Sphinx, which deny the Hysterie (which was interestingly translated by Freud, published in 1886, most penetrating anatomical investigations.’ and acquired in the same year); Les de´moniaques dans l’art (published in Charcot, Clinical Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous 1887, acquired in 1901); and Les difformes et les maladies dans l’art System, Delivered at La Salpeˆtrie`re, vol. 3, Thomas 29 Savill (trans.) (The New Syndeham Society: (published in 1889, also acquired in 1901). The library at Vienna’s London 1889), p. 240. public psychiatric hospital, The Lower Austrian Provincial Institutions for 28. Shorter has drawn attention to the Care and Cure of the Mentally and Nervously Ill ‘am Steinhof’, Obersteiner’s achievements in the anatomy and similarly held works by Charcot, including the Oeuvres completes, Lec¸ons sur pathology of the nervous system. For example, les localisations dans les maladies du cerveau, Berthold Fetzer’s translation the ‘Obersteiner-Redlich area’, where the U¨ber die Localisationen der Gehirn-Krankheiten of 1881 and Freud’s posterior nerve roots enter the spinal cord, is named after him and Emil Redlich. Edward translations Neue Vorlesungen u¨ber die Krankheiten des Nervensystems and 30 Shorter, ‘Mania, Hysteria and Gender in Lower Poliklinische Vortra¨ge of 1892.

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Charcot’s work was also disseminated by other means. Despite his position against Charcot, Freud avidly collected his publications, and those of his followers, for his personal library, which was divided in two on Freud’s Austria: 1891–1905’, History of Psychiatry, vol. departure from Vienna after the 1938 Anschluss. Freud decided to take I, 1990, p. 164. with him to London his 10-year run of the NIS journal (1888–1899), as ` 29. I would like to thank Markus Stumpf, well as the Oeuvres completes with its personal dedication: ‘A Monsieur Le archivist at the University of Vienna library, for Docteur Freud, Excellent Souvenir de la Salpeˆtrie` re. Charcot 23. Janvier his assistance with this information. 1888’.31 However, Charcot was not just a key figure in Freud’s research. 30. I would like to thank Professor E. Gabriel, His work also infiltrated Vienna’s medical research and teaching culture. director of Steinhof, for his assistance with this As Edward Shorter has uncovered in his work on hysteria in Vienna, information. leading doctors imported, supported and ratified Charcot’s findings: 31. The Freud library is divided between two Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021 Richard von Krafft-Ebing (director of the First and Second Psychiatric sites, The New York State Psychiatric Institute, Clinics); Max Leidesdorf (director of Ober-Do¨ bling and the First housed at Columbia University, USA, and The Psychiatric Clinic); Julius Wagner-Jauregg (director of the First and Freud Museum in London. I would like to thank Keith Davis, librarian and archivist at The Freud Second Psychiatric Clinics); and his pupil Emil Raimann, who published Museum for his assistance with this information. work on Charcot’s concept of hysterogenic zones of the body.32 32. Shorter, ‘Mania, Hysteria and Gender’, Such interest in Charcot’s work is indicative of the wider Viennese n. 19, p. 11. initiative, spurred on by the work of leading psychiatrists, to contain, categorise and cure disease. Fears regarding the modern urban environment 33. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: with Especial Reference to the Antipathetic and its debilitating effects on the nervous system took on a degree of Sexual Instinct (London: Staples Press, 1965), urgency in Vienna through the research-findings of such figures as p. 4. First published in 1885. Krafft-Ebing. In his catalogue of the sexual perversions, Psychopathia Sexualis 34. The First Psychiatric Clinic at the Vienna of 1885, the prolific psychiatrist claimed that the ‘monstruous excesses of Asylum for Lower Austria was founded in 1870, sexual life’ he had observed in his practice could always be traced to followed by the Second Psychiatric Clinic at the ‘neuro-pathological conditions of the nation involved’.33 The Lower Vienna General Hospital in 1875 (expanded in Austrian Government responded to these fears with investment, instigating 1887 to include a neurological section), and the 34 careful planning and construction of a 40-year period of psychiatric reform, which was perhaps most Mauer-O¨ hling, a state psychiatric hospital with a sensationally marked with the opening of Steinhof, the largest psychiatric capacity for 1000 patients, from 1898 to 1902. hospital of its kind in Europe with a capacity for 3000 patients, in 1907. For further details of this complex period of change in the provision and management of Crucially, this ‘reform’ in the diagnosis and treatment of disease was psychiatric care see, Magda Whitrow, ‘The considered to be a matter of public interest, with the city’s new Early History of the Vienna Psychiatric Clinic’, psychiatric spaces being opened up to viewers from the ‘outside world’. History of Psychiatry, vol. 1 (1990), pp. 419–25. For example, an exhibition on the care of the insane was opened in honour 35. Exhibitions held in Vienna to demonstrate of the Emperor Franz Josef I’s Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1898, which psychiatric care and specifically the use of art as polarised the traditional approach to psychiatric treatment (using objects a therapeutic exercise to engage patients are such as shackled wax figures) with the contemporary (represented by currently being researched by Luke Heighton in 35 his dissertation, ‘Madness and Modernity: models of newly built observation wards). Such shifts in psychiatric Images of and by Psychiatric Patients in Vienna treatment from ‘old’ to ‘new’ – shifts which we should problematise – 1890–1914’. were speedily incorporated into a public relations effort which sought to 36. Leslie Topp has recently analysed the ways stress the transparency and progressiveness of the Empire’s health system. in which Steinhof was presented to the public as The patient’s body became – in many ways – a public body, to be a utopian city, drawing attention to the rhetoric surrounding the hospital as a shining symbol of a reassuringly displayed to audiences as a pacified, ordered, ‘cured’ object modernity elevated (both ideologically and which could no longer threaten or disrupt the social fabric. The paraded geographically with its location in the Vienna control of the patient’s body could thus be used to signal the Woods) above the morass of Viennese urban life. forward-thinking modernity of the Empire itself.36 Topp argues: ‘The separation between the “greatest asylum in Europe” and the existing Innovation was also stressed through the involvement of Vienna’s leading city, with its flaws and complications, was architects and designers with the planning of such spaces as Steinhof. Otto something to be exploited for its full effect, not Wagner (an early collector of Schiele’s drawings, whose portrait was softened. It was a showy separateness, a model completed by the artist in 1910) designed the layout plan of Steinhof, and for the modern world, a “white city”, an exhibition of the future’. Leslie Topp, ‘Otto the church. Koloman Moser (who also collected Schiele’s graphic work) Wagner and the Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital: designed the church windows. Similarly, the private Purkersdorf Architecture as Misunderstanding’, Art Bulletin Sanatorium (founded in 1890 by Krafft-Ebing but re-designed and re-built (March 2005) vol. LXXXVII, no. 1, pp. 130– in 1904–5) was designed in the Secessionstil spirit as a total-art-work by 156, p. 151.

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Josef Hoffmann, who secured Schiele’s place at the Internationale Jagdausstellung in 1910, where Schiele exhibited his female nude belonging to the group of self-portraits discussed at the opening of this 37. W. C. Kettel, A History of the Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, The University of Iowa, article. The Wiener Werksta¨ tte was commissioned for the interior design 1848–1980 (University of Iowa: Iowa City, of the Purkersdorf, with work being carried out at a time when Schiele 1981), pp. 53–4. Quoted in Anton Schaller, Die was working under its influential auspices. Artistic interventions from Wertheim-Klinik (Wilhelm Maudrich: Vienna, Vienna’s modernist circles in the care and cure of psychiatric patients Munich & Berlin, 1997), p. 29. were therefore well-rehearsed by individuals working in the same circles as Schiele before his turn to an iconography of pathology in 1910. There is, however, more compelling evidence to suggest that he had ready access

to images of the pathological body. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021 Schiele’s friendship with the gynaecologist Dr Erwin von Graff is significant. Graff studied pathological anatomy under Hans Eppinger from 1904 to 1908, until moving across to gynaecology, a field in which he maintained a reputation as ‘a master anatomist’.37 Perhaps in recognition of this passion for dissection, Schiele’s commissioned portrait of Graff (Fig. 9) focuses on the doctor’s elongated hands, with their prominent knuckles and single bandaged finger-tip, which appear to clamp his mottled, arthritic body into place. Graff was working at the University’s Frauenklinik when he was first introduced to Schiele through Carl Reininghaus (who was to

Fig. 9. Egon Schiele, Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff, 1910, oil, gouache, and charcoal on canvas, 100 Â 90 cm. # Private Collection, New York. Courtesy Neue Galerie, New York.

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.3 2007 391 Gemma Blackshaw become the owner of the self-portrait series which opened this article) in 1910.38 Schiele was given permission by Graff to draw the patients at the clinic in the same year. Although the only obvious drawings from this association are of pregnant women and babies, this activity provides us with crucial evidence that Schiele was working in a clinic within a university which championed the pathological anatomy approach to psychiatry, and which held the complete run of the NIS journal. Moreover, this work was facilitated by Graff, whose background was in pathological anatomy. It is no co-incidence that in this exact same year Schiele embraced the image of the diseased body, translating the new iconography he had access to at the

University across to his self-portrait practice. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021 Schiele’s friendship with the performance artist and theatre painter Erwin ‘Mime van’ Osen (1891–1970) is similarly key. Osen (as seen in his portrait by Schiele, Fig. 10) was an original member of the Neukunstgruppe, signing the 1909 declaration, and contributing to the group’s exhibition at Vienna’s Pisko Salon in December of the same year. They had a close working relationship; Osen modelled for Schiele throughout 1910 when both artists Fig. 10. Egon Schiele, Portrait of Erwin were painting together in Krumau, Schiele took over his studio in June Dominik Osen, ‘Mime van Osen’, 1910 pastel 1912, Osen used Schiele’s studio to finish a portrait in 1913 (according to and gouache on paper, 38.3 Â 30.3 cm. Leopold Museum, Vienna. a letter transcribed by Comini),39 and postcards from Osen to Schiele run from 1909 through to 1914. Both artists were also involved with Graff; in 38. Comini, Egon Schiele’s Portraits, p. 72. a letter dated 18 May 1910, Graff asks Schiele to pass on his warmest 40 39. Comini, Egon Schiele’s Portraits, p. 204, greetings to Osen, asking for the date of their return to Vienna. Arthur n. 66. Roessler, Schiele’s early, ardent patron considered Osen a plagiarist, claiming that in a letter of July 1912 Schiele complained that Osen had 40. Nebehay, Schiele, p. 131, n. 102. signed his name to Schiele’s drawings and sold them as his own.41 The 41. Roessler, Briefe und Prosa, pp. 69–70. This importance of this accusation is that it shows the extent to which Schiele speculation is further supported by Nebehay, who writes that Osen was also using Schiele’s and Osen were working alongside each other in similar modes and with painting titles in 1945: ‘Wahrscheinlich scheint similar subjects. uns, daß sich Osen 1945 eines Bildertitels The significance of their relationship for this article is in a letter dated Schieles bediente, wir er ja schon fru¨ her seine 1913, transcribed in its entirety by Alessandra Comini, and quoted in part Art zu signieren imitierte’. Nebehay, Schiele, pp. 551–2. within another letter from Osen in Schiele’s Complete Documents.42 The letter from Osen to Schiele states: ‘I still have to finish a portrait in 42. Comini, Egon Schiele’s Portraits, pp. 203–4, n. 66. It is interesting that despite stating that Vienna and a few drawings at Steinhof for the ‘Science Day’ where Dr. the original letter is in the Albertina Egon Kronfeld will be speaking on pathological expression in portraiture ... I Schiele Archive, it is not reproduced in full in am already simulating all diseases so that I may get away sooner’.43 It is Nebehay. In Nebehay there is the following not clear from the letter whether Dr Kronfeld’s talk, presumably extract only: ‘Dann muss ich in Wien noch ein Portra¨ t fertig machen und einige Zeichnungen accompanied by Osen’s drawings, was held at Steinhof, though this is auf dem Steinhof fu¨ r den Naturforschertag, wo possible. Although Dr Kronfeld is not on the 1907 list of head doctors at Dr. Kronfeld spricht, u¨ ber den pathologiesschen Steinhof, there was a theatre – Gesellschaftsraum – at the hospital where (!) Ausdruck im Portra¨ t ...’ Nebehay, Schiele, guest speakers were invited to give public lectures. This letter is certainly p. 170, n. 570. well known in the Schiele scholarship, but there has not as yet been any 43. This translation is by Comini. mention of the two pages in Schiele’s sketchbook of 1913 to 1915 held in 44. Nebehay, Egon Schiele’s Sketch Books (Thames the Vienna City Library where the words, ‘Kronfeld – Saturday 10–12 and Hudson: London, 1989), pp. 356–7. Dr o’clock – Monday 2–4 o’clock’ are written on a page which includes five Kronfeld is mentioned on pp. 70 and 75 of studies of the male figure in motion, and an additional mention of ‘Dr. Schiele’s 1913/1915 sketch book. Kronfeld’ five pages later.44 This information is crucial to an assessment of Schiele’s exposure to ideas on the representation of pathology in portraiture; not only was Schiele working closely with an artist who was drawing patients at Steinhof, he was also meeting with a doctor whose interest lay in pathological expression. We have not until now had proof of Osen’s involvement at Steinhof beyond the letter and the contemporaneous example of Kokoschka – who

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was commissioned by Adolf Loos to paint the portrait of a patient-friend, Ludwig Ritter von Janikowsky, whilst he was receiving treatment at Steinhof in 1909 (private collection, New York).45 However, three of the 45. Kokoschka’s drawing The Lunatic Girl of 1908 (Wien Museum, Vienna) also shows the patient-portraits completed by Osen have now been discovered, and are artist taking inspiration from – and perhaps published for the first time in this article (see Figs 11 and 12). As even working within – the psychiatric hospital. befitting their role to illustrate pathological expression in portraiture, 46. For a complete list of Schiele collectors and the drawings focus on the face of the patient. Despite this, we see in dealers who knew the artist see Kallir, The Fig. 12 the twisting of the patient’s body, with withered legs and Complete Works, pp. 684–6. shoulders raised awkwardly about his ears suggesting curvature of the spine. Osen also takes care to depict in both images the clenched hands of

the patients. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021 Factual accuracy is also central to Osen’s representation of the patients. The notes included on the drawings detail the names of each patient – Karl Kalnik and Oskar Lo¨ wg – the date of their admission to Steinhof – 1913 and 1911, respectively – and their patient numbers – 1802 and 1963 – as well as Osen’s signature and the date of the drawing’s completion in 1913. These details match exactly the Steinhof records. It is impossible to determine whether such attention to detail was insisted upon by Steinhof, Dr Kronfeld, or – perhaps more interestingly – by Osen, in an attempt to lend the sitter an identity beyond that of ‘patient’. However, what these drawings provide us with is firm evidence that one of Schiele’s closest friends was collaborating with doctors on the representation of disease, taking inspiration from the image of the patient and working directly inside the psychiatric space. Although produced in 1913, 3 years after Schiele embarked upon his project of pathological self-portraiture, Osen’s drawings considerably enrich the context we should be placing Schiele’s self-fashioning within. Not only was Schiele working in a city that prided itself as the leading centre for psychiatry in Europe, amongst individuals involved in the ‘innovating’ of the reforms, he was also closely connected to an artist later invited to undertake a project of portraiture at Steinhof. This context enables us to push beyond the noting of iconographic parallels between Schiele’s self-portrait project and the image of the pathological body disseminated in Charcot’s NIS journal. Why did Schiele turn to this image, how central was it to his oeuvre, and what did it signal to his patrons and supporters?

The Spectacle of the Pathological Body The striking links between Schiele’s three nude self-portrait paintings (Figs 1–3) and his graphic work of the same year show the extent to which the representation of his own body suffused his entire practice in 1910. Although clearly related to the large oils he was to produce in the early months of 1910, the drawings – as evident in their sheer number – were much more than preparatory sketches. I would argue that in their detail, conscientious signing and dating (the distinctive S.10 – Schiele 1910 – signals the finished drawing) and repetitive iconography, the drawings were conceived as an independent body of work, geared towards the demands of a specific market. They were certainly avidly collected by such individuals as Heinrich Benesch, von Graff, Moser, Reichel, Reininghaus, Roessler and Alfred Spitzer, all of whom became active as patrons during 1910.46 Although many of the drawings and the large self-portrait nudes on canvas were not exhibited, their speedy entry into private collections, their sale and exchange amongst collectors (often

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.3 2007 393 Gemma Blackshaw Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021

Fig. 11. Erwin Osen, Portrait of Karl Kalnik, 1913, pencil and pastel on paper, 45 Â 65 cm (approx.). (Photo: Raiffeisenbank Schladming, Austria.)

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47. Oskar Reichel often permitted Schiele to exchange or resell to other collectors works he had acquired earlier. 48. See for example, Fritz Karpfen, Das Egon Schiele Buch (Der Wiener Graphischen Werksta¨ tte: Vienna & Leipzig, 1921). Arthur Roessler, ‘In Memoriam Egon Schiele’, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, vol. 44, no. 11 (August 1919), pp. 226–43; Roessler, Breife und Prosa

von Egon Schiele (Verlag der Buchhandlung Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021 Richard Lanyi: Vienna, 1921).

Fig. 12. Erwin Osen, Portrait of Oskar Lo¨wg, 1911, pencil and pastel on paper, 40 Â 60 cm (approx.). (Photo: Raiffeisenbank Schladming, Austria.)

organised by Schiele)47 and their publication in the first wave of literature on Schiele48 shows us that they certainly had exposure, albeit within a carefully cultivated network of almost exclusively male supporters and patrons. The fact that 1910 marked one of Schiele’s most lucrative years for self-portrait sales and portrait commissions further shows that the image of the pathological body he offered was one which clearly appealed. We could interpret this appeal in terms of the body’s functioning as a ‘spectacle’. I would now like to consider how the body was represented by Schiele. How was it organised? How was it looked at? And how was it bound up with issues of desire?

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Nude Self-Portrait, Grimacing (Fig. 13) was an important work for Schiele – he used the distinctive, grimacing face with its incised brow, locked jaw and pulsating red ear in no less than three posters throughout 1912, thus taking the drawing out – albeit as a fragment – into the public domain.49 The body is imbalanced; the broad shoulders – with their angular and chiselled bones – contrast with the withered waist, the shrunken ball of the stomach, the fragile triangle of the pelvis. The elongated arms form hard right angles to the body, framing its disarray. We are directed towards the hands, held up with much physical effort, with long fingers spread to reveal the bulbous knuckles. Fine, red washes trickle from the ear to the throat, with its

protruding collar bones and knotted tendons, to the ribcage. The body is Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021 allowed no setting or support, but is edged in a shaky white line of paint to throw its anatomical extremes from the picture surface. We notice the spreading of the thin paint with the artist’s fingers and thumb to delineate the bicep, the hollow arm pit, the stomach and pectoral muscles. The corporeal is therefore signalled not just in the pathology of the body represented, but also in the manner in which it is drawn, with Schiele’s nail-marks lending an extra visceral ‘charge’ to the image. Schiele was to repeat this formula throughout 1910–11, with few changes. His graphic oeuvre in particular shows him returning constantly to the depiction of his hunched, spasmodic, contorted body-in-pain, which Fig. 13. Egon Schiele, Nude Self-Portrait, demands a harrowing communication with the viewer. This idea of Grimacing, 1910, gouache, watercolour, communication, ideally followed by the identification of the viewer with and pencil with white heightening, the artist-subject is, I believe, central to Schiele’s project. The 55.8 Â 36.9 cm. Albertina, Vienna. representation of his body as a dismembered and degraded site is geared specifically towards inspiring pity in the viewer it confronts. This suffering 49. ‘Shaw oder die Ironie’, poster for a lecture body, isolated from any narrative context which could help to dissipate by Egon Friedell (11 April 1912); ‘Krieg’, Der our anxiety-in-looking, ‘moves’ the viewer, ideally enabling the viewer to Ruf (May 1912), title page; ‘Musik Festwoche’, 50 poster for Akademischer Verband fu¨ r Literatur identify with the subject. Such a dynamic was crucial to maintain in und Musik in Wien (25, 29 June, 1912). order for Schiele to cultivate a relationship between himself and his 50. This dynamic is also at work in the patrons that went beyond that of a mere ‘sale and exchange’ market devotional gazing at Christ as the Man of dynamic. However, what is interesting about this question of gazing at and Sorrows. For a further discussion of the identifying with the anguished male body is that it had to be managed referencing of Christ’s broken body in Vienna’s carefully, as seen in the case of Max Oppenheimer. modernist self-portraiture see, Blackshaw, ‘The Jewish Christ’. In the same year as Schiele’s self-portrait project, Oppenheimer represented himself in similarly anguished terms as Christ in a Deposition scene which included a cast of supporters reverently holding his splayed, naked body (Fig. 14). The cast of figures was in fact a group portrait; Schiele, Peter Altenberg, Karl Kraus, Heinrich Mann and the physician Dr Oscar Reichel (a patron also shared by Schiele) are all depicted. The painting operated as a powerful statement of Oppenheimer’s sense of belonging to this influential (and with the exception of Tilla Durieux) exclusively male circle. His belonging was signalled through the way in which the supporters were represented around Oppenheimer’s body, gazing at both the broken body of the artist within the image, and the male spectator assumed outside the image, and thus articulating – in a very complete visual exchange – a shared bond. We could interpret this shared bond in terms of homosociality – the professional and social network that binds men together. Oppenheimer provides us with an example of how a male community of friends, collectors and patrons could be united through the act of looking at the artist’s body. This homosocial dynamic was a precarious one which had to be managed carefully. Anthea Callen has recently highlighted the desires and tensions that

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51. Anthea Callen, ‘Doubles and Desire: Anatomies of Masculinity in the Later Nineteenth Century’, Art History, vol. 26, no. 5, November 2003, pp. 669–99, p. 677. 52. See Karl Kraus, ‘Kokoschka und der andere’, Die Fackel, no. 339–40, 30 December 1911, p. 22. Oppenheimer’s Deposition is now lost. It is further discussed in Marie Agnes von Puttkamer, Max Oppenheimer – MOPP

1885-1954 (Bo¨ hlau: Vienna, Ko¨ ln & Weimar, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021 1999), p. 85.

Fig. 14. Max Oppenheimer, The Deposition, 1910, oil on canvas. Present whereabouts unknown, formerly in the collection of Dr Oskar Reichel, Vienna.

characterised the male gaze in both medical and artistic late-nineteenth- century arenas when it turned – unusually – on the male body. She argues: ‘Representations of male homosociality risk transgressing the fragile boundary between the licit and the illicit, between the homosocial and the homosexual, but the risk is greatest, perhaps, where no female is portrayed’.51 It is significant that these same individuals included in Oppenheimer’s painting were to turn viciously against the artist in 1910, switching their allegiance to Kokoschka in an attack laced with anti-Semitic (and possibly even homophobic) slurs on Oppenheimer’s character as the Other (der andere).52 Could we perhaps interpret Oppenheimer’s self-portrait – with its pale, languid and submissive body of the artist – as a step too far in its demands on the male gaze and its suggestion of an erotic subtext to their looking? Was Schiele’s pathological representation of his body in fact a canny means of circumnavigating such tensions – uniting his supporters through their collective gaze on his body, but disrupting this body sufficiently to avoid the worrying tremors of homosexual desire? Schiele was certainly more successful in ensuring the lasting allegiance of his supporters. This was perhaps due to the fact that he quickly extended his iconography of pathology out from his self-portraiture to the imaging of his friends and patrons. We have already identified the emphasis Schiele placed on the diseased body in the process of decay in his portrait of Erwin von

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Graff (Fig. 9). This iconography is typical, with his commissioned portrait portfolio becoming increasingly a complementary body of work to the self-portraits. We could argue that Schiele’s own self-image as the diseased artist was bolstered by his comparable representation of his sitters, with 53. Roessler, ‘In Memoriam’, p. 231–2. the portraits combining to create a single identity for a collective of ‘like-minded’ individuals. Although the body is largely covered in his portraits, the grimacing faces, putrid flesh-tones, withered limbs and pronounced joints protruding from the suits of his sitters certainly articulate a shared identity. This identity further enabled Schiele to articulate a more profound relationship to his patrons than that of mere

financial necessity. The portraits thus disseminated – through the shared Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021 pathological body – a notion of artist–patron kinship, successfully distracting the viewer from the transactional processes that lay behind the portrait’s genesis. The portraits therefore appeared ‘impelled’ as opposed to ‘deliberated’, becoming an extension of Schiele’s own self-image. Such a notion was quickly consolidated by Schiele’s enthusiastic patron Roessler, who described the artist as revealing in the portrait the terminal disease of his sitters:

His cold, glittering eyes have seen the pale hues of decomposition in human faces, the death under the skin; and with indescribable wonder he has gazed upon deformed, contorted hands with craggy skin and nails of yellow horn ... With a sense of awe, he has observed the strange changes in the skin, lined with lifeless veins through which watery blood and dirty juices slowly trickle, and the green eyes behind red, infected eyelids that shunned the light.53

Schiele’s patrons collaborated in this form of homosocial-bonding, by not just commissioning works of themselves, or volunteering their services as sitters (Heinrich and Otto Benesch, Max Kahrer, Eduard Kosmack, Oppenheimer, Reichel, Reininghaus, Roessler, Sigmund Rosenbaum, von Graff and Otto Wagner), but also buying portraits of each other. Reichel’s portrait of 1910 (private collection, Kallir no. P166) – though initially declined by the sitter – was speedily bought by Hermann Eissler following its exhibition at Schiele’s one-man show at the Galerie Miethke in 1911. Wagner’s portrait of 1910 (present whereabouts unknown, Kallir no. P164) – though cut down to a fragment – was nevertheless bought by Roessler. Karl Zakovsek’s portrait of 1910 (Neue Galerie, New York, Kallir no. P160) was bought by Reininghaus in 1912, who followed this purchase up with his acquisition of Schiele’s double portrait of Heinrich and Otto Benesch (Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz, Wolfgang Gurlitt Museum, Kallir no. P250), completed in the early part of 1913. Heinrich Benesch, though lacking the capital of patrons such as Reininghaus, also collected portraits by Schiele, acquiring drawings of Max Kahrer (Albertina, Kallir no. D623), Eduard Kosmack (Albertina, Kallir no. D637), Oppenheimer (Albertina, Kallir no. D588) and Reininghaus (present whereabouts unknown, Kallir no. D609), all produced in 1910. This sale or exchange of portraits is a distinctive feature of this particular group of collectors, and it was unusual. Unlike Klimt’s portraits of society ladies (which stayed with the sitter or her family) and Kokoschka’s rejected portraits (which were bought up by only one patron – Loos), Schiele’s portraits quickly found a local market of interested collectors. Their purchasing of each others’ portraits was not only a means of sustaining Schiele, but also a means of financially supporting the construction and marketing of their group identity. We perhaps see in their efforts the

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vulnerability of this particular group of men. How else to explain the sharing of identity, the declaration of relationships, and the professing of ties? I would argue that Schiele was more than aware of this. Although Schiele’s pathologising of his body in his self-portraiture was to continue throughout 1911, his burst of portrait-painting and sales was largely confined to 1910, with no portraits of either male or female sitters being completed in 1911. We could argue that this intense portrait-painting activity of 1910 was geared specifically towards consolidating Schiele’s position in a competitive art market; the large and expensive self-portraits on canvas bought by Reininghaus launched him, but they could not complete the

avant-garde ‘gambit’ alone. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021

The Language of Pathology: Avant-garde ‘Gambits’ Meier-Graefe’s description of modern art in Vienna as ‘a lad who has grown too quickly, tremendously tall but shockingly thin, weak of bone and precociously diseased’ was published in 1904, one year after Herman Bahr’s publication of the scathing reviews that followed the display of Fig. 15. Gustav Klimt, Medicine, 1901– Klimt’s paintings for the ceiling of the new University of Vienna building 1907, destroyed 1945. (Photo: Albertina, Vienna.) (1900–1907). Klimt’s Medicine (Fig. 15), exhibited at the 10th Secession exhibition of 1901, was attacked for its pessimistic interpretation of the University’s celebrated faculty, with delirious and diseased bodies 54 54. Ludwig Hevesi describes the painting thus spiralling around ‘the pale skeleton of Death’ despite the presence of in Hevesi, ‘Neue Bilder von Klimt: Sezession’ Hygeia, the personification of Health. In Gegen Klimt, Bahr collated the (16 March 1901), reprinted in idem, Acht Jahre Sezession (Marz 1897–Juni 1905): Kritik, Polemik, public condemnations of the painting, including that of an anonymous Chronik (Vienna 1906), pp. 316–9, see reviewer for the Wiener Morgenzeitung, who considered how the bodies in 55 pp. 316–7 for his discussion of Medicine. Medicine were more suited to an anatomical museum than a university. 55. ‘Die auf dem Bilde vorkommenden Klimt’s figures, with their curved spines, swollen stomachs and rigid figuralen Darstellungen sind derart, dab selbe limbs, were bitingly thought to have more diagnostic than aesthetic value. vielleicht fu¨ r ein anatomisches Museum, niemals This opinion was echoed throughout the press, with a viewer writing in aber fu¨ r einen allgemein zuga¨ nglichen Die Fackel commenting sarcastically that ‘the chaotic tangle of decrepit Repra¨ sentationsraum in der Universita¨ t passen, weil sie keine fachma¨ nnische Verwerthung als bodies is a symbolic representation of conditions at the Vienna General 56 Lehrmittel bilden, sondern durch Roheit der Hospital!’ Such criticisms brilliantly – though unwittingly – underline Auffassung und Mangel an Aesthetik das grob the aims of the Salpeˆtrie` re’s NIS journal: to highlight the invasion of Publicum tief verletzen mu¨ ssen’. Hermann Bahr, Gegen Klimt: Historiches – Philosophie, pathology into art, and art into the imaging of pathology. Medizin, Goldfische, Fries (Vienna, 1903), p. 46. I would argue that Bahr’s 1903 reminder of the reception of Klimt’s Medicine inspired Meier-Graefe – working in Vienna on the 14th Secession 56. Karl Kraus, Die Fackel, lxxiii (April 1901), cited in Christian Nebehay, ed., Gustav Klimt: exhibition in the same year – to use the metaphor of the ‘precociously Dokumentation (Vienna 1969), p. 254. diseased’ Vienna. Klimt’s painting provided Meier-Graefe with an example 57. ‘Well, gentlemen, this is Medicine, Klimt’s of how the pathological body could be used powerfully as a sign for latest work of genius ...now I ask you to try and modern art. The power of this sign of the pathological body lay in its think of something sensible in front of this ability to seep sensationally into the very language of art criticism. The picture. I can’t – the walls are turning, and my furore over Klimt’s painting is perhaps best encapsulated in the comic ... stomach too. Help, where’s the exit? Thank descriptions of visitors who – at the mere sight of the bodies – have to God, it’s passed; Medicine has had its effect’. 57 Bahr, Gegen Klimt, pp. 55–56. rush out of the Secession exhibition to vomit. Descriptions such as this show that the pathological body clearly carried that vital avant-garde quality: the capacity to shock. However, Klimt was not able to complete this avant-garde move. The damning reviews were seemingly too much for the artist, who retreated from the representation of the body, increasingly concealing it in flat, decorative panels which attempt (not always successfully) to suppress its eruptive, visceral qualities. I would argue that in a move typical of Pollock’s model of the three-pronged avant-garde gambit – reference, deference, difference – Schiele returned to this early

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.3 2007 399 Gemma Blackshaw work of his mentor, recognising (along with Meier-Graefe) its potential and pushing the iconography of the University paintings one step further.58 Rising resentment at the influence of Klimt, the lingering preoccupation with 58. Pollock defines ‘reference’ as the ability of decorative art, and the sublimation of artistic individuality as signalled in the artist to link his work up to what is the communal working practices of the Secession, meant that it was the currently considered avant-garde. ‘Deference’ right time for such a move. is the willingness of the artist to defer to the Schiele’s benefactors and allies were quick to contribute to this existing avant-garde leader who ‘had the latest move’. A further ‘move’ is required to seal the avant-garde assault, with Roessler in particular being keen to challenge the success of the ambitious artist; that of Secession’s grip on what was considered to be ‘modern’ in Vienna’s art ‘difference’, a third strategy which – though circles (a grip which was simply replaced after Klimt’s departure in 1905 dependent on the older artist’s example – 59 advances it forward and thus supplants it. This

with the Galerie Miethke, with Carl Moll as its artistic director). We Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021 three-pronged assault is a delicate one to see their support not only in their patronage of Schiele, but also in the manage: ‘An avant-garde gambit works only if language they use to describe his art, which further contributed to his you can evoke a reference text, and rework it so iconography of pathology and thus his avant-garde gambit. In Das Egon that its status is overcome and it space occupied. If the work is too different, reference will be Schiele Buch of 1921, which contained five self-portraits and two portraits stymied; if it is too close, deference will of von Graff and Paris Gu¨ tersloh with distinctly similar pathological body overwhelm its separate identity and it will seem types, Fritz Karpfen reflects that, in 1908 (when Schiele exhibited 10 oil merely derivative, or worse, banal and paintings at the Kunstaustellung in Klosterneuberg), Schiele’s art was still hackneyed’. Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits, ‘healthy’ (gesund). However, in 1910 public opinion turned at the p. 28. revolting aspects of his work. In the Fra¨nkischer Kurier of 1911: ‘The 59. See for example Roessler, ‘Hagenbund’, Viennese Schiele is unhealthy (ungesund) and for our taste inaccessible’. Arbeiter Zeitung, 14 May 1912, ‘Drei Jungwiener Maler’, Die Aktion 5 (February, 1915), p. 80 and Similarly, in an unspecified source, ‘Egon Schiele’s aberrations are some of ‘Jungo¨ sterreichische Malku¨ nstler’, Donauland. 60 the most disgusting we have seen thus far in Vienna’. Karpfen defended Illustrierte Monatsschrift, vol. 1, no. 1 (1917), Schiele’s work against such charges, citing Roessler’s view that ‘the pp. 209–213. Roessler contrasts Vienna’s applied art – with Klimt as its figure-head – perversity in Schiele’s portraits and nudes was not his fault, as this was with artists such as Schiele, Kokoschka and simply the nature of his models – the contortions and the diseased stares Oppenheimer, who were able to ‘peel people were simply a faithful rendering of the body and mind of mankind of our inside out’ in front of horrified spectators. 61 time’. The materiality of the body in Schiele’s work was also celebrated 60. ‘Der Wiener Schiele ist ungesund und fu¨ r by critics such as Otto Benesch, painted alongside his father by the artist unseren Geschmack unversta¨ ndlich ...’. ‘Egon in 1913. Benesch, in his foreword to the exhibition catalogue Schiele, dessen Verirrungen mit zu dem accompanying Schiele’s one-man show at the Galerie Arnot in 1915, Ekelhaftesten geho¨ ren, was man bisher in Wien gesehen hat ...’ Karpfen, Das Egon Schiele Buch, observed that Schiele’s paintings from 1910 are ‘organically structured ... p. 23. a network of closely interwoven cells that cannot break without the whole Das Egon Schiele Buch body disintegrating into sore shreds of skin’.62 Kurt Rathe, writing in 61. Karpfen, , p. 24. 1919, similarly focuses on this rupturing potential of the body in his 62. Otto Benesch, ‘Katalog Vorwort zur description of Schiele’s ‘blood-thirsty asceticism’ and portraits that Kollectiv-Ausstellung Schieles in der Galerie 63 Arnot, Wien January 1915’, reprinted in visualise the ‘pulsing juices of the blood’; and Hans Tietze in ‘Nekrolog’ Roessler (ed.), In Memoriam Egon Schiele considers how, ‘in tight contortions, Schiele’s bodies showcase a twitching (Richard Lanyi: Vienna), 1921, p. 33. 64 rigidity just like skinned figures; living corpses’. Tietze goes on to 63. Kurt Rathe, ‘Egon Schiele Weg und Ziel’ comment that this ‘subcutaneous way of painting, a suffering under a Wien February 1919, in Roessler, In Memoriam, deep-seated wound’ was now typical of some artists of the day.65 p. 45. Although he does not mention any names, Tietze must have had Kokoschka 64. Hans Tietze, ‘Nekrolog’, in Roessler, In in mind with his reference to ‘artists of the day’. The reception of Memoriam, p. 58. Kokoschka’s portraits of 1909–10 (slightly preceding Schiele’s work) 65. Tietze, ‘Nekrolog’, in Roessler, In similarly focused on the pathological representation of his sitters, and their Memoriam, p. 58. nauseating effects on the viewer. For example, on viewing Kokoschka’s 66. Josef Strzygowski, ‘Junge Ku¨ nstler im Portrait of Lotte Franzos of 1909 (The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC) Hagenbund’, Die Zeit, 9 February, 1911. at the Hagenbund exhibition of 1911, Josef Strzygowski (professor in art Quoted and translated in Natter (ed.), history at the University of Vienna) noted that, ‘A horrible smell wafts Kokoschka: Early Portraits, p. 120. from the portrait of Lotte Franzos’.66 Karl Schreder of the Deutsche Volksblatt considered Lotte’s portrait – amongst others by Kokoschka – in similar terms as, ‘distorted expressions caused by debilitating illnesses or a corrosive process of decay ... how gruesome the thoroughly crippled

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hands – swollen in parts, half-rotten in others – as if leprosy had already begun its appalling ravaging process’.67 Such criticism arguably shows that it was not just Schiele who recognised the avant-garde potential of Klimt’s 67. Karl Schreder, ‘Kunstuntergang im Hagenbund’, Deutsches Volksblatt, 9 February, University paintings. The representation of the pathological body had 1911. Quoted and translated in Natter (ed.), clearly enabled more than one artist in Vienna to break out of Secessionstil Kokoschka: Early Portraits, p. 120. idioms, although Kokoschka was less confident in depicting the 68. See, for example, Cernuschi, Re/Casting body-in-pain in its entirety, preferring to concentrate on the face and Kokoschka, pp. 21–50. In his chapter ‘Body and hands only. It is interesting, however, that whilst Kokoschka’s identity as Soul: Kokoschka’s The Warrior, Truth, and the artist-surgeon, and ‘subcutaneous’ representation of the body has come Interchangeablity of the Physical and 68 Psychological in Fin-de-Sie` cle Vienna’, under much scrutiny, Schiele’s comparable strategies have not been

Cernuschi considers the local intellectual explored so rigorously. It has therefore been difficult to fully appreciate Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article/30/3/377/1609081 by guest on 01 October 2021 framework which enabled Kokoschka to the methods he used to launch himself into the competitive and hostile associate the peeling back of the skin to reveal climate of Vienna’s art market, where friendships and alliances had to be the interior of the body (seen in his exposure of blood vessels, bones and sinewy tendons) with both declared and nurtured. the revelation of psychological ‘truth’. This By drawing attention to the iconographic links between Schiele’s ‘interchangeability’ is placed convincingly self-portraits and that of the NIS patient-photographs, I hope to have within Kraus’s ‘exposure’ of the hypocritical demonstrated how his work can productively be reintegrated into this bourgeois fac¸ ade, Loos’s critique of Secessionstil ornament which conceals the underlying context. I would argue that the turn to the photographs – readily available material and structure of buildings, and Freud’s in Vienna’s medical and public libraries – was a canny move by an artist concept of ‘excavating’ psychological truth by who was aware of live debates in Vienna about neuropathology and the penetrating the civilising and self-protecting debilitating effects of modern life on the body, as well as the inadequacy of layers of the conscious mind. Secessionstil art to represent this body. The harrowing photographs of ‘les malades’ and ‘les difformes’ provided Schiele with source-material to take the human body as represented in Klimt’s University paintings one step further – in Pollock’s words, ‘advancing it and supplanting it’. He was certainly helped in this endeavour, and we should not underestimate the role of physician-friends working in pathological anatomy, critics such as Roessler championing the skin-peeling techniques of the new ‘Jungwiener Maler’, and patrons such as Reininghaus, purchasing the self-portrait that first staged the ‘gambit’. We could shift the modernist focus on Schiele to his patrons, perhaps even speculating that the iconography of pathology was proffered and fostered not by the artist, but by his market. However, I think it is ultimately more satisfying to consider the ‘gambit’ as a collaborative effort, with Schiele representing his body as a pathological and pitiful site for male spectators who could – in looking, buying, exchanging and identifying – promote the artist as the ‘precociously diseased’ young Vienna.

I would like to thank my colleagues on the AHRC-funded research project ‘Madness and Modernity: Art, Architecture and Mental Illness in Vienna and the Hapsburg Empire 1890–1914’. Project members include Dr Leslie Topp (project leader), Dr Sabine Wieber (post-doctoral research associate), Luke Heighton and Nicky Imrie (PhD students), Birkbeck College. For their responses and helpful comments, I would also like to thank Tag Gronberg and Shearer West. An earlier version of this argument was presented at The Association of Art Historians annual conference, Oxford Brookes University, 2001.

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