Sinful Sunday: Schiele

For years now, I’ve been fascinated by Egon Schiele’s twisted, evocative, hyper-sexualised paintings. We have a framed print of his Sitting Woman with Legs Drawn Up on our bedroom wall – mainly because I think it’s about as sexy as any non-nude portrait you’re likely to find – and when Somerset House hosted an exhibition of his work back in 2014, I spent hours staring at each canvas.

Since November, the Royal Academy has been running an exhibition of Klimt and Schiele drawings, on loan from the Albertina Museum in Vienna. It closes tonight, and Liv and I nearly missed it (in case you haven’t noticed, we’ve been quite busy lately…), but after a brief panic we did ultimately squish Martha into her sling yesterday and head up the Victoria Line to Green Park for a late viewing.

It’s a curious collection of work (unfortunately the Klimt sketches really are, for the most part, no more than that) and it jumps around quite a lot – one minute we’re watching Schiele grow paranoid and claustrophobic in an Austrian prison, the next we’re going through a series of early drawings and studies made by Klimt for the high society portraits that turned him into one of Vienna’s most celebrated artists.

However, there are some real highlights, including a fantastic and somewhat disturbing set of self-portraits that span Schiele’s career, and show the different artistic lens he applied to his own body. By far my favourite gallery though was also the most vividly erotic (yes yes, I know: what a surprise). It contains one startling Klimt sketch of a woman masturbating with her legs hitched up and spread wide. On the wall opposite are four hypnotic Schiele figure drawings, including one of his most famous works, the Seated Female Nude, Elbows Resting on Right Knee.

I kept coming back to these, and especially to the two less explicit pieces among the four. After I tweeted about them, a couple of people pointed out how well suited they’d be to some sort of Sinful Sunday tribute – not least because, as Vida Bailey pointed out, they seem so modern.

The more I thought about it, the more I decided it was remiss of me to have allowed this much time to pass without attempting some sort of Schiele tribute on my blog. So that’s exactly what I decided to do. Neither Liv nor I own a green body stocking, so it is very much homage rather than direct copy, but I’m quite pleased with how my effort came out – and I think it fits with Schiele’s general vibe of fucking around with conventional expectations of erotic art…