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| From Sisi Museum, Hofburg, Vienna instagram shot |
1 January 2023
It’s always a pleasure to write the date, the first day of January in the new year and this one for some reason even more so, perhaps because of the feeling of change in the air, mixing with the feeling of similarity or continuity. I’m listening as I always do on New Year’s Day, to the Vienna Philharmonic concert and The Blue Danube & the Radetsky March sweep my body with a tingling sensation and demand that I dance. A sense that I belong there, not here, but there, in some time and place that is conjured, remembered, vividly imagined, reconstructed, invented, I don’t know what word is appropriate but, as I listen to the music, or rather, as the music takes hold of me, my heart and my emotions are there.
This energy that comes to me through listening to the living orchestra playing the music of The Blue Danube, it vitalizes everything. How can it be past when I feel it so concretely now? Today too, the first of the year, a friend in Vienna contacts me, say they hope to see me this year. Perhaps this present feeling will have some concrete outcome in the future. At any rate, I am thinking of Vienna, so I thought I'd post this piece written shortly after a visit to Vienna some years ago.
Egon Schiele in Vienna
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| photo credit: Vicente Camarasa |
A poster advertising the Egon Schiele exhibition displays one of his self portraits.
The colours and the shapes look out of place among Vienna's baroque architecture.
It looks ugly that's what I thought. But the original in the Leopold Museum has a
very different effect. It's something to do with the vividness and I want to say lack
of interpretation, but I don't suppose we can ever get away from interpretation, but
to me it looks like life given a shove, something bristling with energy being pushed
through the paint. Not trying to make it pleasing to the eye, even less, to conform to
some idea of what it should be, but trying to make it even more like it already is.
I found the self portraits disturbing until I stopped trying to want them to be
different, to conform to what I thought they should be. It was a precarious vision for
me, a tightrope way of seeing, for baggage lurks on the edges of the eye's mind,
craving to turn it into something it is not, shuffling its rhetoric, its interpretative
critical moulding and dissembling. It huffs and puffs and tries to be noticed, tries to
intrude its perception – superior of course – into the eye's vision. But there were
blessed moments when I saw – or it seemed that I saw – what was in front of me.
Even harder for me, were his nudes. Reaction and emotion squabbled with my eyes
and the objective interpreter was silenced. But he was painting the nudes in the
same way, I came to see, as he did his self-portraits – he was not trying to make his
models beautiful, sensuous or erotic but was painting what he saw, with that extra
shove, that emancipated detail that was not smeared or shaded out. And because
detail was not elided into sidelines or suburbs, it was democratised, the result was
unnerving, for we do not give the same credence in life to the marginal, the half-
effaced, the timid; we worship the precocious, the declamatory, and here was
someone who gave equal voice to what we usually submerge into peripheral vision.
At first glance you might say bold, assertive, but on longer contemplation I felt there
was something much more tender and evocative in the democratic centrality of any
part of the painting. There were no peripheries. The painting did not home in on
this or that area, placing the rest in background. Yet it gained dimensionality from
that, it did not lose it. What our eye or our thinking normally elided into
background, was equally present which was why there was the feeling of the detail
being pushed in front of our eyes.
His other paintings show this same capacity, whether they depict fully- or semi-clad
figures, buildings or landscapes. The roofs of buildings are intimately tiled. A thin
tree squirms against a pink evening sky. There is an impression of lack of
perspective but as you look closer, it is inclusion, not lack. By dismissing centrality
and pulling in the margins, dimensions are multiplied.
I walk back from the city centre, following Argentinier strasse. The last rays of sun
are falling on the Keplerplatz. As the sun vanishes behind buildings, the lower sky
glows with pink. The centres of the few clouds are murky purple and they have
halos of golden light around them. Behind them the sky flushes a deeper pink, as if
it was absorbing colour, like damp paper.
This colour reminds me of one of the Egon Schiele paintings – a landscape with
hills so thick and layered, terraced and embroidered, they looked like tapestries
with sequins stuck on them. Then there were the trees, slivers of darkness with
skinny leaves – a strip of water, two rocks, and from the water outwards, everything
was rosy, unforgettable. It was called simply Versinkende Sonne. The colour
wrapped the landscape – and you knew that it would soon be gone. But because he
had caught it, this marvel could be carried with us, out into the tree-lined Museum
Quartier, across the street and along the road in front of the Hofburg, where the
horse-drawn carriages line the street.
Egon Schiele: versinkende Sonne
A dark bird flies across the sky, now the colour of rusted gold. It perches on an
aerial, flicking open its wings from time to time. Another joins it and they sit on the
two ends of the aerial like two black apostrophes, turning the immense pinkness of
the sky into a quotation.
With thanks to Textualities where this article first appeared.
And I wrote about the experience of visiting Vienna's Hofburg in a blog post here.
Unfortunately the photographs I took then were lost, apart from the ones in the post.
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