What Egon Schiele Saw at the Hospital

"A new show at the Neue Galerie points to one possible source for Schiele's bodies. The centerpiece is a 1910 portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff, a physician at a women's clinic in Vienna, who gave Schiele direct access to patients: newborns, pregnant women, and the infirm."

"Schiele's favorite trick was to surgically carve his subjects out of their environment and lay them on a blank page. Without the context of a studio or a bourgeois interior, there are only people made to look etherized, agitated, or ill, suspended in some empty and sterile place between life and death."

"Although Schiele is remembered as a sort of high-art pornographer, his paintings an endless parade of genitals and splayed legs, the results are rarely pornographic. Perverse, unsettling, and morally suspect, yes—but erotic, not so much. There is a clinical quality that interferes."

Egon Schiele's unique artistic vision of the human body—characterized by contorted limbs, bruised flesh, and disfigured forms—has long puzzled art historians examining his influences. A new exhibition at the Neue Galerie suggests a formative source: his relationship with Dr. Erwin von Graff, a Vienna physician who granted Schiele access to patients including newborns, pregnant women, and the infirm. Though often characterized as erotic art, Schiele's work maintains a clinical quality that creates psychological distance. His technique of isolating subjects against blank backgrounds produces figures appearing etherized and suspended between life and death, evoking hospital settings. Before meeting Graff, Schiele's work was largely derivative.

Read at The New Yorker