Original subtitles

There was something slightly dirty and clunky about it.

The shapes...

..and the cocaine morning-after look.

Schiele's nudes still shock audiences.

There is clearly something that is still provocative

about his work.

Taboos are broken and people are having sex.

For Schiele as an artist, but also for the women.

It would have been an incredibly radical and audacious

type of image to take part in.

Schiele still sort of shimmers between being an artist that seems

kind of on the edge of being pornographic

and on the edge of being an artist

that can be revered for being a great modern artist.

Schiele was not only a great artist, he was a marketing genius as well.

He knew how to make a career.

People like David Bowie looked at this, and did the same.

If someone were to show you a Schiele watercolour,

and ask you, "When do you think this was done?"

I think the answer would be, "Yesterday!"

Vienna, around 1900, was the centre of the world.

Of the intellectual world.

It wasn't very liberal, very open to the new, in general.

You had Sigmund Freud.

You had Adolf Loos.

You had Gustav Klimt.

Gustav Klimt was really the artist who blazed the trail.

The modern art that Klimt and later Schiele went on to represent,

was about the contemporary.

It was about being modern.

And it was about being controversial.

In the knowledge that art should be free.

Free from the watchful eyes of the authorities.

All these triple-A artists and intellectuals had been living here.

Had been visiting the coffeehouses

and speaking about revolutionary things.

1910 is really regarded as Schiele's breakthrough year.

This is the year in which he becomes

the controversial artist we celebrate today.

He's just 20 years old.

# Voodoo in my blood is living

# Blood take I'm chillin'

# Chill me got the soul of a mimic

# It's not quite right, you must be silly

# Sign of the wars is my grinning... #

Egon.

# Momma stop giving me grief... #

I see no reason whatsoever to respond to your shameful telegram

asking for a cash remittance.

I placed a considerable amount in your bank account

only a few days ago.

I'm not a cow to be milked.

Kindly remember this.

Your guardian, Leopold.

# Wipe that cheeky grin and come on down... #

Dear Oskar.

I've entirely run out of money and was obliged just now to pay 300 krone.

Please, please, bring me 20 tomorrow, Saturday.

Please, this is very urgent, otherwise I'll be unable even to eat lunch.

Dear Leo. Such an unhappy fate.

My relatives are appalled by my children's behaviour.

Ever since Egon left from here, he has changed.

He fell in with bad company, easily found in a big city.

But nonetheless, please believe me when I say

that I do not see him as lost.

He's broken away from the Academy,

where he received his training in life drawing.

That move enrages his uncle, his guardian and benefactor,

who decides to withdraw all financial and moral support.

Dear Marie.

The conduct and attitude which Egon has displayed for some time

disdain all morals and amount to a direct insult

of the highest order.

I feel obliged, after more than five years,

to end my guardianship of Egon

at the earliest opportunity.

Schiele has to support himself.

He has to pay for rent, material and models.

And he decides to approach this, I believe, rather practically.

He produces sheet after sheet of explicit drawings,

and these drawings very quickly find their market.

Let's talk about sex...

SHE LAUGHS

..for a moment.

Schiele is really still a teenager.

And he is, like all teenagers, obsessed with sex.

Now, what do artists do?

They draw nudes.

Even at the Academy, you were supposed to draw nudes.

But what is not normal is to draw a nude

without in some way, neutralising her sexuality.

All sorts of aesthetic devices have been invented

to make it OK to look at a naked woman.

To make that an artistic experience and not a pornographic experience.

And when Schiele is drawing the female nude,

he is actually having an immediate encounter

with a naked woman who terrifies him

and excites him at the same time.

And this is precisely what you see in those works.

I think his work is entirely about desire.

The difficulty for the viewer is that you take the position

of the artist's desire - watching, looking,

observing, and being voyeuristically connected to this person

who has had no part to play.

That's why his work is still so relevant.

Because we know, in looking at these sheets,

that we are in some way engaging with how we see ourselves,

and our relationships to each other.

How we think about our own sexuality, our own desires.

# Rusted brandy in a diamond glass

# Everything is made from dreams... #

Schiele turned to his sister, Gertie,

because he couldn't afford

to pay a professional model.

And she would do whatever he wanted.

She was extremely compliant.

# I can't resist

# I just know that she's made of smoke

# But I've lost my way

# She knows that I am broke

# But I must play...#

There had been definitely an erotic situation

between Egon Schiele and Gertie.

How far this was, we don't know.

We can't say.

But this erotic atmosphere, we can feel when we see

the drawings, the artworks.

Gertie and Schiele had all kinds of secrets,

and later when I interviewed Gertie as an adult,

she liked to imply that they had many secrets.

Schiele was brought up in a small town near Vienna

and his father was the head of this railway station.

And the way Egon Schiele grew up was with rules, rules, rules.

Egon's father did not like the fact that his son drew all the time.

And he was perturbed because what is his son

going to become, if all he does is draw?

The relation between Egon Schiele and his father was pure love.

And then this little Egon Schiele saw that this perfect world

did not really exist. It was only a facade.

Egon Schiele's father loved a young girl,

but the girl was brought up very prudishly,

so she was shocked when she suddenly had her wedding night,

and did not let Schiele's father join her in bed.

So, according to the family mythology,

Schiele's father went to a whorehouse and acquired syphilis.

The illness spread and he became mentally quite strange.

Nobody talked about this, the father tried the whole time

to give a perfect picture.

But more and more, he appeared like a maniac,

and the whole family saw this.

Schiele saw that the picture you see, the facade you see,

is not the truth.

There's something behind it.

With his family coming apart in this fashion,

he simply lost himself in his artwork.

And that became his emotional retreat and salvation.

Dear Anton.

Does anyone, I wonder, recall my noble father with such sorrow?

Who could understand why I seek out the places he went,

where I pass sorrowful hours willingly feeling the pain within?

Schiele was 14 when his father died.

Schiele then spends a lot of the rest of his life

coming to terms with that emotional experience

and the experience of his father's death.

Egon Schiele's work, there are two elements

which are extremely dominating.

There is his focus on the corporeality

and on the sexuality, on the sexual force,

and there is sort of the counterpart, which is the death.

And this sex and death are the most vital energies

which can be found in his paintings and drawings.

Artists were valued for being on the margins of society.

And a way of really heightening their outsider status

was to emphasise their anxiety, their sense of inner turmoil

and torment, that's what audiences of the time really valued.

I think Schiele knew that.

I think he had a very strong sense of how he needed

to market himself as a modern artist.

# Take a little walk to the edge of town

# Go across the tracks

# Where the viaduct looms like a bird of doom

# As it shifts and cracks. #

All painters try to be performers.

And the good ones are good performers.

All of them.

# Hey, man, you know you're never coming back. #

What he decided to do was to make a big entrance.

To say, "Look, I'm here.

"And I'm ready to sort of revolutionise what is here."

# On a gathering storm comes a tall handsome man

# In a dusty black coat with a red right hand. #

There's an honesty to how he portrays himself

that I really like.

You know, it doesn't feel like he's trying to flatter himself.

If anything, maybe, he's making himself look slightly

more sickly, or slightly worse.

You can imagine going to Schiele, saying,

"can you do a painting for me?"

And he shows you as a kind of pornographic dead corpse.

But there's a sense in which the works are more monstrous

than they are ideal.

Schiele is concerned with the idea of representations of the body

which seem to undermine the idea of transcendent beauty.

# He'll reach deep in the hole

# Heal your shrinking soul. #

We know about 170 self-portraits

which are declared as self-portraits by Schiele.

Gustav Klimt did not do one single self-portrait.

This maniac production of self-portraits has its roots also

in Vienna of 1900s, where these questions of identity

were highly debated.

# He's a ghost

# He's a god

# He's a man, he's a Guru. #

He wanted to feel what's the soul, and how all these many,

many persons, Egon Schiele, fit together.

This nakedness and his exploration of the corporeality is something

which he explores on his own body but also on the body of the other.

And it's highly interesting not to split those two body of works

apart but to see them together.

I don't look at Schiele's images and see them as victims.

I've done a million types of images in the past,

and worked with a million different photographers and artists.

And some of those have been quite sexualised.

And in a lot of his images, you can see the woman staring back.

The subjects have more agency, and they're looking at you.

And just acknowledging that they're being seen,

and that they are agreeing to being, being seen.

The way he exploits his female models...

..certainly for today's tastes is quite interesting.

Because it's kind of at least equal in terms of how he manipulates

and exploits his male models, including himself.

He's not scared of male nudity.

He is as explicit when it comes to the depiction of his own body.

But this doesn't constitute a levelling of the playing field

because Schiele is doing this to himself.

He's taking his own clothes off.

His economic survival doesn't depend on doing this for somebody else.

And so I don't think we can use these works

to talk about female empowerment.

Schiele views the women as equals.

He is not a feminist in that sense.

But in acknowledging the power that these women have over him,

he grants them a degree of sexual autonomy that you rarely see

in the work of male artists, to this day.

The women who were posing for artists like Schiele,

artists who couldn't pay them a great deal of money,

were, in the large, vulnerable, often illiterate women,

who had had to resort to posing for artists and even possibly to go

into prostitution, there are very close lines

between prostitution and posing for artists.

# Whoever drew my body was colouring outside the lines

# But sometimes I can't help dressing to the nines

# Fancy hats...#

And the prostitutes at that time used photographs of themselves.

And in some of the watercolours of Schiele, we can see

almost the same posture and the same clothes as on the photographs.

The women are being almost performative in some of the images,

in a way that's super sexualised and erotic.

I don't know that that makes them pornography, though.

To me, it doesn't, but I don't know if I'm just being too kind.

# Once I knew a boy, he tried to erase me... #

The problem for me, as an audience, with the explicit nature

of everything that gets thrown at me in the media today

is the predictability.

The magic doesn't come in.

There needs to be some enchantment with your lust.

Pornography was absolutely an influence on the artists

of turn-of-the-century Vienna.

You could buy pornographic photographs anywhere.

So, of course Schiele would have had access

to that sort of thing.

He is always breaking this distinction between art

and pornography down.

But in order for his work to exist, to be collected, to be appreciated,

he had to fall back on this defence of it,

not as pornographic, but as erotic.

Artists at this time were trying to reform both the content

and the appearance of art.

The minute Schiele steps forward as a kind of leader,

that is subject to a lot of competition and infighting.

And there's a lot of rivalry.

Pesca, I want to leave Vienna.

The sooner, the better. It is so ugly here.

I'm the object of everyone's envy and deceitfulness.

Those who were my fellows not so long ago now look on me

with scheming eyes.

Vienna is all shadows.

The city is black and that's that.

I want light.

I want to see the sun, and bask in the drenched green blue

valleys of evening.

I want to go to the Bohemian Forest,

May, June, July, August, September, October.

I'd like to converse with the flowers.

To run, unstoppable, over plains.

I want to kiss the soil.

The soft, warm flowers of the moss.

Early in the morning, I should like to see

the sun rise again.

The soil as it breathes and shimmers.

It was great luck for Schiele that he met Wally Neuzil,

his muse, his model, his girlfriend.

They were very young when they met, and she was open to all his

unconventional and new tendencies.

Wally was maybe the most important woman in Schiele's life.

All the things we know about her tell us

that she was absolutely great.

She supported him from the beginning to the end.

Schiele did not communicate in writing with Wally

because they were always together.

Where we see Schiele and Wally together, we see a deep

relationship, a really deep relationship.

Dear Uncle Leopold, it was impossible in Vienna,

all the more so the more one is entangled in public life.

Everything by my hand that appeared over the last two or three years,

be it painting, drawing or writing, prefigures what is to come.

I know I've developed enormously as an artist.

I've experienced and continue to experience to build.

I've fought the art business unceasingly.

I'm pleased to have become so tough.

I came to Neulengbach intending to stay,

for I mean to produce great works, and for that, I need quiet.

Schiele loved the countryside, loved to see the trees,

see the meadows, but at the end, the people of the countryside

did not really understand Schiele.

You move to a town like Neulengbach with a woman who's clearly

not your wife, and already you're in trouble.

He painted in the garden and had also models from this town,

and painted them in the nude in the garden,

so the neighbours saw it.

And the town population did not like them.

Kids begin to hang out at your studio after school,

just like the kids did in Vienna.

But these are not street urchins,

these are proper bourgeois children

who are being brought into a den of sin.

And you can imagine the parents talking about this and saying,

you know, "What's going on up there at that cottage with the artist

"and that hooker?"

Dear Carl Reininghaus, I must insist on thanking you once more

for the recommendation of your lawyer.

What has happened is an outrage.

Some of the papers printed, "14-year-old girl kidnapped,"

which is entirely untrue.

I have never so much as set foot in the place where I am supposed

to have met this girl.

I have had 125 of my drawings confiscated.

I have been served a court summons for Saturday,

and naturally, it all keeps me from my work.

Schiele was approached by a young girl who said she has to

escape her parents, and Schiele and her together made

the mistake to bring her to her grandmother, to Vienna.

And so, the family in Neulengbach accused him of abducting the child.

Even though the charges of rape and kidnapping are quickly dropped,

the police start an investigation.

And what they find is that, yes, there is - quote, unquote -

"pornographic art" hanging on the walls of this studio.

And yes, kids have been hanging out.

So, if you have a nude hanging on your wall,

there's nothing wrong with that, but the minute someone

from the outside comes in and sees it, that's public immorality.

Hell...

A hell.

Not THE hell but a base, vulgar, dirty, miserable,

shaming hell is this into which I've been thrown unexpectedly.

I must live in my own excrement,

breathe in my own poisonous, sticky fumes.

I'm unshaven.

I cannot even wash myself properly.

Yet, I am a human being.

I still am, although imprisoned.

Does no-one think of that?

And thus, I, as I am torn with my roots from the soil

of my activity, in order not to go really mad,

painted, with trembling fingers dipped in bitter spit.

Using the stains on the plaster, I painted landscapes

and heads on the walls of the cell.

Round me, all the colours are extinguished.

It's frightening.

The problem at Neulengbach was that there had been children.

We can't say what happened there exactly, in Neulengbach,

so we can't judge.

But we see that Schiele thought that, for him,

all these things are not a problem at all, because he's an artist,

and an artist can do things other people can't do.

That's what he trusted in,

but he found out that that's not true.

At last, at last, last, at last, the alleviation of pain.

At last, paper, pencils, brush, colours for drawing and writing.

Excruciating were those wild, confused, crude, those unchanging,

unformed, monotonously grey, grey hours.

I have painted the cot in my cell, in the middle of the dirty grey

of the blankets, a glowing orange which Wally brought me,

as the single shining light in the room.

That little coloured spot did me unspeakable good.

If Schiele would have been proven to have behaved illegally,

it would have ruined his career, very probably.

One of his rich collectors paid the lawyer for him.

And it's quite probably that the lawyer talked to the judge,

and they said, "It's a young man.

"He didn't do anything bad until now.

"Let's not ruin his life."

At the hearing, one of my confiscated drawings,

the one that hung in my bedroom, was solemnly burned

over a candle flame by the judge in his robes.

It's inquisition, Middle Ages, castration, hypocrisy.

Go then to the museums and cut up the greatest works of art

into little pieces.

He who denies sex is a filthy person who smears in the lowest way

his own parents who have begotten him.

I think the judge who gave the ruling on his trial

wanted to make an example of him,

that it wasn't OK to produce pornographic work,

and to have this work on display

in places where children could see it, and rightly so.

What you have to realise is that

in early 20th century Vienna,

the age of consent was 14,

and the majority of prostitutes

in Vienna were under the age of consent.

I mean, just think about that for a moment.

This is the society that we are dealing with.

Schiele is not doing anything

out of the norm for that time.

He picked up from where he'd left off remarkably quickly.

The difference is that the bodies were more sexually mature

than before, so that did change his choice of models.

But he still kept on doing the work

that the authorities were so concerned about.

And I think that shows you just how emboldened he felt,

actually, by the trial.

He knew that the trial could, in terms of the market value

of his work, actually play to his favour.

This was work that was even more exciting with the history

of the trial associated with it.

She stuck by him during the prison experience.

And I think that was a crucial moment

in deepening their relationship.

I think that he was profoundly grateful to her loyalty.

And after that, he painted this fantastic pair of portraits

which act as a kind of betrothal.

Not a formal engagement,

but a declaration of a kind of commitment.

They look almost like a medieval married couple's painting.

She has these clear, open eyes, this soft expression in her face.

But you also feel an inner strength which she never loses.

After this existential crisis, Schiele came back to Vienna

and moved into a new studio.

And as fate goes, just on the other side

of the street, there lived the family with the two girls,

and he waved and played and showed himself from the window

from one side of the street to the other side.

Dear Miss, I don't know whether the blonde young lady

or the brunette is the one named Ada.

Both are as wicked as I.

We may not be neighbours for much longer, because I mean to go

to Paris, having received an invitation.

Why not visit me?

I know this would not be considered appropriate,

but I would do you no more harm than your beloved windchimes do.

Please do write to me.

For now, I send greetings to you and your sister,

affectionately, kissing your hand, and...

Egon Schiele.

It wouldn't have been proper for a young man to approach

two such proper bourgeois young women, so the next thing he does is,

he writes a letter to Mrs Harms and says,

"You know, I'd like to take your daughters to the movie,

"and don't worry, my mistress Wally is going to act as chaperone."

Concerning the movies, we approve.

We suggest Monday the 14th at the parkino,

with Wally, of course.

Who will get the tickets?

Best, Adele.

The Harms household was very dull, and this was exciting.

Adele was still alive when I started my Vienna

researches, and so I had many interviews with her.

And she said that Schiele was just a shooting star

of his generation, and that people knew it already.

And no wonder they were flattered when Schiele begged them to go

to the movies with him, with the chaperone,

of course, of Wally.

Are you under house arrest?

How about a little walk together?

Should I...

May I send a drawing of my beloved Edith?

I'll enclose it right here.

Do give a sign when we can take a walk,

sometime around half past five.

Many kisses, Egon.

He was handsome.

He had extraordinary hair, she said.

And then those crazy, stuck-out ears.

He made quite a splash on the street, and it was fun

to be walking with his arm around you.

So, yeah, it was like falling for a rock star.

Dear Egon, I'm so sorry to say that there is no way I can come

to you today.

My cheek is so swollen that I dare not be seen in public.

All that should be over tomorrow, I hope.

Should I visit tomorrow?

Let me know.

But be sure that no-one sees, least of all my mother.

I am so very fond of you.

Edith.

I intended to marry advantageously.

Maybe not Wally.

Schiele wanted to leave the wild, artistic life behind him,

and wanted to build up a serious bourgeois family.

And this choice was Edith and not Wally.

Dear Egon, I am determined not to lose you, come what may.

I want our marriage immaculate from the outset.

I shall demand nothing of you.

I don't want to do that, but at this point,

you can surely see the problem of your friend.

I don't think I'm asking the impossible.

After Egon proposed to Edith, she said to him in no uncertain

terms, you've got to make a clean break.

She wasn't naive about what was going on.

I believe in you.

You stand highest of all for me, and I shall obey you.

I will do, or refrain from doing, whatever you wish,

because I know you would never ask the impossible of me,

namely, to compromise my dignity as a woman.

I am writing almost in darkness, in the water closet.

Please don't let that annoy you, either.

Believe in me as I believe in you and we will be the happiest

creatures on God's earth.

Farewell now.

I love you more than anything in the world.

Your Edith.

Anyone who has ever lived through the end of a relationship

can relate to that painting, because it does encapsulate

that feeling of a dying love.

It is, in my view, a goodbye picture to Wally,

showing very clearly this, we have to break up,

but we cannot leave each other.

So, it's one, I think, one of the greatest

paintings he did.

Dear Gerti, we live in the most daunting times

the world has ever seen.

We have grown used to every kind of deprivation.

Hundreds of thousands of people are perishing miserably.

Everyone living or dying must bear his fate.

We must become hardened and fearless.

Whatever happened before 1914 belongs to a different world.

This is why we shall always look to the future.

Does Wally enlist in the Red Cross out of heartbreak,

or is she an independent woman who is now starting a new life

as a nurse on her own?

We'd love to see her as a new woman and not as a heartbroken,

jilted lover, but the truth is, we don't know.

Dear Anton, deemed fit to report for duty,

in Prague on 21st of June.

Warm regards, Egon Schiele.

I think, without the breaking out of the First World War,

he would not have married so fast.

But when he was drawn into the Army in 1915,

he married very quickly, because when someone was married

and the woman lived in the same town, you were permitted to sleep

in the quarters with your wife and not with your fellow soldiers.

They have two or three days alone in Prague in a hotel,

and then he's off.

My dear Egon, last night, I was too worried about you

to sleep at all.

From Kemmelbach to Weisselburg by night, did you come to any harm?

My dear, lovely Edith, it is all wretched.

I will tell you everything when we are together again.

I'll be happy beyond all words to see you again,

and to know where you are.

With heartfelt kisses, your Egon.

I miss you terribly.

I kiss you a thousand times.

I'm awaiting you impatiently, with innumerable kisses,

your Edith.

Working conditions from 1915 became much more difficult for him.

The Army didn't leave him much time to develop as intensely

as he did before.

Finally, he achieved what had always been his goal,

which was to work for the war press headquarters in Vienna.

From that time on, he's basically got a free ticket

to do whatever he wants.

By 1917-18,

they have settled into the marriage,

for better and for worse.

Whatever I do or don't do, everything is only for him.

For him alone do I live and die.

I think they were truly in love.

He loved her in his way,

but Edith is totally unequipped

to be the mate for someone like Schiele.

Egon had married a prude, after all of these affairs

and doings with women.

So, he had to teach Edith, and Edith was purposefully

a slow learner, I would say.

Edith rarely will strip down to the full nude.

She's, at most, or at least, shall I say,

stripped down to her knickers.

And even there, she looks quite uncomfortable.

She didn't want to be recognised in her husband's nudes,

and you know, she was a proper bourgeois woman,

and she said, you know,

I mean, "OK," you know,

"I'll masturbate for you, but please, please,

"hide my face."

Just at the beginning of 1918, two things happened -

Gustav Klimt died, and there was an important

exhibition at the Secession, where Schiele was given the main

space, and where he sold quite a lot.

And he was considered, at that time, as the main figure

after Klimt's death.

Maybe never before has the excitement of a moment

carried such a compulsive charge.

The amount of interest in new art, it's unbelievable.

No other exhibition of contemporary art or the very latest work

ever attracted so many people.

On the opening day, it was impossible to get in

after noon, there were so many.

And no fewer on Sundays around that time.

More art has been sold than ever before at an exhibition.

Schiele believed in his own talent.

He believed that in other generations, he would be admired

and appreciated for the genius he really was.

Adele would talk about how stubborn Edith could be.

Yes, she was in awe of Egon as an artist,

but other times, she just lost interest,

lost patience in his constant complaining,

or pounding on his own chest - "I am the best of the best."

Today, when I lack for nothing physically,

I am, again and again, psychologically alone.

Egon certainly loves me, but in his own way.

And he does not want to share his thoughts with me.

He makes me stand aside and will not let me take part in the growth

or inception of an idea.

Would it be better if I had a child?

I would then possess a part of him with which I would be allowed

to concern myself.

The thought of a child has not left me since I have become aware

of being pushed aside.

It was an influenza outbreak that was very lethal

and very contagious.

And it is said that by the end of the war,

the Spanish flu killed more people than were killed by the war itself.

By autumn of 1918,

the flu was epidemic in Vienna.

Dear Mother Schiele, Edith caught the Spanish flu

eight days ago yesterday.

Now, she has pneumonia.

She's also six months pregnant.

She's very seriously ill, and her life is in danger.

Already, I prepare for the very worst,

for she now has constant trouble breathing.

Affectionate regards to you and Melanie.

Egon.

We see the development

between 1908 and 1918.

These are ten years, and within this ten years

happened so much.

We are talking like about an old man, but the thing is

that we're talking about an artist that was 28 years old

when he died, so he was at the very beginning

of something that never happened.