4th Egon Schiele Symposium at the Leopold Museum
07.12.2021
With lectures by Christian Bauer, Gemma Blackshaw, Verena Gamper, Adam Kaasa, Jane Kallir, Elisabeth Leopold and others
On 3rd December, the Director of the Leopold Museum, Hans-Peter Wipplinger, and Verena Gamper, Head of the Leopold Museum’s Research Center, hosted the 4th symposium dedicated to Egon Schiele. Due to the current lockdown, the all-day symposium was held as an online event that was accessible for free via a streaming link.
“Egon Schiele is now such a familiar name that it has become almost imperative to keep reappraising his art and to look at it from different perspectives. With the 4th Egon Schiele Symposium, the Leopold Museum is once again intending to do just that. As with past editions, this year’s event, too, features eminent lecturers from Austria and abroad who have approached the artist’s work and activities from various angles.”
Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum
“With their views of Schiele, the lecturers cover a wide variety of topics, ranging from the reconstruction of his participations in historic exhibitions via the point of intersection between art and medicine, Schiele’s exploration of artists including Gustav Klimt and Erwin Osen, all the way to the latest material-technological findings. This pluralism of approaches is testament to the vitality of Schiele’s oeuvre which we feel obliged to highlight through our scientific and curatorial work at the Leopold Museum.”
Verena Gamper, curator | Head of the Leopold Museum’s Research Center
The interactive event was attended by around 230 people. The lectures can still be watched until 12th December 2021 via the website of the Leopold Museum. With simultaneous interpretations of the lectures being offered in German and English – the respective audio channel could be selected in the live stream – the symposium reached an international audience.
Franz Smola, curator at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna, delivered the first lecture entitled “Egon Schiele’s Painting Jugendströmung – New Findings about Schiele’s Participation in the 1909 International Kunstschau Vienna”. Smola investigated which works by Schiele were actually shown in this first presentation of the artist’s work in Vienna, which was only sparsely documented with photographs. In the course of his research, Smola was able to prove the identity of a work that was believed to be lost: Known under the title Danae (1909), the work was in fact the painting with the original title Jugendströmung (1909) which today forms part of the Lewis Collection.
Sandra Tretter, Deputy Director of the Klimt Foundation in Vienna, derived the impetus for her presentation from the fact that both the collections of the Klimt Foundation and of the Leopold Museum feature exhibition catalogues from the Vienna Kunstschau held in Berlin in 1916 which, owing to errors in the printed picture captions, contain handwritten corrections by Egon Schiele. Tretter outlined Klimt and Schiele’s shared exhibition participations, exploring them by means of extant correspondence, press reviews from Austrian and German newspapers and various archival materials. She retraced points of contact between the two artists, starting with Klimt’s much-cited role as Schiele’s mentor, via neighboring studios in Vienna to the abrupt deaths of both artist personalities in 1918.
Elisabeth Leopold’s contribution, for which she chose the Schiele quote “I went through Klimt” as a title, focused on the development of the two artists’ careers, on Klimt’s support of the much younger, emerging Schiele, and on their artistic and human connection. In her lecture, Leopold related Schiele’s painting The Hermits (1912) as well as Klimt’s Faculty Paintings – Philosophy (1900-1907), Medicine (1901-1907) and Jurisprudence (1903-1907) – and Beethoven Frieze (1902) to El Greco’s metaphysical manner of painting.
Elisabeth Dutz, curator at the Albertina in Vienna, presented a genealogy of the many extant Schiele death masks as well as many other recent research findings discovered in connection with the current reappraisal of the Albertina’s Egon Schiele Archive. Dutz outlined the history of the archive, which was bequeathed to the Albertina in 1948 by Max Wagner and comprises 1448 inventory numbers, gave an overview of the archive’s contents and objects, and shone the spotlight on several highlights.
Verena Gamper, curator and Head of the Leopold Museum’s Research Center, dedicated her lecture to the key research questions posed by the exhibition The Body Electric. Erwin Osen – Egon Schiele which was shown this year at the Leopold Museum and was curated by her together with Gemma Blackshaw. Reconstructing the background of creation of newly discovered patient depictions by Erwin Osen and contextualizing them with other works by the two artists created in medical institutions, Gamper presented Viennese Modernism as a modernism of the body which was approached from a medical as well as an artistic perspective.
Christian Bauer, curator of the Egon Schiele Museum Tulln and Founding Director of the Landesgalerie Niederösterreich, explored the phenomenon that was Erwin Dominik Osen in his presentation. Retracing the biography of this multi-talented, elusive stage designer, actor, director and painter, he analyzed instances of interactions between his oeuvre and the art of Egon Schiele. Revealing hitherto unpublished sources, documents and works, Bauer painted the multi-faceted portrait of a personality whose charisma is still palpable today.
Jane Kallir, Director of the Kallir Research Institute New York, explored the extent to which Schiele’s Expressionist breakthrough was shaped by his relationships with the gay artist Max Oppenheimer and the likely bisexual Erwin Osen in her lecture “Reconfiguring Gender. Egon Schiele and the Gay Subculture”. Kallir explained that gender norms became more fluid in the early 20th century, while both women and homosexuals began to campaign for their rights. This “feminization” of society was deemed to be a threat. Kallir explored the effect Schiele’s points of contact with Vienna’s homosexual subculture had on his oeuvre and on his approach to the topic of gender identity.
Gemma Blackshaw, art historian and curator, and Adam Kaasa, architectural historian and artist at the Royal College of Art in London, reflected on curating in keeping with the concept of “care” – the meticulous treatment and custody of works, places, people, stories and legacies – in their contribution “’Dear Curator...’: Correspondence as Care for Erwin Osen’s Lustknabe”. Referencing the treatise published by the artist Johanna Hedva in 2016, and based on feminist and queer theories, Blackshaw and Kaasa approached Erwin Osen’s depiction of a patient entitled Lustknabe [Catamite] (1915), which was shown for the first time in the 2021 focus exhibition at the Leopold Museum The Body Electric: Erwin Osen – Egon Schiele curated by Gamper and Blackshaw, in the form of an epistolary dialogue.
The author, curator and literary scholar Stefan Kutzenberger wanted to approach Schiele’s small body of lyrical works from a new perspective. Comprehending Schiele’s verses as scripted pictures, Kutzenberger had planned to cooperate with the San Francisco-based Open Austria Art + Tech Lab in order to feed the algorithm DALL-E, which generates images from pieces of text, with lines from Schiele’s Expressionist poems and to compare the results with the artist’s visual works. However, due to travel restrictions in connection with the pandemic and Elon Musk’s current research focus on the adventure of space travel, the project had to be postponed until next year. Kutzenberger presented the developments so far under the heading “Blue Lady in Green Nature. Pictures from the Text”.
Finally, Sandra Maria Dzialek, art restorer at the Leopold Museum and Karin Maierhofer, art restorer at the Wien Museum, talked about insights into Schiele’s paintings from an art restorer’s perspective. Karin Maierhofer elaborated on the restoration, painting technique, pictorial composition and material esthetics of Egon Schiele’s painting Young Mother (1914), while Sandra Maria Dzialek placed her emphasis on Schiele’s townscapes from the collection of the Leopold Museum. Offering a systematic survey, she gave an overview of the current condition of the works and their technical evolution, from the preparation of the image carrier to the finished painting. Using the painting Krumau on the Vltava (“The Small Town” IV) (1914), she was able to demonstrate that the artist reused his canvases – for underneath the townscape hides the early work Melancholia (1910) which was long thought to be lost.
Further information on the Leopold Museum’s 4th Egon Schiele Symposium with kind support from the Kallir Research Institute, New York:
German: https://www.leopoldmuseum.org/egon-schiele-symposium/de
English: https://www.leopoldmuseum.org/egon-schiele-symposium/en
All lectures are available to watch until 12th Dec. 2021 using the following link:
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