Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
was putting together his theories on Eros and the unconscious, Schiele was capturing the
erotic on canvas, often taking death and lust as his explicit themes.
He had come a long way from the conservative, idyllic Tulln countryside - a little too
far, some thought. In 1912 Schiele was held in custody for three weeks and later found
guilty of corrupting minors by exposing them to pornography. His arrest and imprison-
ment were the culmination of a series of events that saw the painter and his 17-year-old
lover and model 'Wally' Neuzil flee the Vienna scene and move to Bohemia (Ćesky
Krumlov in the Czech Republic), from where the two soon fled again. Today the Tulln
museum dedicated to Schiele has a reconstruction of the prison cell near St Pölton where
he was imprisoned.
Oskar Kokoschka
Like Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, the second of the great Austrian expressionists, was born
on the Danube River. Kokoschka comes from Pochlarn, near Melk. Like Klimt, he stud-
ied at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) in Vienna. Like Schiele, he was
strongly influenced by Klimt, but another of his influences was Dutch post- Impressionist
Vincent van Gogh. From 1907 he worked in the Wiener Werkstatte (Vienna Workshop).
His earliest work had features of the Secession and art nouveau movements, but later he
moved into expressionism. The Österreichische Galerie in Schloss Belvedere (Oberes
Belvedere) has a collection of about a dozen of his oil paintings; some of these portraits
highlight Kokoschka's skill for depicting the subject's unsettled psyche without in any
way resorting to bleak colours.
Kokoschka's long life was punctuated by exile and travel. He moved to Prague in 1934
to escape the extreme right-wing politics of the day; once the Nazis came to power and
declared his works 'degenerate' in 1937, seizing over 400 of them in German museums,
Kokoschka packed his bags for Britain and became a UK citizen.
If Kokoschka was 'degenerate' and shocked the Nazis, it was a good thing the 'brown'
men and women of the Thousand Year Reich were not around to see what would come
later. It was called Viennese Actionism - and now even the mainstream art establishment
was being sent into a state of shock.
The Habsburgs were avid supporters of the arts, commissioning fresco painters to lend colourful texture
and new dimensions to their buildings and using music as an expression of their own power and pomp.
