Crouching female nude with bended head by Egon Schiele, 1918.
On June 18th, 1915, three days after his wedding, Schiele was conscripted into the Austrian army. Due to his excellence in handwriting, he spent most of the war working as a clerk in a POW camp. He continued to draw, encouraged by his commanding officer.
Despite avoiding action on the front lines, Schiele did not survive to see the Armistice. His wife, six months pregnant, fell victim to the Spanish Influenza pandemic on Oct. 28th, 1918. Schiele, who had also contracted the disease, capitulated three days later. He was 28.
One hundred years after his death, Schiele is categorized with a group of erotic artists that includes one of his mentors, Gustav Klimt. I’m not sure that’s the right place for Schiele, as although his major works have sexual themes, they are often grotesque.
In 1912, Schiele was arrested for seducing a girl under the age of consent. He was ultimately convicted on a lesser charge of showing pornography to a child. He may also have initiated an incestuous relationship with his sister, Gerti, when she was 12. On at least one occasion, he was forced to move out of town due to suspicions he had molested teenage girls posing for him.
Whereas Klimt unabashedly celebrated eroticism, I think Schiele had a much darker perspective on sexuality. Although there can be beauty in brutality, Schiele’s work is tinged by a sense of repulsion, perhaps self-directed.
The gap of time does not allow for confirmation or rejection of the rumours surrounding Schiele, The art he left behind, however, has a distorted and delinquent quality (for example, the portrayal of the genitals of the redheaded model, above) which–and mine is a minority opinion–isn’t so sexy.
In 1918, Josep Pla was studying law at the University of Barcelona when the disease known as Spanish Influenza broke out. The university closed in the middle of the semester and Pla returned to his family home in Palafrugell, the small city in the Mediterranean Costa Brava where he had been born. At this point, Pla began keeping the diary that would become The Gray Notebook(translated by Peter Bush for NYRB). The very first entry mentions the influenza, his return to Costa Brava, and his innocent first days back home:
8 March. There is so much influenza about that they’ve had to shut the university. My brother and I have been at home in Palafrugell ever since. We are a couple of idle students. I only see my brother at mealtimes; he is a very keen football player—despite breaking an arm and a leg on the pitch. He leads his life. I do what I can. I don’t miss Barcelona, let alone the university. I like small-town life here with my friends.
Later entries about the flu are much less carefree. Over the course of the outbreak, an estimated 250k+ people died in Spain alone, and by the following fall, Pla and his family were attending funeral after funeral. His description of taking the train home after one such funeral, written on October 18, 1918, is particularly haunting:
The small train takes us home in the evening, in the dim, murky carriage light. The engine sputters despairingly and sparks fly up from the chimney. The train is full. People sit in subdued silence. Those coming from market imitate those who’ve been to the funeral. If one imagines a train full of thinkers, this would be it. The brims of our hats cast shadows over our faces. What are we thinking? Nothing at all, I expect. The drama derives from the fact that there is so much here we cannot understand—so much that it renders the mechanics of our minds quite useless.
In an entry February 21, 1919, after Pla has returned to Barcelona, he remarks on the eerie quiet that has fallen over the city:
Barcelona is remarkable tonight. Everything has been plunged into darkness. It is so astonishing it is literally beyond words. The silence is what’s most striking—the deep, deep silence. You can hear neither the distant wail of vessels setting sail nor distant trains. Nothing at all. It’s like living under the heaviest slab of lead.
Pla was ill at this time himself, but thankfully he recovered, much to his father’s surprise, as recorded in an entry from February 25, 1919:
My father, who has just arrived from Palafrugell, thinking he will find me on my sickbed, is shocked to see me reading when he walks into my bedroom. We talk at length.
Just one more glance at your lips before I take the fall.
—
Guys, I just want it to be acknowledged that this powerhouse of a woman DREW this.
Si,
My Dear
My Love
My Heartache….
I know how much you feel you are missing the community right now due to studies…. But let me tell you that you are the illumination to this damn community. You supply gold and thought and genius when time is not on your side to do it.
