Double Schiele News: Leopold Museum Publishes Conference Volumes on 3rd and 4th Egon Schiele Symposium
30.11.2022
Last year, the Leopold Museum hosted the fourth Egon Schiele Symposium – an event dedicated to Schiele research initiated by the Leopold Museum’s Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger and Verena Gamper, Head of the Leopold Museum Research Center. The symposia provide the most important regular platform for the presentation of scientific findings and research results on the eminent Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele (1890–1918). Preparations for the 5th Egon Schiele Symposium, to be held in late autumn 2023, are already under way.
The 3rd Egon Schiele Symposium, which took place in November 2019, was followed by the 4th Egon Schiele Symposium in December 2021, which due to COVID was realized as an online event. The conference volumes on the third and fourth Schiele Symposium are available as of now at the Leopold Museum Shop.
Dialogue and Staging is the title of the publication accompanying the 3rd Egon Schiele Symposium. It refers to the emphases of the conference held on 10th November 2019 at the Leopold Museum. The event focused on the dialogue between medicine and art of Viennese Modernism as well as on Egon Schiele’s various approaches to his self-stagings. The symposium further featured new research findings from the field of art conservation. The conference volume on the 4th Egon Schiele Symposium highlights Milieus and Perspectives. The contributions range from research into Schiele’s early exhibition activities, via the examination of Egon Schiele’s artistic milieu – based on Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele’s joint participations in important art exhibitions – and Schiele’s relationship with the scintillating artist personality Erwin Osen, all the way to a genealogy of Egon Schiele’s death masks.
“We are greatly indebted to all the speakers at the third and fourth Egon Schiele Symposium whose insightful contributions are now available to everyone in these two new, extensive and richly illustrated scientific publications. We would also like to thank all the participants in the symposia who followed the great range of scientific discoveries on site or online with keen interest, as well as the team of the Leopold Museum for their support with organizing and realizing these events and the accompanying publications. The conferences are strong indicators of the vitality and relevance of the scientific discourse on the exceptional artist Egon Schiele and the attainments of Viennese Modernism.”
Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum
“The third and fourth Egon Schiele Symposium, whose findings are now available in two conference volumes, were aimed at highlighting the diversity of approaches to Egon Schiele through a wide range of perspectives. The variety of different points of contact shows the vitality of Schiele’s oeuvre which we are committed to preserving and researching through our scientific work.”
Verena Gamper, Head of the Leopold Museum Research Center
The contributions to the 3rd Egon Schiele Symposium
For the 3rd Egon Schiele Symposium, we were fortunate enough to enlist the Vienna-born Nobel laureate Eric R. Kandel as keynote speaker. In his address The Age of Insight – The Origins of Modernist Thought, the renowned neuroscientist and author of the standard reference work The Age of Insight – The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present built upon his outstanding research results on the unique entanglement of science and art in “Vienna around 1900”. Gemma Blackshaw of the Royal College of Art spoke about “Clinical Modernism” – the intertwining of clinical medicine and modern figurative art. She illustrated this through Egon Schiele’s connection with the gynecologist Erwin von Graff, who was portrayed by Schiele, which resulted in a series of drastic studies of pregnant women and newborns. The philosopher and artist Elisabeth von Samsonow analyzed the influence that the publications by the Viennese prehistorian Moriz Hoernes and the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer had on Schiele, documenting the various prehistoric motifs that entered into the artist’s work. Based on the now lost work Encounter, the art historian Patrick Werkner explored Schiele’s self-iconization through sacral aggrandizement, for instance through his practice of creating (self-)portraits with halos. The Leopold Museum’s curator Verena Gamper investigated Schiele’s exhibition activities in view of the importance of the exhibition as an extended staging space and an opportunity for commercial exploitation, image building and opinion making. Stefanie Jahn, Head of the Department of Conservation and Restoration of the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, presented her analysis into the 16 Schiele paintings comprised in the Belvedere’s collection. Her colleague Agathe Boruszczak, who also works as an art restorer at the Belvedere, traced the genesis of Schiele’s portrait of his wife Edith. Sandra Maria Dzialek, Head of the Leopold Museum’s Art Conservation Department, presented the findings of the radio-diagnostic and material-technological analyses of Schiele’s masterpiece Hermits.
The contributions to the 4th Egon Schiele Symposium
The 4th Egon Schiele Symposium opened with Belvedere curator Franz Smola’s investigation into Schiele’s painting Current of Youth which was believed to be lost and which the artist presented at his exhibition debut at the Internationale Kunstschau Wien 1909. Smola demonstrated that the work is, in fact, the painting long known as Danae. Sandra Tretter, Deputy Director of the Klimt Foundation, outlined the artistic points of contact between Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt based on their joint exhibition participations, from the Internationale Kunstschau Wien 1909 to the Wiener Kunstschau 1916 held at the Berlin Secession. The collector Elisabeth Leopold dedicated her lecture to Gustav Klimt’s Faculty Paintings and their great influence on Schiele’s oeuvre. Albertina curator Elisabeth Dutz afforded insights into Max Wagner’s Egon Schiele Archives and reconstructed the genealogy of Egon Schiele’s death masks. The Head of the Leopold Museum’s Research Center Verena Gamper focused on the entanglement of art and clinic based on the discovery and acquisition of a series of patient drawings created by Schiele’s fellow artist Erwin Osen at Vienna’s 2nd Garrison Hospital, juxtaposing these depictions with Schiele’s drawings of pregnant women and newborns executed during his visits to Vienna’s 2nd Women’s Clinic. Christian Bauer, curator of the Egon Schiele Museum in Tulln, the artist’s home town, shone the spotlight on the phenomenon that was the multi-facetted artist personality Erwin Osen, who crossed paths with Egon Schiele. Jane Kallir, renowned Schiele expert and President of the Kallir Research Institute New York, which in 2021 first acted as cooperation partner to the symposium, researched Schiele’s friendships with Max Oppenheimer, Erwin Osen and Willy Lidl, which brought the artist into contact with the homosexual subculture of the time. The art historian Gemma Blackshaw and the architectural historian Adam Kaasa of the London Royal College of Art approached Erwin Osen’s portrait Lustknabe through an epistolary dialogue based on feminist and queer theory. The fourth Schiele Symposium also touched upon questions of art conservation. The Wien Museum’s art restorer Karin Maierhofer outlined her latest findings on Egon Schiele’s painting Young Mother and highlighted interesting differences between an early and the final version of the painting. Sandra Maria Dzialek, Head of the Leopold Museum’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, presented her art-technological examination of the 13 townscapes by Schiele comprised in the collection of the Leopold Museum, including the discovery of the work Melancholia, which was believed to be lost but actually hides underneath the work Krumau on the Vltava (“The Small Town” IV).
The conference volumes on the third and fourth Egon Schiele Symposium:
Egon Schiele. Dialogue and Staging. 3rd Egon Schiele Symposium at the Leopold Museum
Conference volume on the 3rd Egon Schiele Symposium at the Leopold Museum
10th November 2019
Editors: Verena Gamper, Hans-Peter Wipplinger
Authors: Gemma Blackshaw, Agathe Boruszczak, Sandra Maria Dzialek, Verena Gamper, Stefanie Jahn, Eric Kandel, Elisabeth von Samsonow, Patrick Werkner, Hans-Peter Wipplinger
Publishers: Leopold Museum-Privatstiftung, Vienna 2022
19 x 24 cm, 144 pages, approx. 110 illustrations, ISBN 978-3-9504888-3-8
Sales price: EUR 14.90 – Available at the Leopold Museum Shop
Egon Schiele. Milieus and Perspectives. 4th Egon Schiele Symposium at the Leopold Museum
Conference volume on the 4th Egon Schiele Symposium at the Leopold Museum
3rd December 2021
Editors: Verena Gamper, Hans-Peter Wipplinger
Authors: Christian Bauer, Gemma Blackshaw, Elisabeth Dutz, Sandra Maria Dzialek, Verena Gamper, Adam Kaasa, Jane Kallir, Elisabeth Leopold, Karin Maierhofer, Franz Smola, Sandra Tretter, Hans-Peter Wipplinger
Publishers: Leopold Museum-Privatstiftung, Vienna 2022
19 x 24 cm, 176 pages, approx. 140 illustrations, ISBN 978-3-9505185-3-5
Sales price: EUR 14.90 – Available at the Leopold Museum Shop
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