Views of Egon Schiele: Symposium at the Leopold Museum

12.11.2019

With lectures by Eric Kandel, Gemma Blackshaw, Elisabeth von Samsonow, and others

Vienna (OTS) – On Sunday, the Director of the Leopold Museum Hans-Peter Wipplinger and Verena Gamper, head of the Egon Schiele Documentation Center at the Leopold Museum, hosted the third symposium dedicated to Egon Schiele. During the all-day event, renowned Austrian and international speakers approached the work of Egon Schiele from various perspectives.

The event began with a lecture entitled “The Age of Insight: The Origins of Modernist Thought” delivered by the Nobel laurate in medicine Eric Kandel. The internationally renowned neuroscientist is a professor at Columbia University in New York as well as a senior scientist of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research is dedicated to human recollection and memory. Kandel, who fled from National Socialist terror to the US as a child, was named an honorary citizen of Vienna already ten years ago. Now, in the days leading up to the symposium, he was presented by Vienna’s Mayor Michael Ludwig with the award “Goldener Rathausmann”, received the highest distinction from Vienna’s Medical Chamber – the “Grand Decoration of Honor with Sash” – and was celebrated by Vienna University and the Medical University of Vienna on the occasion of his 90th birthday. In his book “The Age of Insight”, Kandel investigates pioneers of science, medicine and art in Vienna around 1900 who would go on to shape the understanding of the nature of man, among them Sigmund Freud and Arthur Schnitzler, as well as Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele.

Gemma Blackshaw, art historian, curator and senior tutor at the Royal College of Art in London, afforded insights into her current research in her lecture entitled “Egon Schiele’s Clinical Modernism”. Blackshaw, whose area of expertise is modern Viennese portrait art and figurative art with a special emphasis on intersections with the visual, institutional and therapeutic framework of modern medicine, focused in her lecture on the connection between clinical medicine and modern figurative art. Based on Egon Schiele’s 1910 series of studies of pregnant women, executed at the 2nd Gynecological Hospital of the General Hospital of Vienna University, and on his portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff, the assistant to the clinic’s director, she illustrated Schiele’s “clinical modernism” and the links between the, at the time, progressive facilities and Schiele’s depictions of the female body as objects of medicine.

The artist and philosopher Elisabeth von Samsonow has been exploring Schiele since 2009 through her research in the context of Anton Peschka junior’s estate. In her lecture “Archeology and Mineralogy – Egon Schiele’s Productive Study of Moriz Hoernes and Wilhelm Worringer”, Samsonow investigated how Schiele translated the writings and illustrations he found in the publications of the prehistoric scholar Moriz Hoernes as well as in mineralogical textbooks, which form part of the estate, into modern visual concepts. A professor of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, Samsonow drew connections between Schiele’s collection of minerals, his books on minerals and his cityscapes, which appear as if mineralized, and illustrated how Schiele reacted in his work to ground-breaking archeological discoveries, such as the Venus of Willendorf in 1908.

In his lecture “Icon Schiele”, the former professor of art history and head of the Collection and Archive of the University of Applied Arts Vienna Patrick Werkner addressed works in which the artist placed himself in the proximity of holiness. Werkner focused especially on Schiele’s self-stagings in the photographs of Anton Josef Trčka. In his photograph taken in front of Schiele’s 1913 painting Encounter, Trčka juxtaposed Schiele’s profound and symbolic painting of that period with the artist’s “real” person in a contradictory manner.

Verena Gamper, curator and head of the Egon Schiele Documentation Center at the Leopold Museum, focused in her lecture “’Exhibiting is Indispensable Today.’ – Schiele and the Exhibition Medium” on this extended space for stagings, and analyzed the artist’s thoughts on presentation contexts, marketing, as well as image and opinion forming based on his exhibition activities until 1915. She investigated the role played by autographs, exhibition catalogues and reviews in order to close gaps in the current state of research, and looked at structural parameters, such as juries, censorship and availability, that impacted on the selection of works to be exhibited. Gamper outlined Schiele’s transition from his adolescent enthusiasm for exhibitions at the beginning of his career, to his relative delegation of exhibition agendas to Arthur Roessler and Hans Goltz during the intense prewar years, all the way to his emancipation and positioning as a confident strategist.

Finally, Stefanie Jahn, Agathe Boruszczak and Sandra Maria Dzialek presented new insights into Schiele paintings from the collections of the Belvedere and the Leopold Museum from an art restorer’s perspective.

Stefanie Jahn, head of the department of restoration at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna, dedicated her lecture to the systematic investigation, carried out in 2017, of 16 paintings created between 1907 and 1918 from the collection of the Belvedere with a view to Egon Schiele’s painting technique. This investigation revealed that the artist attached almost equal importance to all materials – it was only in the individual interplay of support, priming, compositional lines and colors that he developed the depiction and invested his works with characteristic traits.

Agathe Boruszczak, art restorer at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna, demonstrated in her presentation entitled “The Genesis of a Play of Colors: Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, Edith Schiele” how it has been possible through digital image manipulation programs to approximate the work’s original appearance at the time it was acquired in 1918 by the Österreichische Staatsgalerie, before it was reworked by Schiele, evidently at the request of the Saatsgalerie’s then director Franz Martin Haberditzl.

Sandra Maria Dzialek, art restorer at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, illustrated the artist’s form finding before and during the painting process from a technical perspective based on the large-scale work Hermits. Linear design media, such as underdrawing, scoring of the paint layer and areas of pastose paint layers, shed light on thematic aspects of the work as well as on the work’s continuous development.

Link to photographs of the event, © Leopold Museum, Vienna/photographer: Nadine Bargad: https://we.tl/t-Ujq3UkYygb

The 3rd Egon Schiele Symposium was attended by some 210 guests, including Denise Kandel, the curator and collector Diethard Leopold with Waltraud Leopold, the professor at the University of British Columbia William Rees with Elisabeth Rees, the historian, archaeologist and museum director Helmut Swozilek, Christian Bauer, Landesgalerie Niederösterreich, Franz Smola, Belvedere, Theresa Feilacher, Land NÖ, Gerbert Frodl, art historian and former director of the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere with art historian Marianne Frodl, Andrea Fürst, Hundertwasser Foundation, Heidrun-Ulrike Wenzel, Egon Schiele Museum Tulln, Museum Niederösterreich, Alexandra Sattler, Kunstmeile Krems, art and contemporary historian Sophie Lillie, Katharina Husslein, Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art, the gallery owner Alois Wienerroither, the artist Bernadette Huber, the journalist Hedwig Kainberger, the curator and journalist Alexandra Matzner, and many others.

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