Egon Schiele's Hairs - Esther

Yes, plural.

There were a lot of them both in his works & in reality. Throughout his life he was blessed with a remarkable, often unruly abundance. In his art, it was everywhere.  Wherever hairs existed he’d include them. & I mean wherever.

Egon's amazing head of hair

Sometimes the hairs are an indicator of a broader mood or atmosphere – dark & aggressively applied through light & wispy to revealing weakness & vulnerability. When he makes a sketch, the hairs might be scribbly or a solid block of colour but what he has rendered looks exactly like hair. Eyebrows might be a pair of looped lines. They’re still eyebrows.

It’s difficult to imagine him applying these lines. When faced with some of the incredibly bold, almost gestural drawings he created, I struggle to picture him thinking, “Oh wait. Needs more fluff,” & delicately scratch on a few tufts here - & frankly – there.

If I’m thinking of Egon’s work, I’m thinking of the The Whole. Much of it is expressionist & I visualise an entire piece at once. I think this is a good place to start because a lot of it is tied into emotion or tension. If you’re not familiar with his work, I suggest a quick search & have a look, just a glance. If you know him well, fire ahead.

I’ll wait.

If you’ve gone & come back, you’re quite likely to have seen a clear, even recognisable style. You will have seen figures, portraits, perhaps the odd boat, townscape, a mixture of drawings & paintings, even florals. Maybe you find the content challenging. Maybe you don’t like what you see or maybe he’s your new favourite artist. You might have seen large blocks of colour, defiant stares, strained limbs, elongated digits, nakedness in wild positions.

I’d hope you’d be impressed with the accomplishment in the sweep of a single line. It would be nice if you found him interesting at the very least. Since you’ve read the above, perhaps you’ve been looking for the hairs.

Eyelashes, underarms, eyebrows, head, legs, chest, pubic, beards, moustaches. All included & only sometimes with much fuss. There’s no way that someone that tinkers around with his own signature so often hasn’t thought about every aspect of what he’s doing, so when it’s sketchy, it’s sketchy for a reason. He was even the type to adopt several different styles of handwriting, all of them beautiful & distinctive - & even more controlled than his drawn lines. None of it’s happening by accident.

Hair everywhere

Egon’s figures were some of the first examples of fine art I liked without being able to explain why. Within his twenty-eight years he was phenomenally prolific & accomplished but I still struggle to tell you why his works do it for me. The figures were often deeply unattractive in their stretched-out contortions yet I wanted to keep looking at them. In that sense they remind me of the exaggerated features in Connie Jude’s illustrations for The Jam’s This is the Modern World album. There can exist profound beauty in apparent ugliness. This is a valuable message I was fortunate to grasp early in life since it has informed many of my cultural interests & indeed my own art.

Connie Jude illustrations

Many other people are Schiele enthusiasts nowadays but a short life, the interminable nudes & a couple of scandals help fuel a dumbed-down, often sensationalist approach, as if his oeuvre boils down to a few external factors & little or no interior life. He inspires online lists & articles that begin “10 Things You Didn’t Know…” (I invariably did), “21 Facts About…”, “Schiele-Inspired…” (generally involving the human form, photography & body paint) & there’s even “Egon Schiele in 60 Seconds.” It’s all a bit depressing & you have to rise above it.

Egon’s humans (frequently himself) were often so awkward & ferocious that you might barely notice the individual that existed behind the emotion, so keen was he to tell you what he felt. At times, it’s almost a dance - the human body as a receptacle for pure expression. Egon’s work & that of Francis Bacon often appear as if stills from an elaborate performance. Francis however disfigures, strips away the detail, blurs the lines. His pictures are unsettling & they move.

Frances Bacon detail

But with Egon the pose isn’t always what makes the image visceral & uncomfortable. The sensual is often in the details. We say “the devil is in the detail” thus Egon’s details help you smell the image, taste the air in the room. Details such as hairs. His prison self-portraits seem to me to be his most self-pitying & defenceless, in part because of the bodily contortions & facial expressions but also because his head is shaved. He’s a twentieth century Samson.

Egon's prison self-portraits

I imagine most if not all people approach an artwork in a similar way. We look & take in the entirety, sum up The Whole. & if we are interested in what we see, we delve deeper into the work, cast our eyes over the details. We notice. Perhaps that’s enough or perhaps we search for meaning. As humans, we try to make sense. Order is satisfying & often comforting.

Whether or not we see or accept the meaning in Egon’s figures, the details are often overlooked despite rooting the work in reality. If you go back & look him up again, you can try checking off my list of details. Maybe you’ll find some of your own:

toenails, fingernails, window, navels, knuckles, the fact that his mother looks exactly like him, nipples, ties, buttons, roof tiles, lace, flowers, ruffles, patterns, highlights in eyes, ribs, hips, hat bands, washing lines, belts, cuffs, eyelids, decorations, twigs, collars, lips, pillows, wrinkles in hands, clothes & faces, leaves, stocking positions, clavicles, teeth, shoe heels, facial lines, rouge, stripes, stained glass windows, ribbons, suprasternal notches, cushions, pockets, HAIRS.

 

Collage of some of Egon's beautiful handwriting styles between 1910 & 1916

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