"Self-portrait masturbating"
(Egon Schiele)
"Self-portrait with two whores"
(George Grosz)
”No erotic work of art is filth if it is artistically significant; it is only turned to filth through the beholder if he is filthy.” (Egon Schiele, 1912)“
Both these works are artistically significant and not pornography. In other words the purpose of both pictures is not to arouse the viewer but to provoke thought. Schiele’s more erotic pictures may be closer to soft pornography but I would emphasise that aesthetic appreciation of the picture is more essential than titillation.
The aptly titled Grosz was, I believe, something of a misanthropist and his self-portrait is a very depressing view of the self and his sexuality. Grosz was a deeply traumatised individual who suffered from shell-shock as a result of active service during the first world war; in fact how could you not be something of a misanthropist if you were German and alive during the reign of the Nazis.
Schiele is more complex but showed great disdain for society hypocrisy towards expressing your deepest inner self sexuality at a time when prostitution was rife in Austria. Schiele embarked on more than one incursion into sexual depravity and was obsessed with death. Very often his sickly, weak body is redolent of a corpse and his eyes look like the black pools of the dead. Schiele’s father died of syphilis contracted before marriage and the artist died at the early age of twenty eight from influenza. It may be the case that Schiele had in fact always been living with the death sentence of hereditary syphilis which can be asymptomatic. This would have weakened his immune system and may have had a profoundly disturbing effect on how he viewed everything including physical love.
I once saw a child of about eleven or twelve in a Salvador favella who other kids were regarding with morbid fascination. His face was that of a diseased old man and his expression carried the apprehension of someone who knew he was about to die. Most people who are on the threshold between life and death know that they are dieing and this must alter every natural pleasure. In Schiele’s case he may have subconsciously been aware of this and, had he been carrying syphilis, that he was death to other people as well, which is perhaps evident in his disturbing work “Death and the Maiden.”
(Prompted by “Egon Schiele” – Tim Marlow – excellent and essential reading if you are interested in Expressionism)