A different essay this week, and a shared one: written with my friend Floris van Doorn. In truth, it is not an essay at all.
It is a diary Egon Schiele never kept: three entries, eight years apart, invented in the key of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.
The frame is fiction; everything standing inside it is real. The dates, the paintings, the mirror, the orange in the prison cell: all of it checked against the record.
21-01-1910
Just returned to my studio after visiting my mother; she seemed ill, possibly from worry; money again, I think. She will not say. My studio looks at the back wall of Schönbrunn. A palace outside the window, and my room is small.
Klimt came by this morning; he wants to trade drawings again, several of mine for one of his, and when I asked him why, he said only that I draw better than he does. I don’t really know what he sees in them; my style is so dramatically different, so much less perfect, harmonious, ‘sacred’. But the fact he likes it is promising. Only I don’t. I’m obsessed with painting myself like I am; I try to paint myself the way I view myself, and yet I fail, over and over.
After I came home, I saw my mother’s tall mirror standing in front of me. It was hers once; it is the one thing of hers I keep. A man looked me in the eyes; I tried to evade him, but I couldn’t. I put the mirror on my studio floor, sat with my back against the wall and looked at myself. The body in the mirror looks scrawny; every piece of it is so terrifyingly angular; the hair looks dirty, and its skin looks disgusting. I stripped down until I was naked; the clothes hindered me from looking more closely at my body. The mirror showed me a chest that never developed, ribs I could count from across the room.
Maybe if I twisted the body, it would look more like myself. I stood up and bent my back toward the mirror, keeping my head where it was. The pose gave me nothing. The bones were more visible this way; that felt more like me. I still don’t feel at home; I feel like I’m crammed into the bones of a stranger. Whenever I try to make this scrawny machinery mine, it rejects me, and the moment I try to transcend it, it doesn’t let me go.
I got up, ran towards the mirror and looked deep into the eyes of the man before me. I couldn’t recognise him; the only appealing part was who I saw behind those eyes. I shouldn’t feel this way. The rage came up in me all at once. I grabbed the wide mirror and threw it down. It went into dozens of pieces. Shocked at what I had just done, I looked down at the glass on the floor. I saw fragments of my body in the glass splinters; my entire body looked distorted, and the proportions had changed. Not only was the mirror fragmented; my body seemed to be broken down as well. A strange sense of recognition went through me; I liked the distorted picture better.
The two who stay two
10-04-1915
That total merge, a fusion of two beings, until my soul is indistinguishable from yours. Why couldn’t we get that close, Wally? Every time I imagine it, I long to be not so alone anymore, to be together. But we aren’t together, no matter how hard you cling to me, how many portraits I paint of you, how many poems I dedicate to you; we still are our two separate people.
I wish I could forget myself, to drown in you and you to drown in me; you don’t understand me until you have been me, and you haven’t; you can’t. You’re just as crooked, unreasonable and malformed as I am; if someone would offer that perfect transcendence of two spirits, it would be you and yet I am still holding on to another person.
At some moments I don’t even know your thoughts; I have to guess what you think. Sometimes even I have to guess how you feel. Well, that’s a lie; I have to guess very often, and I’m more often wrong than right, but luckily enough you still put up with me, and where would I be without you. Three springs ago you brought oranges to my cell; I drew one on the blanket and wrote that the one orange was the only light. It is still the truest caption I ever wrote.
Sometimes I even think you're ugly; it’s just that you’re ugly exactly in the way that I am. I feel more in love with you whenever I see that ugly side; it reminds me that you are, at the end of the day, secretly the same as me.
Maybe it’s impossible; we live in a physical world, we’re physical creatures, maybe we will never be together as in my imagination. But Wally, if I didn’t want this, I couldn’t keep living; I need to at least be able to long for it. Even if science proved it impossible, I would keep trying and keep begging.
I would hold onto you even if it kills me, even if it would only exist inside my mind; I wouldn’t let it die, I wouldn’t let go. Sometimes, in my dreams, I’m so close, so close to believing we are together, that we both come from the same stars and have reunited as one. The big canvas in the studio is of us, a man and a maiden, entwined; I cannot finish the faces.
I am delusional, and I am fully aware of that. I’m not reasonable; maybe I’m evil; maybe I’m actually abusing you by keeping you in this dream, this nightmare. This dream won’t go anywhere; it’s unproductive, it’s silly. I’m not engaged with anything in the world, except this far-away dream, this precious dream. I understand you don’t want anything to do with me anymore; I’m probably a dead man to you, Wally. Maybe that’s for the better. Would a dead man mean anything to you?
The Borrowed Family
30-10-1918
Edith is dead. I write it down because I don’t believe it yet; maybe if it stands on a piece of paper in my own scribbled handwriting, it will become true. She died the day before yesterday, in the morning, in her parents’ flat, across the street from my old studio. She was six months pregnant.
I drew her while she was dying, black chalk on brown paper. I don’t know why my hand did that; it just kept drawing, as it belonged to someone else, as it has always belonged to someone else. I think that was the last drawing. I feel it very clearly, and I am not even sad. That frightens me. I am angry that I am not sad.
I keep asking why. Why not me? I used to claim I prayed for my own death. But Edith now, and Klimt in February instead. Also then, I went down to the morgue and drew his dead face three times; they had shaved him off; they had shaved my friend away. They took the face I knew, and left me a stranger to draw. In March the Secession gave me the big hall, nineteen paintings; the paintings brought almost sixteen thousand kronen, and people who never used to greet me now wave, and demand my smile in return. I thought it arrived, the life, the real one, the ordinary one everyone else seems to simply have.
In the studio stands the painting of the family. A man, a woman, a child. The man is me. The woman is not Edith; Edith never wanted to sit naked, so I hired a model. I painted the child later, over a bouquet of flowers; my little nephew sat for it. I look at the picture now, and I finally conceive what I made. A borrowed family, put together out of strangers and flowers, out of the scraps of life I still had around me. Because that is what I do, that is all I have ever done, I paint the wanting.
Wally, you never answered my question. You couldn’t; you were in Dalmatia nursing soldiers, and you died there in December. I heard it much later, from others, the way one hears about a stranger. So now it doesn’t matter anymore which of us was the dead one.
The fever is in me too; I feel it coming up slowly like someone climbing the stairs. And here is the strange thing I want to write about while I can still hold this pen. I am not afraid the way I always thought I would be. My whole life I wanted three things. To be at home in this body, and the body refused me; I stood in front of the mirror, and it refused me every single time. To be one being with another person, and we stayed two; whatever we did, we stayed two. And to have an ordinary life, wife, child, table, and this I only managed to paint. Three wants, not one of them ever arrived, and still I wouldn’t give back a single day of the wanting, because the wanting, the mere wanting, was the only thing that was ever completely mine.
The child would have come in the spring. I would have shown it how to hold a pencil.
There, you see, I am doing it again. I am painting what isn’t there.
it’s art is free: one essay a week, when something is worth saying. This one was written with Floris van Doorn.
Klimt’s Sketches: The self-portrait he said he never made.
Morning, Vienna, in the last years of the empire. At the end of a garden where the grass grows as it pleases, a low studio hides behind f…
I’ve always loved Schiele’s work, especially his extraordinary line quality. As an artist who works directly with the body through body prints, I’m fascinated by his struggle to recognize himself in his own physical form. The body can be both intimately ours and strangely foreign...
In my own practice, I’m interested in what happens when the body leaves an imprint behind, what remains, what disappears, and what we project onto that trace. “I paint the wanting” resonates for sure. Sometimes we aren’t simply making images of the body. We’re trying to understand what it means to inhabit one.
I had never heard of Egon Schiele’s story before, but this was such an interesting and moving introduction to his life and work. I really enjoyed the diary format—it made the story feel very personal and brought his paintings to life in a completely different way.