This homage to The Italian Job was part of the New Year’s Day Parade yesterday. But I was on my way to the Austrian job executed by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele at the Royal Academy.
The trouble is my brain is not very retentive so I had forgotten almost everything about both of ’em. I’ve been to a Schiele exhibition in his home town, Česke Krumlov, and a dazzling Klimt show in New York at the Neue Galerie. The RA has an impressive display of drawings by both artists but, if you have seen Klimt’s paintings, his drawings are a pale substitute. In this exhibition Schiele steals the show. Many of his drawings are coloured which comes as a relief after peering at Klimt’s faded work.
Their work is similar; Klimt, twenty-eight years older, inspired Schiele. But Klimt was an established artist winning private and public commissions. Schiele was an outsider – he couldn’t afford to pay models so used young girls and prostitutes. Indeed, although Česke Krumlov is proud of him now, they expelled him for gross moral turpitude in the short time he lived there. His drawings are sexually explicit and must have been shocking to prurient viewers in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; though it is would be absurd today to look at them as pornographic. His draughtmanship is part of the continuum of artists from da Vinci and Rembrandt to Hockney and Emin. I was also reminded of Chaïm Soutine’s portraits that I saw last year at the Courtauld.
It was remiss of me not to mention it at the time, but I spent a day in Berkshire learning to see the aura that we project. On the course it was fairly easy to see the glow but in real life I never pick up any aura. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Schiele calls it “the inner light that shines forth from our bodies”. Here is how he depicts it.
An Austrian redhead called Dora,
Had oodles and oodles of aura,
She got jolly hot,
And sweated a lot
Until Egon Schiele saw her.
In response to your interesting Pugin piece which for some reason is now closed for business. His church in Rylston Road is indeed quite stunning. I have a feeling that in my childhood and youth (as in Shrewsbury School’s Victorian chapel?) there was much over-painting in magnolia of once-colourful neo-Gothic interiors. Is that correct? I mean to enquire, but Ardmulchan Castle in Meath is likewise nowadays multi-coloured. Not sure if this was Gina Galvin’s interior-decorating genius and/or whether it was part of the original scheme that she restored. Any info about colourful neo-Gothicism gratefully received.