Egon Schiele

The present work shows a view of the town of  Neulengbach (fig. 1), where Schiele and Wally Neuzil stayed between August 1911 and April 1912. The couple had moved there after being forced to leave Krumau in Bohemia by the conservative townspeople, who had disapproved of Schiele’s solicitation of young girls to model for him at his studio. Neulengbach, located about 30 kilometers outside of Vienna, at first seemed more accepting of Schiele’s unorthodox artistic practices and his extramarital relationship with Wally. ‘I have come to Neulengbach to remain here forever,’ Schiele wrote to his uncle that September (quoted in Rudolf Leopold, Egon Schiele, London, 1972, p. 14). His time in this town, however, ended abruptly in 1912, when the police raided his studio and arrested the artist on several counts of indecency. But Schiele’s initial enthusiasm in the months that preceded this event proved to be beneficial for his art. As he wrote to his friend Anton Peschka in August 1911, he was particularly fascinated by the landscape: ‘One can see the most wonderful field landscape from the Buchberg near Neulengbach: what the tower of Krumau offers by way of houses is offered here by a view of the fields’ (ibid., p. 14). For the next eight months, Schiele completed several important landscape compositions, some of which depicted the city of Krumau, such as Blick auf Häuser und Dächer von Krumau, vom Schlossberg aus gesehen (fig. 2), and others depicting the fields and trees of Neulengbach, such as Herbstbäume (J. Kallir, op. cit., no. P.218). According to Christian Nebehay, the present depiction of the Neulengbach castle and its surrounding fields is a view from Schiele’s home (C. Nebehay, op. cit., p. 151). 

Many of Schiele’s landscapes, including Ansicht des Schlosses Neulengbach, have a meditative quality that can be linked to the artist’s admiration of Gothic art. Like his German contemporaries, the Expressionist painters of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, Schiele appreciated the use of a non-naturalistic perspective in medieval stained glass, woodcuts and illuminated manuscripts. He was particularly interested in the overwhelming visual effect of the compressed, abstracted landscapes of the 13^th and 14^th centuries (fig. 3), and he executed his own compositions with a similar approach. As is the case with the present painting, he even incorporated the technical elements of Gothic art into his work, painting many of his landscapes on a type of wood panel called Bretter. Schiele’s ‘new Gothic’ landscapes, as many historians have called them, are also indebted to the influence of the Vienna Secession and Gustav Klimt’s flattened forms and experiments with the compression of pictorial space. But by the time Schiele painted this picture, he had developed the style that would distinguish his work from his contemporaries, both in Austria and abroad.

The present work bears the characteristics of his small wooden panels, or Bretter, a support that Schiele first used in 1910, that enabled him to achieve the luminosity and jewel-like quality of icons. The smaller scale allowed the artist to work in a spontaneous manner, applying vibrant pigment in quick, wide brush-strokes and creating a powerfully expressive image. Rather than building up the composition out of well defined and neatly outlined blocks of solid colour, he leaves traces of his brushwork, moving in all directions, visible on the surface, with different pigments and shapes merging with each other in an explosion of expression. These smaller scale paintings culminated in a major series of monumental cityscapes, such as Krumauer Landschaft (Stadt und Fluss) of 1916 (fig. 4).

Unlike most of Schiele’s Krumau townscapes, which are depicted from an elevated perspective, the castle in the present work is seen from below. With their unusual angles and dramatic viewpoints, Schiele’s landscapes and townscapes are often compared to his depictions of the male and female figures, his tree trunks and rows of houses reminiscent of the contortions of the human body. Significantly, his towns are never populated, they serve as metaphors for human life devoid of human presence. The melancholy, ghostly atmosphere of the townscape conveys the same haunted, angst-ridden vision so beautifully expressed in Schiele’s portraits and self-portraits. As Kimberly A. Smith observed: ‘Schiele’s landscapes are repeatedly characterized as anthropomorphic visions that transform trees and towns into metaphors for the human figure and as melancholic elegies exhibiting a readily perceptible fascination with death. The landscapes are thus seen as functioning much like the self-portraits. Their anthropomorphic forms reiterate the anguished explorations of personal identity more famously executed in the artist’s images of the human body’ (K. A. Smith, Between Ruin and Renewal: Egon Schiele’s Landscapes, New Haven, 2004, p. 139).

Fig. 1, View of the castle of Neulengbach
Fig. 2, Egon Schiele, Blick auf Häuser und Dächer von Krumau, vom Schlossberg aus gesehen, 1911, oil on panel, Národní Galerie, Prague
Fig. 3, Left Wing of the Architectural View in the First Habsburg Window from St. Stephan’s Cathedral, Vienna, stained glass, Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien, Vienna
Fig. 4, Egon Schiele, Krumauer Landschaft (Stadt und Fluss), 1916, oil, tempera and coloured chalk on canvas (sold: Sotheby’s, London, 23^rd June 2003, lot 6)