In the summer of 1912, not long out of the cell at Neulengbach,1 Schiele sat down and wrote about how a person ought to see. “One needs to observe and experience the world with naïve, pure eyes,” he put it, and then, a few lines later, the harder claim: that few people see the sun, and everyone else has to read novels to learn there is light.
“One needs to observe and experience the world with naïve, pure eyes in order to attain a great weltanschauung; — that is a living cult. — the proper tone is a book which, for some, may be nice to consult, but proves itself completely useless in the world; in other words, there are those who should live through books and those who exist through themselves; who are better? — that is clear. — Few see the sun and everyone else must read novels and novellas in order to finally realize that there is light.”
—Egon Schiele: Poems and Letters 1910–1912
He wrote a fair amount, around twenty poems across two short bursts, in 1909 and 1910 and again in 1915, plus letters that slide into something closer to verse. Frank Whitford, whose reading of Schiele I have leaned on all month, has little patience for any of it. He files the writing under the same heading as the photographs of Schiele posing for the camera, hands and body thrown into theatrical gestures, one more form of self-display, the painter in love with the image of the painter.2 And there is something to that. The poems do cast him as a seer among the blind, an eternal child, a leader of the few against the many. The ego is not hidden.
But I think the narcissism reading stops too early. Yes, the self-elevation is there but what it carries is a claim about how to see, and a man does not have to be humble to be right about perception.
It also sits oddly beside Whitford’s own account of the city. A few chapters earlier he describes what made Viennese modernism cohere, the way its figures refused to stay inside one discipline. Kokoschka wrote poetry and plays, Schoenberg learned to paint and showed with the Blaue Reiter, Kraus and Loos and Mahler all worked across the lines between art forms. Writing was not a side hustle in that world, it was the native condition of the modernist, and Whitford grants as much when he notes, almost in passing, that “even Egon Schiele took himself seriously as a poet and aphorist.” Schiele also designed clothes, made posters, built whole graphic identities for his exhibitions. If we take Schiele’s poems out of this context and only read them as social posing we disqualify the importance of the rich soil that they actually grew in.
The harder charge to let stand is the one about character. Whitford calls Schiele “not an intellectual, rather someone who felt it necessary to assume an intellectual stance from time to time in the hope of being taken seriously.” That is not a judgment about the writing. It is a judgment about the man, that he was a poseur reaching above himself, and it is the kind of claim that cannot be proved and tends to say more about the reader’s patience than the writer’s intent. A person who writes, in the same year he is jailed for how he sees, that few people see the sun, is not performing intelligence. He is defending the one thing he has, his artistic vision.
It is worth setting two readers beside each other here, because they reach the same passage and walk away with opposite men. Maria Popova places Schiele’s writing in a line that runs back through Kierkegaard, who held that “truth always rests with the minority… because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.” Schiele echoes Kierkegaard through his reflection about the power of visionaries:
“The “many” are those who are dependent upon each other, — the people. — The “few” are the direct leaders of the world because they introduce only that which is new and are therefore repugnant; that should be clear enough. Beyond that are the fighters — leaders… — One battles against the capital and the philistines; the large spirit wishes to see the smaller one equally large whereas the small spirit forever wishes to overshadow every small spirit around him. — That is a lack of will and whatever else… — Envy those who see beauty in everything in the world.”
—Egon Schiele: Poems and Letters 1910–1912
This is not philosophy and it does not need to be. Whitford reads it as a man straining to think and finds him wanting, but that is the wrong measure. It is a painter’s vision finding its way into words, the same eye that saw the prisoners and the trees, now turned on the question of who sees at all. Read it as argument and it looks like posing. Read it as seeing and the last line gives it away: “Envy those who see beauty in everything in the world” is not a boast about Schiele, it is the whole of his art, stated plainly.
