All posts tagged green

Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery

From the press photos I wasn’t anticipating too much but ‘Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary’ turns out to be a really interesting and rewarding exhibition, fully deserving the two floors of gallery space given over to it.

First room of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery

One of the problems is the promotion web pages and images just show one photo at a time and some of them look a bit meh, don’t feel that good, as a group they don’t add up to a unified look’ etc. It’s only when you get to the exhibition that you realise a number of key facts which transform your understanding.

1. Amateur Boris Mikhailov got into photography by accident, had no formal training, and so was free to invent and make things up. A lot of these innovations are really interesting.

2. Articulate Mikhailov is a very good explainer of his own work, so the wall labels which explain it are not only informative but his explanations of his innovations are unusually inspiring and interesting.

3. Bad photography One of these was the simple idea of bad photography. In the Soviet Union photography was a profession like any other, heavily controlled by the state with approved styles and qualities to promote uplifting images of perfect life in the workers’ state.

Mikhailov opened up a whole new world when he realised that bad, out of focus, poorly framed, damaged images were themselves a valid aesthetic, and a political statement. Badly printed, damaged or poor-quality productions were, he realised, the appropriate response to the shabby reality of Soviet life: ‘lousy photography for a lousy reality’. This explains why some of the images, when seen in isolation on a web page are only meh, whereas seen en masse, and accompanied by an eloquent explanation, they gain so much more power.

4. Sets It also explains why Mikhailov’s images are conceived and designed to be seen in sets and the sets don’t just represent a new subject, but the best of them embody an entirely new technique and way of thinking about photography. As he explains:

‘The idea that a single picture contains maximum information is a lie; I don’t believe in absolute truth. Exploring something from many different angles gives you a heightened sense of the truth. I need the sum of the images, the sum of the sequences in order to cast doubt on the correctness of one single, possible perception. The vibration between the images expands their possibilities.’

Biography

Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1938, Boris Mikhailov is a self-taught photographer. Having trained as an engineer, he was first introduced to photography when he was given a camera to document the state-owned factory where he worked. He took advantage of this opportunity to take nude photographs of his first wife – an act forbidden under Soviet norms – which he developed and printed in the factory’s laboratory. He was fired when the photographs were found by KGB agents. From then he pursued photography full time, using it as a subversive tool and operating as part of the underground art scene.

His work first gained international exposure in the 1990s with the series ‘Case History’, a shockingly direct portrayal of the realities of post-Soviet life in the Ukraine. Having learned of him via his post-USSR collapse photos, Western fans were then able to go back and review his subversive works from the 1970s and ’80s. This exhibition presents the complete body of his work in chronological order.

‘Ukrainian Diary’ brings together work from over twenty of Mikhailov’s most important series, including:

Slideshow: Yesterday’s Sandwich (mid-’60s to 1970s)

One day he threw a couple of slides onto his bed and they stuck together. When he held the stuck slides up to the light he realised they made a dramatically surreal image and hence was born the series ‘Yesterday’s Sandwich’. As he experimented with the technique he realised the juxtaposition of random images could be thought of as reflecting the dualism and contradictions of Soviet society.

His commentary is fascinating. He explains that the 60s and 70s were a time, in all the countries of the Soviet bloc, of hidden messages and secret codes. No-one took official propaganda seriously but all organs of free expression were ruthlessly suppressed. Hence codes and secret signs and hidden allusions. In actual fact no particular ‘message’ emerges from these images except a surreal subversion of the normal, logical, sensible everyday world.

Nearly 100 of these wonderfully funny, crazy, surreal images are here displayed as a slideshow projected onto the wall of a darkened space in the gallery. For some reason they are displayed to a severely edited version of the classic Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon’ which Mikhailov considers an ‘exaggeration of beauty’ conveying a kind of ‘paradise lost’. It makes it an even more surreal experience, watching images from a distant and vanished society accompanied by such a familiar homely soundtrack.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing one of the composite images in the Yesterday’s Sandwich slideshow (photo by the author)

Black Archive (1968 to 1979)

‘Black Archive’ documents everyday life in Kharkiv, often revealing the disparity between public life and private life in domestic spaces. Under Soviet rule it was forbidden to photograph everyday life and so Mikhailov was forced to hide his camera in order to take furtive snapshots, often taken from behind and at odd angles. By contrast, the private sphere of people’s apartments was a space of freedom, most vividly expressed in the carefree nudity of many of his subjects.

But in the series Mikhailov also deploys his concept of ‘bad photography’— the deliberate production of sloppily printed, blurred, and low-contrast images full of visible flaws — as a metaphor and a tool for social critique.

Red (1968 to 1978)

The set ‘Red’ brings together more than 70 images taken in Kharkiv in the late 1960s and 1970s, all of which contain the colour red. From the wall labels we learn that red was a powerful symbol of the Russian Revolution (1917) and of the Soviet Union (1922 to 1991). Its presence in these varied photos indicates the extent to which communist ideology saturated everyday life. As usual Mikhailov explains all this in his vivid and fascinating way:

‘The word “red” in Russian has the same root as the word for beauty, it also means revolution and evokes blood and the red flag. Everyone associated red with communism. But few people realised that red had permeated all our lives. Demonstrations and parades are an important part of this series. It’s a place where one of the main images of Soviet propaganda—the face of happy Soviet life, secure in its future—was created. They became absolutely kitschy and vulgar… I sometimes felt that I was surrounded by a herd of cynics, victims, and fools, followed by people wearing red ribbons as if they were policemen. As if the regime was using the people’s desire to celebrate for its own ends. And it was important to me to photograph them in such a way that you could tell the “Soviet” from the “human”.’

From the series ‘Red’ by Boris Mikhailov (1968-75) © Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Luriki (Coloured Soviet Portraits) (1971 to 1985)

After losing his job as an engineer, Mikhailov managed to make a living as a commercial photographer, sometimes working on the black market, enlarging, retouching, and hand-colouring snapshots of weddings, newborns or family members lost in the war.

In what is considered the first use of found material in contemporary Soviet photography, Mikhailov then appropriated and reworked these manipulated photographs for his own practice. Often using vibrant or exaggerated colours, he made them more ‘beautiful’, staying within the law while simultaneously mocking the way Soviet propaganda glorified mundane events.

By means of these simple techniques, Luriki comically undermined the absurdity of the iconography of Soviet life. Grouped together, the pictures are like a Soviet family album, a collection of surreal, ridiculous situations.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing one of the Luriki images (photo by the author)

Dance (1978)

Apparently open-air dancing was a popular activity in Soviet Kharkiv. Mikhailov has a lovely set depicting people of all ages, sizes and shape, in 1970s Soviet clothes, sedately dancing, quite often women dancing with other women.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the Dance photos (photo by the author)

Series of Four (early 1980s)

One wall is covered with these images grouped into sets of four. This came about by accident. Mikhailov set out to wander the streets of Kharkiv and take photos of nothing, of non-events, designed to capture the boredom and emptiness of Soviet life. But when he came to make contact prints he realised he didn’t have small-format paper so he put four images together on one sheet. At a stroke he realised he’d created something: the multiple points of view of the same scene creates complex effects. Suddenly a boring scene becomes part of a fragmented, multi-angled world. Presented in this way, they can also have a cinematic effect, telling a story in snapshots. And another effect is to create out of a mundane non-space a kind of cocoon, creating a compression of space, imbuing an anonymous nowhere with strange fugitive meanings.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the Series of Four photos (photo by the author)

Crimean Snobbism (1982)

Mikhailov went to Gursuf, a seaside resort on the Crimean Peninsula and took portraits of himself, wife and friends frolicking by the seaside, adopting holiday poses etc. As with many of his sets, Mikhailov gave them a sepia tone, making them feel historic and detached from the present, and also suggesting their subversive intent. Because the entire set is intended as a parody of the kind of carefree, bourgeois lifestyle then associated with ‘the West’ and far beyond the reach of your average Ukrainian citizen, and which he satirises in phrases: ‘We’re so happy. We’re so beautiful. We’re so in love etc’.

Viscidity (1982)

In another interesting experiment, in the early 1980s Mikhailov started combining text and image together in a conceptual way: he glued his photographs carelessly onto sheets of paper, then scribbled thoughts—banal, poetic, or philosophical—in the margins. His fragmentary thoughts were not intended as captions, nor to illustrate or elucidate the photographs; they were often utterly unrelated to them and intended to be equally important, a composite reflection on the social stagnation of the Soviet Union.

‘Viscidity’ is the word he used to describe the period the country was living through at the time — ‘a peaceful, quiet, featureless, dull life, a time of deep political stagnation, a frozen day-to-dayness. There was no catharsis, no nostalgia, just grey, everyday life. Nothing was happening, nothing was at all interesting.’ Hence ‘lousy photographs with these lousy texts’, ‘unchanging ordinariness and timelessness.’

Unfinished dissertation (1984-5)

On the back of the tattered pages of a stranger’s university dissertation found in a rubbish bin, Mikhailov pasted poorly printed black-and-white photos of inconsequential moments and then jotted down his thoughts about art and life in the margins. The photos don’t synch with the text, neither shedding light on each other, except obliquely.

Salt Lake (1986)

Mikhailov’s father used to tell him about a salt lake in southern Ukraine where people went to bathe in the 1920s and ’30s, believing that the warm, salty water had healing properties. When Mikhailov went to visit himself he found the crowds of people on the beach near to a disused old factory, washing themselves in the factory pipes and smearing themselves with mud.

He found it ‘the quintessence of an average person’s life in the Soviet context. Despite the horrible, polluted, inhuman environment, the people were relaxed, calm, and happy.’ To the modern Western ye, this looks like a gallery of grotesques in a grim, squalid environment.

Later Mikhailov toned his images sepia, like photographs from another era and explains: ‘There was a kind of an interplay there, a fusion between the old and the new. Old, because it was something my father had seen, and at the same time a reality that still existed… An elaboration of an idea I’d explored before: we’re both there and not there, it’s both today and a long time ago.’

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the Salt Lake photos (photo by the author)

By The Ground (1991)

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Mikhailov took to the streets with his panoramic camera slung low around his waist. While the panoramic format is conventionally used for sweeping vistas and beautiful landscapes Mikhailov captured bleak street scenes which captured the shabby poverty of the streets.

Mikhailov also devised a protocol for installing the series: the prints are hung low on the wall, forcing the viewer to stoop down to see the images, as if to bring us closer to his subjects. As with previous sets, he also treated the images, toning the silver prints brown, imbuing them images with a sense of nostalgia. As always his own comments on his process are fascinating:

‘I “aged” the images by toning them in sepia… embedding the photos in layers of time to trigger parallel, photo-historical associations, to show that photography has become as elusive as existence itself.’

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the By The Ground wide-angle photos (photo by the author)

I am not I (1992)

A series of nude self portraits in which Mikhailov parodies traditional masculine stereotypes. The stereotypes he mocks are those promoted by the recently collapsed USSR but they are also recognisable as American stereotypes too. Thus he photographs himself in a range of comic or demeaning poses, wearing an absurd curly wig, holding a toy sword or, most strikingly, an artificial phallus. Like all the sets, these gain in meaning and humour when you see 20 variations next to each other.

From the series ‘I am not I’ by Boris Mikhailov (1992) © Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Green (1991 to 1993)

In the early 1990s Mikhailov produced a series of hand-coloured photographs known as the ‘Green’ series. The images are suffused with a lingering, toxic green tint to reflect the environmental decay and societal collapse following the fall of the Soviet Union. The series is represented here by a monumental triptych showing a decaying junkyard in an overgrown landscape. The colour green has a particular resonance for Mikhailov who says it is the colour of a swamp and indicates the moss which had grown on Soviet life, a metaphor for Soviet decay.

In earlier sets he had had photographed people living in poverty, drug addiction and social degradation using a disposable camera and cheap gelatin silver paper to evoke awkwardness and fragility. Here, he takes the concept further, using stains and drips of paint on the thin, crumpled paper as if to embody the worn, impoverished landscape and lives he saw around him.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing ‘Green’ (photo by the author)

At Dusk (1993)

Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union Mikhailov wandered the streets of Kharkiv with a swing-lens camera that took in a 120-degree panoramic view, capturing the life of destitute people on the streets. He tinted all the images a heavy cobalt blue. Why? Several reasons: the colour (along with the title) indicate the transition from day to night. But blue also represents his boyhood memories of the Second World War, of fleeing with his mother on one of the last freight trains out of Kharkiv to escape the Nazi advance. Blue, he explains, is the colour of blockade, hunger and war. Tinting these images of street people the same colour a) indicates the severity of the crisis of poverty which hit his country and b) also produces images of intense and haunting beauty.

From the series ‘At Dusk’ by Boris Mikhailov (1993) © Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Case History (1997 to 98)

A few years after the collapse of communism, Mikhailov realised that in his hometown of Kharkiv, not only had a new ruling elite of millionaires emerged, but a significant part of the population had also been plunged into poverty. The mid-1990s produced a new group of people, the bomzhes or homeless.

So Mikhailov set about photographing these pitiful people, right at the bottom of society. He produced a series of 400 raw portraits. As with other sets, he deliberately transgressed the codes of photojournalism by paying his subjects, and he and his wife Vita also often offered them hot meals in exchange for posing. Some of the poses are stage in the manner of the Pietà or the Descent from the Cross.

This exhibition shows one image of one abject couple blown up on the wall and a display case of 100 small test prints from his archive. They are pitiful to look at.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing the one blown-up image and 100 test prints from ‘Case Study’ (photo by the author)

Reflecting on these images the next day, I realised that their abjectness is emphasised by their nudity. What I mean is that, unless you have a buff toned body, most of us already look a bit embarrassing when naked and caught in everyday postures, in the shower, getting out of bed etc. Many (half?) of the shots in the Case History exacerbate the poverty and squalor of the subjects by showing old, ugly, maimed or ill people, naked or half-clothed. What I’m trying to convey is how this nudity powerfully amplifies the general air of degradation and humiliation.

The Theatre of War, Second Act, Time Out (2013 to 2014)

Euromaidan or the Maidan Uprising was a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine, which began on 21 November 2013 with large protests in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kyiv. The protests were sparked by President Viktor Yanukovych’s sudden decision not to sign the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement, instead choosing closer ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union. Ukraine’s parliament had overwhelmingly approved of finalizing the Agreement with the EU but Russia had put pressure on Ukraine to reject it.

In late December 2013 Boris and Vita Mikhailov documented the protests, photographing protestors who had pitched their tents in the central square in Kyiv. Mikhailov comments that the situation was so tense that scenes felt like they had been staged. ‘The bonfires, the colours, the lights, the people sitting there exhausted — everything created a general feeling of tension. It was unclear how it would all end.’

The protests succeeded in forcing President Viktor Yanukovych to flee to Russia but soon afterwards, on 27 February 2014, Russian forces occupied the Crimea, starting the Russo-Ukrainian War which continues to this day.

Thoughts

Many of Mikhailov’s images are very strong in their own right, and display adeptness in an extraordinary range of styles, from the photojournalism of Salt Lake to the nostalgic surrealism of Yesterday’s Sandwich, the warlike intensity of the At Dusk series to the blistering poverty porn of the miserable Case Histories.

But as well as the appeal of individual images, or the impact of specific sets, the exhibition as a whole builds up into a powerful portrait of life in a Soviet state – to the shabby, unhealthy, stiflingly boring nature of life under communism – and then after 1990, to the catastrophic collapse in living standards for large swathes of the population in post-Soviet society.

It’s not only an impressive body of work by a consistently inventive and innovative artist, but a powerful portrait and indictment of life in Soviet and post-Soviet regimes.

Video

This is not the usual 30-second exhibition promotional video but an extended, 14-minute-long interview with Mikhailov which really brings over how articulate and interesting he is.

Related links

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on January 12, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Communism, Exhibition, Photography, Politics
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on January 12, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/01/12/boris-mikhailov-ukrainian-diary-the-photographers-gallery/

Klimt / Schiele @ the Royal Academy

This exhibition is much more varied and interesting than the Royal Academy’s promotional material suggests. The main poster shows two female nudes with prominent nipples and, of the eight images further down the page, all but one are nudes, leading you to expect a festival of bottoms and boobs.

There certainly are plenty of nudes in the show, but there’s considerably more to it than that, and it’s the fuller, broader context which makes it so interesting and rewarding.

The pretext

Both Gustav Klimt (born July 1862) and Egon Schiele (born June 1890) died in 1918, Klimt 27 years older and much the more famous and successful figure, having developed a style which combined beautiful draughtsmanship with a fin-de-siecle and semi-symbolist fondness for placing his human figures within two-dimensional sheaths of glittering colours, most famously in 1908’s The Kiss. (Be warned: there is nothing this finished and this glamorous in this exhibition.)

The Kiss by Gustav Klimt (1908)

The Kiss by Gustav Klimt (1908)

Schiele was much under the older man’s influence throughout the 1900s (they first met in 1907) until around May 1910, when he himself realised he had broken through to find his own voice and style – basically Klimt unplugged, the same addiction to the human figure, to sensuous depictions of nudes, but with a ferociously modern, twisted, angular, abrasive sensuality.

To some extent, as the gallery notes make clear, this was the sensuality of poverty. Whereas Klimt ran a successful studio which won public commissions – painting complex ceiling schemes for grand buildings of Vienna’s Ringstraße, did a series of commissions for Vienna’s high society ladies and was married to Austrian fashion designer Emilie Louise Flöge who ran a successful fashion business, and so had access to all manner of sumptuous fabrics, in the latest designs, for his drawings and paintings – Schiele was barely 20 when he hit his stride, and lived in poorly furnished flats with a succession of ‘companions’, most of them even poorer than him, which is why so many of his women are wearing basic kit, stockings, a blouse, and not much else.

To mark the coincidental centenary of their deaths the Royal Academy has arranged to borrow 100 or so portraits, allegories, landscapes and erotic nudes by Klimt and Schiele from the Albertina Museum in Vienna, allowing visitors an amazing opportunity to see these powerful, skilled and stimulating works.

Six rooms

The exhibition is upstairs in the Sackler Wing of the Academy, and is divided into six rooms.

Room 1. Photos, early sketches and the Secession

Photos of Klimt as a middle aged man, in his trademark blue smock, early and very Victorian realist drawings. Next to early photos of Schiele adopting one of his art school poses.

Egon Schiele in Front of the painting ‘Shrines in the Forest’ (1915) by Johannes Fischer

Egon Schiele in Front of the painting ‘Shrines in the Forest’ (1915) by Johannes Fischer

This rooms explains Klimt’s rise to dominance of the Vienna art scene and his leadership of the ‘Secession’ of new young artists set up in 1897. There’s a Secession poster which Klimt designed, with a graceful image of Athena in 1903, next to the bitingly Expressionist picture of the selection board around a table which Schiele created for the 1918 Secession exhibition, after Klimt’s death.

Room 2. Klimt’s drawing process

This room is devoted to several sets or series of drawings Klimt made for grand allegorical projects. In 1894 he was commissioned to create three paintings to decorate the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna and chose the subject of Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence. On display are a series of preparatory drawings for ‘Medicine’ which he conceived as a naked woman floating in space, feet towards us.

In 1902, Klimt finished the Beethoven Frieze for the Fourteenth Vienna Secessionist exhibition, and there are a number of sketches here for female figures. And several preparatory sketches for his 1905 oil painting, Three Ages of Woman, including a strikingly drawn naked middle-aged woman.

Standing older woman in profile (study for three Ages of Woman) by Gustav Klimt (1905)

Standing older woman in profile (study for three Ages of Woman) by Gustav Klimt (1905)

The most obvious thing about all the pieces in this room is none of them are coloured: they are literally just pencil drawings on paper. They allow you to examine and admire Klimt’s technique, and to understand better his interest in the surfaces and folds of the dresses his figures (almost all women) are wearing. But they lack all the exquisite finish and colour and golden luxuriance of his paintings.

It is, therefore, quite a shock and a pleasure to walk into the next room, which is packed with Egon Schiele’s vibrant colourful paintings.

Room 3. Schiele’s drawing process

You immediately notice that all the drawings in this room are coloured, very carefully and fully coloured. And I noticed that the strong angular outlines of Schiele’s figures are emphasised by often being drawn in black crayon as opposed to weak pencil. As if this wasn’t enough some of the most striking figures are outlined with a rough swathe of white gouache, which really makes them leap off the page. Exemplified in this nude.

Female Nude (1910) by Egon Schiele

Female Nude (1910) by Egon Schiele

Female nude also epitomises other Schiele traits:

  • the angularity of the anatomy – look at the painfully pointed hip and shoulderbone
  • the uncomfortableness of the pose – what’s happened to her right arm?
  • the attention to the hand which is long and heavily jointed, looking like a four-legged spider crawling up her side
  • the unashamed bluntness of the loins with their pubic hair
  • and the use of colour not so much to describe as to highlight and bring out the composition

The guide makes a central point:

Schiele frequently used watercolour and gouache in his works on paper, but rarely to create three dimensional modelling. Colour is employed expressively or as a graphic compositional device, similar to Klimt’s division of decorative surface pattern in his paintings.

Not all, but a number of the Klimt sketches in the previous room sketched in the face and body shape merely in order to allow him to create the characteristic series of whorls and geometric shapes across the fabric of women’s skirts and dress which obviously fascinated him. By contrast Schiele’s colours don’t even and smooth out, but create dramatic highlights which leap out of the image.

Not only is the shock of walking into this room like watching colour TV after black and white – it is also by far the most varied in subject matter.

Thus Schiele was arrested in April 1912 when a thirteen-year-old girl who had sought protection in the house he shared with his unmarried partner and model Wally Neuzil, was tracked down by her irate father. He was arrested on charges of seduction and abduction and ended up spending 24 days in Neulenbach prison before the case was dismissed. The exhibition displays five of the drawings and paintings he made during this brief incarceration, one is a full-body self-portrait, but four are of the interior of the prison and his cell. I liked the one of a chair with some handkerchiefs and a green scarf (?) draped over it.

Beside these were two striking and dynamic architectural studies of houses, showing how well Schiele’s strong black lines bring out the architectonics of anything, be it body or building. Alongside these a set of landscapes. I never knew Schiele painted landscapes, they tend to be eclipsed by the explicit nudes.

Field landscape (Kreuzberg near Krumau) 1910 by Egon Schiele

Field landscape (Kreuzberg near Krumau) 1910 by Egon Schiele

This reproduction doesn’t bring out how bright and vivid the greens of the field are. And next to these landscapes was a set of three drawings of chrysanthemums. Again, I had forgotten that Schiele made many flower studies.

White chrysanthemum by Egon Schiele (1910)

White chrysanthemum by Egon Schiele (1910)

Klimt may, for all I know, be the finer artist of the two, but in this exhibition, in this selection of their works hanging side by side, Schiele comes over as vastly more colourful, inventive, varied and dynamic.

Room 4. Klimt portraits

By the 1890s Klimt was a sought-after portrait painter for society ladies. He made his rich women appear tall, statuesque, elegant, often with fashionable dresses buttoned right up to the chin, and a carefully styled bouffant haircut. In the ten or so pencil drawings and sketches for portraits presented here, Klimt is obviously interested in the overall shape and, in some of them, the potential of the dresses to be turned into his trademark fantasias of geometric shapes and mosaics. This approach is exemplified in this study for the sumptuous portrait he eventually painted of Frau Fritza Riedler. Note the absence of eyes. it is the patterns and shapes of the dress which take up most of the space, with just enough outline of face to make it human.

Study for a painting of Fritza Riedler by Gustav Klimt (1904)

Study for a painting of Fritza Riedler by Gustav Klimt (1904)

The curators have artfully hung this eyeless sketch next to a penetrating study by Schiele of his younger sister, Gerti Schiele. You immediately see the difference: the brim of the hat and the ruff around her chest are confidently sketched in, but the rest of the body, for example her right arm, just tapers away. Schiele’s real interest is obviously in the intense black eyes of the sitter, which are staring right out at you.

They are hung right next to each other and looking from one to the other you realise that The Klimt is a design, whereas the Schiele is an intensely felt portrait.

Gerti Schiele by Egon Schiele (1911)

Gerti Schiele by Egon Schiele (1911)

Maybe the difference can be explained in terms of tradecraft – the Klimt sketches were never to be intended to be anything more than preparations, try-outs for what would be the very labour-intensive process of creating finished luxury paintings. By contrast, the Schieles are what they are, not many of them are preparations for paintings, they are pencil, crayon, gouache and watercolour works in their own right.

Maybe there’s a sociological explanation: Klimt could afford to make numerous preparations of expensive works for rich clients; Schiele never became that financially successful, so most of his portraits are of people he knew, models, lovers, friends and family, so they come out of more intimate and close relationships. Maybe that explains why almost all the Schiele knock you for six.

Room 5. Schiele portraits

This is really rammed home in the room devoted to Schiele portraits which, once again, demonstrates his versatility. There are one or two nudes but the emphasis is on his ability to capture the features and character of perfectly respectable, fully dressed citizens of Vienna. There’s a little set of portraits of middle-class men like Heinrich Benesch, the railway inspector who became an important collector of Schiele’s work.

One wall displays a set of portraits of his family, including touching portraits of his sister, his mother and his father-in-law. Set amid these is a staggeringly evocative face of his wife, Edith Harms, who he married in 1914. The guide tells us a bit of gossip about their marriage, namely that nice, middle-class Edith insisted Schiele cut off all contact with his working class mistress and muse, Wally Neuzil. Seems cruel. Needs must. But what remains of Edith is Schiele’s staggeringly evocative portraits of her, like the one featured here. A face, hair, a hand – and an entire personality is before us. It is a staggering testimony to what art can do.

Edith Schiele by Egon Schiele (1917)Edith Schiele by Egon Schiele (1917)

Edith Schiele by Egon Schiele (1917)

Yet another aspect of Schiele’s vision is displayed across two walls of this room – his numerous, inventive and varied self-portraits. Klimt never did a self portrait in his life, Schiele did hundreds. Maybe, again, partly out of poverty. But mostly because, whereas the Symbolist, fin-de-siecle art of the 1890s reached beyond itself to some secret realm trembling on the brink of revelation, the Expressionist art of the 1910s explored the self, and the fracturing of the self, into anguished fragments.

It’s an oddity or irony of the German Expressionists that so many of them considered themselves spiritual leaders, heralding a great spiritual awakening of humanity – and yet, to us, so many of their paintings look hard, heavy and anguished. Same here, with Schiele – the commentary tells us that he identified with Francis of Assissi, wrote about the artist being a spiritual leader, gave his self-portraits titles like ‘redemption’ – and yet to us they seem to anticipate the acute and anguished self-consciousness of the twentieth century, which didn’t decline after Schiele’s death, but achieved new heights of neurotic panic after the Holocaust, the atom bombs and the spread of nihilism and existentialism across mid-century Europe.

It is that tormented self-consciousness which Schiele’s countless experimental self-portraits seem to communicate to us today, not songs about birds.

Nude Self-Portrait, Squatting (1916) by Egon Schiele. Pencil and gouache on packing paper. The Albertina Museum, Vienna

Nude Self-Portrait, Squatting (1916) by Egon Schiele. Pencil and gouache on packing paper. The Albertina Museum, Vienna

By no means all of these self-portraits are nude; the one above is the most naked and explicit. In many others he’s wearing clothes but posing in one of his characteristically agonised, ungainly stylised positions. This angularity prepares us for the last room.

Room 6. Erotic nudes

Bang! the room explodes with some of the most erotic paintings and drawings ever made. They are erotic because they are so candid. You feel like you are in the room, with a good-looking young woman who is happy to share her body with you, no shame, no false modesty, no recriminations. For me, at any rate, it’s this spirit of complete, unashamed, naked complicity which makes them emotionally or psychologically powerful.

Seated Female Nude, Elbows Resting on Right Knee (1914) by Egon Schiele. Graphite and gouache on Japan paper. The Albertina Museum, Vienna

Seated Female Nude, Elbows Resting on Right Knee (1914) by Egon Schiele. Graphite and gouache on Japan paper. The Albertina Museum, Vienna

But having looked carefully at all the works which precede them it is also possible to set aside their erotic charge altogether and consider them as compositions. In this respect the most successful of them vividly bring together features we’ve already noted:

  • the stylised pose, deliberately not classical, not a nude woman carefully standing so as to conceal her loins, but a real woman squatting, lying back with her legs open, gazing at the viewer, completely unembarrassed
  • the angularity of the anatomy – note the weirdly pointed hips, the visible ribs, the jagged angles around the shoulder, the accurate depiction of the lines made by the tendons of the inner thigh just next to the pubic hair, the pointed chin – the human figure as sharp angles
  • the use of colour not to describe naturalistically, but as expressive highlighting – much earlier Klimt had coloured the nipples of his nude paintings, but they were set amid an entire composition of gleaming rich colours: Schiele repeatedly uses the trick of painting the labia, nipples and lips a bright orange colour, on one level highlighting the erogenous zones, but on another making the figures almost into painted puppets, marionettes, an unsettling ambiguity

Note, also, the use of the colour green. By her breast, and armpit, and under her eyes and, the more you look at it, the more you see that Schiele has used that very unhuman colour, green, just touches and flecks of it, which… which do what, exactly? They make this woman’s body look a bit more emaciated than it already is: but the sparingness with which it’s used also makes you look closer, lean in, get drawn in.

Once I started looking, I noticed a very fleeting use of green in many of the nudes, creating just a hint of a kind of heightened, floodlit, hyper-vividness. There’s even green in the self-portrait wearing a yellow waistcoat. I’ve read scores of articles about Schiele and nudes and pornography and the male gaze and so on. It would be interesting to read just one good article about his very sophisticated use of colour.

Schiele’s nudes, hundreds of them, were notorious in his day and now are widely known and admired. I had no idea that Klimt did quite so many nudes and that, in their way, they are more sexually explicit. The wall opposite Schiele’s green-flecked nudes is covered with the detailed pencil drawings Klimt made of nubile young women naked and very blatantly masturbating.

In 1907 Klimt provided fifteen avowedly erotic drawings for a luxury edition of the Roman classic, Lucian’s dialogue of the courtesans. The title of one drawing – shown in the original pencil version and then as an illustration in a copy of the book which is on display here – says it all: Woman reclining with leg raised. She is lying on her back on a bed with one leg pulled up and back by her left arm while she is masturbating with her right hand. Art doesn’t come much more explicit than this. Although even when he’s being as rude as an artist possibly can be, it’s amusing that Klimt can’t stop himself drifting off to think about the decorative spots and patterns on the fabric she’s lying on (her dress? a blanket?)

Reclining nude with leg raised by Gustav Klimt (1907)

Reclining nude with leg raised by Gustav Klimt (1907)

The commentary suggests that, because Klimt’s nude women have their eyes closed they are somehow passive victims of the male gaze, whereas Schiele’s explicit female nudes generally have their eyes open and are often looking straight at the viewer – and so are therefore empowered, have agency etc – an issue of vital concern to female art curators.

I don’t think it’s quite that simple: it’s certainly not that a consistent rule, because some Klimt women have their eyes open and some Schiele women have theirs closed.

In my opinion the scholars are over-explaining something which is more obvious: not only Schiele’s female nudes but the male nudes and most of the fully-dressed portraits as well, are simply more powerfully drawn and more vividly coloured than any of the Klimt drawings on show here.

Klimt’s masturbating women may have their eyes closed, but more importantly (for me, anyway) – although they are just as explicit, in fact in the way they are actively masturbating, they are more explicit than the Schiele – nonetheless, they are drawn with much finer and paler lines, lines which almost fade away into nothingness, as the left leg of the model, above, dwindles from the heft of her buttock and hip down to a small foot which is merely an outline.

In other words, in my opinion, it is not the model, the human being depicted – it is Klimt’s technique or style which is passive and mute. As pencil drawings, the Klimt nudes in this final room are probably better, more accurate draughtsmanship, than the Schiele. But the Schiele erotic nudes, with their strong black outlines, weird angularities, piercing black eyes, and coloured highlights, are incomparably the more powerful and bracing works of art.

Video introduction to Schiele

By Tim Marlow, Artistic Director of the Royal Academy.

//player.vimeo.com/video/298238498

Related links

More Royal Academy reviews

1 Comment
by Simon on December 21, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Feminism
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on December 21, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/12/21/klimt-schiele-royal-academy/