Egon Schiele’s Passion: Spirituality and Sexuality 1912–1915
- Submitting institution
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Royal College of Art(The)
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- Blackshaw3
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- Egon Schiele: The Complete Paintings 1909-1918
- Publisher
- Taschen
- ISBN
- 978-3-8365-4612-6
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
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- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This 10,000-word essay was commissioned by Tobias G. Natter, an internationally acknowledged expert on art in fin-de-siècle Vienna, for Taschen’s new, comprehensive monograph on Egon Schiele. A major (600-page) publication, available in 4 languages, it features the complete catalogue of Schiele’s paintings from 1909 – 1918. It expands upon Jane Kallir’s catalogue raisonné of 1990 (second updated edition 1998), adding new documentation which takes into account archival discoveries, exhibitions and publications since Kallir 1990/1998, and which addresses in further detail the subject of provenance. Nearly 600 illustrations from public and private collections are presented, many newly photographed; this, added to the voluminous size of the book (presented in XXL format at 29 x 39.9 cm), brings an unprecedented level of surface detail to reproductions of Schiele’s work. The text is a landmark publication in Schiele studies.
Resisting recent tendencies to present Schiele’s work thematically or by genre, the volume proceeds chronologically to consider the vital connections between Schiele’s public statements, private writings and artistic media. Blackshaw was one of six ‘internationally outstanding’ Schiele scholars (quoting Natter in the Introduction) invited to contribute. Writing on the period immediately after Schiele’s 1912 imprisonment for the display of sexually explicit drawings, Blackshaw evaluates his correspondence with patrons and gallerists to demonstrate the ways in which he and his supporters reconstructed his identity as a Christ-like figure, above reproach, as a counter to his public image as a pornographer. Connecting Schiele’s allegorical painting with his pornographic drawing for the very first time, Blackshaw makes a feminist intervention in the field by arguing that Schiele’s image as Christ was an obfuscation of the modernist quest for spiritual transcendence through sex. In doing so, she shines a brighter light not only on Schiele’s practice but also the sexual politics of its historiography.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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