When he was sixteen years old, Egon Schiele painted Landscape of a Meadow with Houses in oil on a rectangular cut of cardboard. A little higher than the landscape’s horizontal center a thick band of green, unevenly applied in a gently undulating motion, cuts across the scene from the left, where the paint is thickest, to right, where it has run thin and dry, though it is still thicker than the marks of rubbed-down greens and browns which fill the lower half of the painting. Above the thick green line — grass hills — three couplings of houses are positioned, surrounded and separated from one another with small swoops of deep and hardly differentiated shades of purples, reds, and greens — trees. The sides of the houses are rendered in rich sheets of whites tinged lightly with either blues, pinks, or purples. Cardboard does not absorb oil paint as avidly as canvas or paper (which slurps oils down to a dim, flat mark) and so the walls of the buildings are raised up, the heavily applied paint has dried thick and the volume contrasts pleasingly with the flat wisps of surrounding trees. Behind this layer of incident, a larger building separates this strip from a band of pale purple markings which fills the canvas from left to right — a body of water, delicately rendered, a whisper lighter than the whitish blues of sky that reach the top of the painting. The scene is complex. The rubbed-down greens at the bottom and the pale whites and blues at the top frame the dark interplay of field, forest, and buildings which Schiele has put in quiet communion with one another at the landscape’s middle. The composition was organized by an artist attuned to the interrelations of complicated machines. Today Egon Schiele is famous for his brazen erotic drawings and paintings. His name has become a shorthand for erotic edginess and that aura clouds a proper conception of what Schiele was actually like. He was born in 1890 and died twenty-eight years later. Every painting that he produced in the short span of years when he was working was created by a man with the same psychological and emotional temperament: he simply did not have time to win and then evince the wisdom of a mature man. For the entire time he was working Schiele’s curious fascination was childlike — not a word that readily comes to mind when looking at his renowned nudes and portraits. But every painting and drawing that he created — whether of landscapes, flowers, or naked women — was the fruit of this fascination girded and regulated by an astonishingly sophisticated draftsmanship. That combination — sophistication and juvenility (but never puerility!) — is what makes Schiele immortal. Schiele’s sophistication was kindled by a fastidious attention to detail, a capacity which he developed growing up in close proximity to powerful and complicated machines which he studied obsessively as soon as he could walk. Two generations of men on his father’s side had worked for the Austrian railroad. His grandfather, Ludwig Schiele, had directed the construction and then served as the first general inspector of the Imperial Royal Privileged West Railway of Bohemia. Adolf Schiele, Egon’s father, was stationmaster in Tulln, the small town where Egon was born and was first fascinated by the movement and the structure of the epochal metal enormities. The family lived over the railway station, and the young boy’s first drawings were detailed illustrations of different kinds of trains. When he was five years old, Egon climbed out the window and onto the roof for a better view of the gigantic locomotives below. Two years later his parents gifted Egon a sketchpad, a single page of which they instructed him to fill each day — but to his mother’s bitter exasperation, before the sun set that evening Schiele had filled every sheet with drawings of trains which he hung throughout the house as if a railroad ran through every room. Schiele’s mother had wanted her only son to become an engineer. His stubborn disinterest in any scholastic subject was just one of the many disappointments to which Marie Schiele was subjected. Adolf had married her when Marie was only seventeen years old — he was twenty-eight — against the wishes of both sets of parents. Adolf brought syphilis with him to the marriage, a disease which he passed on to his wife, and which curdled Adolf’s once beautiful body and then killed it. Sex, disease, death, and birth were bound together in the young Schiele’s mind since before sentience and he became conscious of them at the same time that he evinced a precocious interest in railroads and their intricate machinations. Schiele was curious about the mechanisms which regulated complex processes in animate and inanimate objects which were interrelated in his imagination. He was fascinated by how vitality functioned, how a creature became inflamed, sapped, satiated, and extinguished. There is in Schiele’s landscapes a merger of two qualities that for the nineteenth century had been antithetical to each other, almost spiritual enemies: the organic and the mechanical. The landscape that Schiele painted when he was sixteen translated the drama of the fields, hills, houses, sea, and sky into a coherent single structure made up of rhythmically related shapes which were distinct but connected. His mind made order automatically out of things, environments, and human beings. The rigor of his intellectual orderings was matched by Schiele’s sensitivity. He felt deeply, he was easily hurt and slow to recover. Schiele wanted very badly to be understood, loved, and recognized for the genius that he at first suspected and then became certain he was. His childlike desperation for recognition and admiration — even as he created some of the most adult images in the history of art he wanted to be patted on the head — was a source of pain throughout his life. Adolf Schiele’s syphilis entered its tertiary stage in Egon’s early teens. Fewer than
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