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This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

ANDROGYNOUS ASPECTS OF THE
SELF-PORTRAITS OF EGON SCHIELE

presented by

Joseph Alexander Magil

has been acpepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Master of Arts , History of Art
degree 1n

 

 

 

 

Dan: July 30, 1992

0-7639 MS U is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

 

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ANDROGYNOUS ASPECTS OF THE SELF-PORTRAITS
OF
EGON SCHIELE

BY

Joseph Alexander Magil

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ART
Department of Art

1992

ABSTRACT
ANDROGYNOUS ASPECTS OF THE SELF-PORTRAITS

OF
EGON SCHIELE

BY

Joseph Alexander Magil

The works of the Austrian Expressionist painter Egon
Schiele have an arresting, disturbing effect due to their
distortions, emaciation, and overt sexuality, creating an
oeuvre of super-personal psychological revelations as
Stephen Walrod has shown. There is, however, another aspect
of Schiele's works which gives to what is often seen as
powerfully painted pornography a philosophical and even
elevating element. It is due to this that the most
significant works of Egon Schiele are his self-portraits.

He regularly represented himself nude with peculiar
alterations of his anatomy which make him an androgyne.
These alterations, as well as numerous hand gestures which
Schiele performs, have their roots in earlier art, and
especially in art of a religious or mystical nature. These
appropriations lead the viewer to conclude that Schiele was
familiar with various, earlier conceptions of the androgyne,
and especially with those of the Late Romantics and

Decadents.

I would like to dedicate this work
to the memory of my parents,

Mary F. Magil and J. Mendel Magil

iii

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Professor Eldon Van Liere for his
assistance in the preparation of this thesis. I would also
like to thank my readers, Professor Phylis Floyd and
Professor Webster Smith for their advice and meticulous

proofreading.

I owe a special debt to Laurie Anderson, whose gift of
materials which she had collected on the topic of androgyny
saved me a great deal of time, energy, and expense at the

start of my research.

Shaw-Mei Hsieh assisted me at every stage of the
preparation of this thesis, from scouting for material to
entering the various drafts into the computer. Without her
help this thesis would never have seen the light of day. I
would also like to thank Wen-hsiung Hsieh for his help in

preparing the finished draft.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page
LIST OF FIGURES.... ............... ......... ..... .........vi
INTRODUCTION.................... .......................... 1
CHAPTER 1: The Concept of Androgyny ................... ....7
CHAPTER 2: Schiele the Androgyne.... ...... . ........ . ..... 20
CHAPTER 3: Schiele and the Language of Gesture.... ..... ..38
CONCLUSION....... ........................................ 57
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................. 60
FIGURES .................................................. 64

Figure
1. Schiele,
2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.

LIST OF FIGURES

Self-Portrait Sitting with Raised Arms.

Hermaphrodite.

Female Pseudohermaphrodite.
Male Pseudohermaphrodite.

Greek Statue of Hermaphroditus.
Alchemical Hermaphrodite.

Indian Statue of Ardhanarisvara,

T'ai Chi
Schiele,
Schiele,
Schiele,
Schiele,
Schiele,
Schiele,
Schiele,

School of Pisa,

Schiele,

Georges Minne,

Schiele,
Schiele,
Schiele,
Schiele,
Schiele,
Schiele,

12th century.

Self-Portrait I.

Self-Portrait with Trousers Pulled Down.
Self-Portrait Masturbating.

Eros.

The Dead MothergI.

Self-Portrait Sitting with Raised Hands.
Self-Portrait with Hands on Hips.

Cross No. 15, late 12th century.
Portrait of Gerti Nude.

Kneeling Box.

Self-Portrait Clothed.

Self-Portrait with Raised Leg.
Self-Portrait with Head Bent to the_§eft.
Self-Portrait Nude Facing Front.
Portrgit of Edvard Kosmack.

Portrait of Poldi Lodzinsky.

 

Edvard Munch, Puberty.

Oskar Kokoschka,

Schiele,

Hans and Erika Tietgg.
Madonna and Child.

Schiele's principle hand gestures.

Schiele,
Schiele,
Schiele,
Schiele,
Schiele,
Schiele,
Schiele,

Photography of Egon Schiele,
William Blake,

Schiele,
Schiele,
Schiele,
Schiele,

Delirium.

Death ang_the Maiden.
The Poet.

Melancholy.

The Hermits.

The Embrace.
ELEEEEEL-

 

1914.
Frontispiece to Europe.
Self Portrait with Hair Band.
Self-Portrait with Hand to Cheek.
Levitation.

Mother and Child.

vi

42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.

(LIST OF FIGURES CONTINUED)

Schiele, Salf—Seers I.

Schiele, Two Hermits Pgaying.

Schiele, Portrait of Mime van Gaga.

Schiele, Self-Portrait with Spread Fingers.
Jewish tombstone with emblem of kohanim.

Waite tarot card - The Devil.

Court de Gebelin tarot card - The Devil.

Oswald with tarot card - The Devil.

Vase belonging to Egon Schiele.

Schiele, Striding Torso-Back View.

Schiele, Coitus.

Carlo Crivelli, Annunciation with St. Emidius.
Chriat Pantocrator, Cathedral of Cefalu, Sicily, 1148.
Berlinghiero Berlinghieri, Cross.

Andrea del Verrochio, Baptism of Chriag.
Crivelli, Madonna della Candelletta.

Caravaggio, Madonna of Loreto.

Raphael, Sistine Madonna.

Adolphe W. Bouguereau, Madonna 0d the Angels.
Michelangelo, Burqes Madonna.

Michelangelo, Burges Madonna, detail.
Michelangelo, The Creation of Adag, detail.
Blake, God Writing upon the Table§_pf tha Covenant.
William Blake, The Reunion of the Soul and the Body.
Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of a Young Man.
Bronzino, Portrait of Maria de'Medici as a Girl.
Portrait of Robert Fludd.

Wedding portrait of Frederick V and Princess Elizabeth.
Hermaphrodite Siamese twins.

Myth of Hermaphroditus from Atalanta Fugiens.
The fixation of Mercury.

The marriage of brother and sister.

Fernand Khnopff, Portrait of Marguerite Khnopff.
Aubrey Beardsley, Mademoiselle de Maupin.
Schiele, Portrait of Erich Lederag.

Schiele, Poster for Arnot Gallery exhibition.
Botticelli, Birth of Venus.

Schiele, Portrait of Arthur Roessler.

Schiele, Holy Family.

Schiele, Self-Seers II.

Photograph of Egon Schiele, 1914.

Schiele, Portrait of Gerti Schiele.

Schiele, Agony.

Schiele, Cardinal and Nun.

 

 

vii

(LIST OF FIGURES CONTINUED)

86. Schiele, Convegaion.
87. Matteo di Giovanni, St. Barbara Altarpiece.

viii

Introduction

Egon Schiele lived and worked at a time when Europe had
a profound and pervasive fascination with sex and sexuality.
The art, music, literature, and science of this time convey
the concept of a humanity fatally dominated by sexual

impulses and desires.

In the 18903, Edvard Munch illustrated the human life

cycle in a series of paintings which he called his Frieze of

 

alga, Such works as Puberty (1894), The Voice (1893),
Madonna (1894), and Dead Mother and Child (1893) reveal a
view of life in which sex is an overpowering imperative and
death awaits us once we complete our procreative duty. A
grimly fatalistic attitude towards sex is manifested in the

works of this painter whom Schiele admired.

The composer Arnold Schoenberg achieved fame and
notoriety at two stages of his career with works dealing
with sexual relationships. His Transfiggred Niggg (1899), a
tone poem for string sextet based on a poem by Richard
Dehmel, evokes a moonlit scene in the woods in which a woman

confesses to her fiance that she is pregnant by another man

and receives his forgiveness. Schoenberg's monodrama

Erwartung (1909), written after his move into the sound

 

world of atonality, depicts a disturbed woman waiting to
meet her lover in the woods. When she chances upon his
body, she is not certain whether or not she herself murdered

him.

The playwright Frank Wedekind dealt with the conflict
between adolescent desires and adult expectations in his
first play, the semi-autobiographical Spring's Awakening
(1891), premiered in Vienna 1907.1 In the play a fourteen
year old girl, Wandla Bergmann, becomes pregnant by Melchior
Gabor, a self-portrait of the young Wedekind. The girl's
mother procures the services of an abortionist who causes
the girl's death. Melchior is also expelled from school
when it is discovered that he had told the facts of life to
a classmate of his who subsequently committed suicide. The
school authorities blame the suicide on Melchior's
revelation, whereas the real reason was his friend's fear of
academic failure. In the final scene Melchior escapes from
reform school and visits the graveyard where his two friends
are buried. The ghost of Moritz, the suicide, appears to
him there and tells him of the peace and security of death,

urging him also to commit suicide. At this point a new

 

lHelen 0. Borowitz, "Youth as Metaphor and Image in
Wedekind, Kokoschka and Schiele." Art Journal, vol. 33 no.
3, (Spring 1974), p.221.

3
character appears -a masked man who talks Melchior out of
committing suicide. He argues that morality is not an
absolute, but is, rather, the maintenance of a state of
equilibrium between one's instincts and the demands of
society, and that Melchior has just momentarily lost his

2 It was Wedekind's desire to expose the

equilibrium.
hypocrisy of a society that fears and cannot deal with the
instincts of its members, the same society that imprisoned

Egon Schiele in 1912 when he lost his "equilibrium".

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch provided a glimpse into the
workings of his own psyche in the short story Venas in Fgga
(1870) in which he described his relationship with the
Baroness Fanny Pistor with whom he had signed an agreement

3 Von

in December 1869 to be her slave for six months.
Sacher-Masoch's name was subsequently appropriated in the

form masochism to refer to the obtaining of sexual pleasure
from the receipt of pain, and this term has largely replaced

the venerable Latin algolagnia. Sacher-Masoch's writings

were admired by the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing,

whose Psychopathia Sexualis: A Clinical-Forensic Study

 

(1884) detailed numerous cases of sexual aberrations, mostly

culled from courtroom files. This linking of sexual

 

2Borowitz, pp.219-220.

3William M. Johnston, The Agstrian Mind: (Ag
Intellectual and Social Histogy41848-1938, (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1972),_p.233.

4
abnormality with criminal behavior made for juicy reading,
and the book gained instant fame. It was quickly translated
into seven languages from its original Latin; was expanded
to three times its original length; and reached its
seventeenth edition in 1924.4 In this book, Krafft-Ebing
details case histories of individuals driven to crime and

self ruin due to irresistible sexual urges.

In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Sigmund Freud
puts forth his theories that sexual feelings have their
roots in infancy and develop through childhood, and that
neuroses result from a lack of agreement between reality and
the individual's unconscious desires. Freud saw neuroses as
having mental rather than physical causes and that they thus
required psychological rather than medical treatment. To
Freud, failure to acknowledge and deal with one's sexuality

could have a deleterious effect on one's health.

Schiele's own family history was decisively shaped by
sexual circumstances. Schiele's father, Adolf, had
contracted syphilis before he married Schiele's mother,
Marie Soukup. He kept the disease a secret and refused to
submit to treatment, with the result that his wife became
infected and their first two children were stillborn.

Adolf's syphilis eventually destroyed his sanity. At times

 

4Johnston, p.233.

5
he would hallucinate that there were guests at the dinner
table and insisted that the family include them in
conversation. Finally, on the evening of December 31, 1904,
he threw all of the family's stocks and bonds on the fire in
a delirious fit of rage, and succumbed to the disease later

that night.

Egon himself had an incestuous relationship with his
younger sister Gerti. She regularly posed nude for him
while she was an adolescent and when he was sixteen and she
was twelve he took her by train to Trieste where they spent
the night in the same hotel at which their parents had spent

their honeymoon.

Schiele the artist was thus a product of his time as
well as his family history, as far as his interest in sexual
themes. The easily titillated yet equally easily censorious
public of fin-de-siecle Austria provided the perfect
audience for Schiele's exploration of his own angst-ridden
sexuality. Upon leaving the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in
1909 at the age of nineteen, Schiele began to produce one of
the most personal, self-analytical oeuvres in the history of
art. Schiele's great achievement was that he was able at a
remarkably tender age to forge a fully mature style and to
discover his preferred subjects along with his own

characteristic treatment of them. Schiele was thus able to

6
chronicle his feelings and experiences as they occurred and
so did not have to wait until later when these memories

would likely be colored by hindsight.

Chapter One

The Concept of Androgyny

One of Schiele's early masterpieces is his §£l£1
Portrait Sitting with Raised Arms of 1910 (fig. 1). At
first glance one notices the emaciation and bony angularity
of much Expressionist art, of which Schiele was an early
exponent. One soon notices, however, a peculiar treatment
of the sex organs which seems inconsistent with the
carefully described anatomy of the rest of the figure.
First, there is the ambiguous form of the genitals, the
penis is missing, and what is there bears a not wholly
convincing resemblance to a scrotum. The left breast is
also much larger and fuller than the right one, and looks
much like a woman's breast viewed straight on. These
alterations of Schiele's anatomy are puzzling at first, but
they yield much of their mystery if we study the concept of

androgyny and the history of its representation in art.

The concept of androgyny dates back to antiquity and
manifests itself in cultures all over the world and is a
peculiar concept, in that it deals with the union of both
sexes, or, more accurately, of their qualities or powers,
within one person. This is frequently celebrated as an
ideal, blissful state, and is often claimed as the goal of

mystical adepts.

8
Androgyny should not be confused with hermaphroditism,
in which a person is born with both ovarian and testicular
tissue, or pseudohermaphroditism, in which the sex organs

resemble those of the opposite sex.

True hermaphroditism is an extremely rare condition
with only sixty cases reported in medical literature
worldwide in this century before 1980.5 Such an individual
may have one testicle and one ovary, or sex glands that
contain a mixture of ovarian and testicular tissues.
Hermaphrodites usually have masculine genitals and feminine
breasts. Often there is some sort of vaginal opening
beneath the penis, and many hermaphrodites menstruate.
Frequently the uterus is incompletely developed, with, for
example, only one fallopian tube present. Genetically, true
hermaphrodites are usually females, possessing two X

chromosomes.6

Figure 2 is a photograph of a true
hermaphrodite who is genetically female, with a right

testicle and a left ovary as well as breast development.

Pseudohermaphrodites do not have both ovarian and
testicular tissue, but do have sex organs resembling those

of the opposite sex. This results from the simultaneous

 

5Herant A. Katchadourian and Donald T. Lunde,
Biological Aspects of Human Sexuality, 2nd edition, (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), p.100.

51bid. p.100.

9
presence, in significant amounts, of both male and female
sex hormones during embryological development. In females,
exposure to large amounts of androgens will often result in
enlargement of the clitoris (fig. 3) and even fusion of the
labia so as to resemble a scrotum. Such females are often
reared as males and may also become further masculinized at
puberty. Normal internal female organs may, however, be
present. In males, the testicles may not descend into the
scrotum and the halves of the scrotum may not have fused.
There may be a vagina, but no uterus, and at puberty there
is breast development. There may be a clitoris-like penis
with a urethral opening at its base. Such males may

resemble females to a remarkable degree (fig. 4).7

While hermaphrodites may have influenced the
representation of the mythical figure of Hermaphroditus in
ancient art (see below), their existence is probably not
responsible for the development of the concept of androgyny.
In fact, the birth of hermaphrodites was taken as a bad omen
in ancient Greece and such infants were routinely left to
die of exposure.8

The concept of androgyny is, at root, one of wholeness,

the stimulus for which is a primal sense of loss or

 

7Katchadourian and Lunde, pp.100-102.

8A. J. L. Busst, "The Image of the Androgyne in the
Nineteenth Century," in Romantic Mythologies, Ed. Ian
Fletcher, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), p.2.

10
separateness which many scholars and religious thinkers
perceive as the lot of humankind. This sense of loss is
said to stem from the time of creation. Many myths in fact
portray the creative act as one of separation. At certain
points the creation story found in Genesis 1:1-2:4a presents
it as such. The first creative acts of God involve
separation:
When God began to create the heaven and the earth
-the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over
the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping
over the water -God said, "Let there be light"; and
there was light. God saw that the light was good, and
God separated the light from the darkness. God called
the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And
there was evening and there was morning, a first day.
On the next day God separated the waters above the

firmament from those below, and on the third day God
separated the waters on the earth from the dry land.

9
The second creation story in Genesis, given in the
second chapter, contains another act of creation/separation
which was to have far reaching consequences. Here, Yahweh
removed a rib from slumbering Adam's side and fashioned it
into a woman. The result was an implied sense of loss, as

this separation resulted in a powerful attraction due to
which men and women join together in marriage to become one

"flesh" or one "body" (Hebrew has no word for "body").w

 

9Genesis 1:1—5, The Torah, 2nd edition, (Philadelphia:
The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1967).

1ocf. Genesis 2:24, New American Bible, (Camden: Thomas
Nelson, 1971).

11

Plato's Symposium also contains such a primeval act of

 

separation, and this too is the cause of sexual longing.

The character Aristophanes relates a fanciful story about
the nature of early humankind. At that time people were
round, with four arms and four legs, one head with two faces
facing in opposite directions, two pairs of ears, and two
sets of genitals. There were at that time three sexes
rather than two, with male joined to male, female to female,
and male joined to female, which last type Aristophanes
calls the Androgyne. Primeval humans had great strength and
intelligence and even dared to scale heaven to attack the
gods. The gods held a council to see if a way could be
found to restrain humankind, and eventually Zeus came up
with a solution. He decided to sunder them in two, which
would greatly reduce their strength. After this division
the two separated parts, each desiring the other, came
together and threw their arms about each other, not desiring
to do anything apart from the other, and thus literally
began dying from hunger and self-neglect. Zeus then devised
a new plan to save humankind. He turned the sex organs
around to the front, thus allowing sexual intercourse as it
is done today,both between men and women and between men.
This way, unlike the original method of procreation by which
they sowed their seed on the ground, they could now
experience satisfaction, and then rest and get on with their

business. We are given the origins not only of sexual

12
attraction, but also of sexual preference, as Aristophanes
informs us that those men who are descendants of the
original male/male humans are attracted to men, women
descended from female/female forebears are attracted to
other women, and men and women who descend from the

H For

Androgynes are each attracted to the opposite sex.
Plato's Aristophanes, then, sexual attraction and the
momentary bliss attending sexual intercourse are all that

remain of the primeval contentment of early mankind.

Aristophanes goes on to claim that, given a divinely
offered opportunity, a pair of lovers would choose to be
joined together into one body and one soul, never again to
be separated in this life or the next.12 Such in fact was
the fate of Hermaphroditus -son of the incestuous union of
Hermes and Aphrodite- and the Naiad Salmakis. In fact, it
is from this character that hermaphrodites derive their
name. One day when Hermaphroditus went to bathe in a
spring, Salmakis saw him and fell passionately in love with
the handsome youth. She then seized him and prayed to the
gods that they might be united forever, and her prayer was
immediately answered, as the two were fused into a single

being possessing both sexes. In Hellenistic representations

 

11Plato, The Dialogpes of Plato, vol. 1, translated by
B. Jowett, (New York: Random House, 1937), pp.316-319.

”Ibid., p. 319.

13
Hermaphroditus possesses feminine breasts as well as a penis
and scrotum, and is sometimes ithyphallic (fig. 5). This
type of hermaphrodite thus shows a horizontal division of

sex, with female organs above and male organs below.

The hermaphrodite appears again as a major figure in
the late Middle Ages in alchemy. Alchemy was an attempt to
unite the material and spiritual realms by finding a common
underlying order to which both adhered. The famous Emerald
Table of Hermes Trismegistus, a text purportedly by the
legendary Egyptian mystic, states, "What is below is like
that which is above, and what is above is like that which is

"B As a

below to accomplish the miracles of one thing.
result, alchemical texts tend to have a daunting complexity
coupled with a capricious use of symbols. These texts often

state that they are not intended to be wholly intelligible

to the uninitiated.

The alchemical work was an attempt to refine gold out
of base matter, but the difficulty in interpreting an
alchemical text is that all the operations are to be
understood as references to events in both the material
world and the soul of the adept. Alchemists sought to free

the soul from its imprisonment in the body just as they

 

13June Singer, Androgyny: Toward a New Theory of
Sexuality, (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1976), p.128.

14
sought to free gold from its imprisonment within base
matter. To accomplish this, it was necessary to reduce
matter to the condition it was in before God began His work
of creation, that is, to the state of undifferentiated unity
of chaos, which the alchemists called the prima materia.
The alchemist then began his own process of creation. The
production of the prima materia happened in a stage called
the ni redo, which is characterized by the utter blackness
of the original chaos. Being often referred to in the
alchemical literature as a period of destruction and
despair, it parallels the "dark night of the soul" of
mystical literature, or the descent into the underworld in
some mythologies. It may be experienced by the individual
as deep depression and hopelessness. A process of
purification follows which leads to a state called albedo or
"whitening". In this stage opposites are joined together
under the agency of operations personified by the
androgynous deity Mercury. Spiritually, one may experience
the pain of realizing that one is living a lie, or that life
seems to be without meaning and that a painful self-analysis
must be undertaken. The person must learn to integrate
forces in his psyche which he has neglected. Alchemists
often refer to the conjunction of sulphur and salt at this
stage. Sulphur is characterized as masculine and is related
to fire and the sun. Salt is feminine and comes from the

sea, whose tides are governed by the aspect of the moon.

15

This stage has been called the coniunctio oppositorum or the

 

"conjunction of opposites". The final stage is called
rubedo, when the red "philosopher's stone" appears. The
stone, often described as a red powder, was said to yield
unlimited quantities of gold when combined with a baser
metal, such as lead. A full reintegration of the psyche
will have been achieved at this point, and the subject will

know a new happiness.l4

Hermaphrodites occur frequently in alchemical
illustrations, often bearing the name "Rebis", meaning
"double being", and representing the stage of the work
called the coniunctio oppositorum. The hermaphrodite
generally has two heads, a man's and a woman's, and, if
nude, will often have one feminine breast and two different
sets of genitals (fig. 6). Unlike the ancient Greek
Hermaphroditus, this hermaphrodite is not so harmonious in
appearance, due to a distinct vertical division between its

sexes .

The androgyne is a significant image in non-Western
cultures as well. In India the god Siva is known to fuse
with his wife Parvati, creating the hermaphroditic deity

known as Ardhanarisvara, i.e., "The Lord who is half a

 

l4Singer., pp.128—l43.

16
woman".ls Like Salmakis, Siva acts under the spur of lust.‘6
Like the alchemical Rebis, Ardhanarisvara is another
"vertical" hermaphrodite. In fact, depictions of this god
often exhibit a deliberate tendency to emphasize this
"splicing" together of male and female down an imaginary
center line. Even the penis of this usually ithyphallic
deity is "sliced" in half, as it were, and masculine and
feminine dress, jewelry, and hairstyle distinguish each half

(fig. 7).

An abstract representation of androgyny is found in the
image of the T'ai Chi of Taoism (fig. 8). Here is a circle
out of which "the principles of reality" develop. The light
side (Yang) balances the dark side (Yin). These principles
of darkness and light can represent all opposites, however.
Yin is usually described as warm, moist, and feminine, while
Yang is cold, dry, and masculine. The surging, active Yang
is met and absorbed by the passive Yin, which takes over as
Yang begins to diminish. As one cannot exist without the

other, a small dot of its opposite is found in the center of

 

t5Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Womeny Androgynes. and
Other Mythigal Beasts, (Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press, 1980), p.317.

16Alain Danielou, The God; of India: Hindu Polytheism,
(New York: Inner Traditions International, 1985), p.203.

17
each principle; The T'ai Chi represents the rhythmic

interplay of these polarities.17

The androgyne assumes a somewhat sinister character in
the Late Romantic and Decadent culture of nineteenth century
Europe. This trend began with the publication of Theophile
Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin in 1835. It is an
historical romance based on the life of Madeleine de Maupin
d'Aubigny, a bisexual actress and transvestite of the
seventeenth century. Its basic structure parallels that of
Balzac's Seraphita, written at the same time, in which a man
and a woman fall in love with an androgyne who rejects them
both and, before disappearing forever, commands the two to
unite in his/her name. The difference is that Gautier
ignores the spiritual perfection of Balzac's androgyne and
makes his a paradigm of neo-pagan beauty. Gautier's preface
to the book is the first manifesto of aestheticism, in which
he attacks bourgeois notions of the social utility of art
and its need for moral content and declares that beauty
alone is the goal of art.18 Henceforth, the androgyne would
appear as a self-contained, and, very often, self-absorbed,

object of beauty in nineteenth century art and literature.

 

”Gail Gelburd, Androgyny in Art, (Hempstead, N. Y.:
Emily Lowe Gallery, 1982), no pagination.

18Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence
from Nefertiti t2, Emily Dickinson, (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1990), pp.408-409.

18

The concept of androgyny made a splash in Western
popular consciousness with a pseudo—scientific work
published shortly after the turn of the century by a
remarkable character named Otto Weininger. His Sex and
Character of 1903 posited that men and women contain
mixtures of masculine and feminine qualities in varying
proportions and that these even manifest themselves on the
cellular level. Weininger's book is, however, in no way a
celebration of the concept of androgyny, but is steeped in
misogyny and even anti—Semitism. Weininger, himself a Jew,
claimed that the Jews were the most "womanish", and
therefore least virtuous, of races and, because of the self-
loathing largely inspired by this belief, he took his own

life after completing the book in his twenty—third year.

The androgyne appears to have been born out of a
commonly felt desire for wholeness and for an end to any
sense of separateness from one's beloved. Perhaps the myth
of Ardhanarisvara best captures the early spirit of the
androgyne in representing the desire of lovers to capture
and sustain forever the intimacy and emotional nakedness of
orgasm. Mystics exalted the androgyne as the symbol of
spiritual union with the godhead and all of creation. In
the nineteenth century the androgyne assumed a new
significance with the advent of aestheticism. Self-

sufficiency turned into self-absorption, narcissism,

19
voyeurism, and obsessive masturbation. Late nineteenth and
early twentieth century Europe was gripped by a morbid
fascination with sex (by the end of the nineteenth century
the incidence of syphilis had reached epidemic proportions)
as well as by misogyny. One's own sexual desires were
feared and mistrusted as they could only lead one down a

road to ruin.‘9

 

19for an in-depth account of fin-de-siecle misogyny and
fear of sex, cf. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of? Perversity:
Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-ge-Siecle Cylture, (New
York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986).

Chapter Two

Schiele the Androgyne

Schiele's approach to the nude self-portrait developed
gradually, one might even say cautiously, in two paintings
of 1909-1910. The first, Salf Portrait 1, (fig. 9) is an
oil revealing traces of Gustav Klimt's influence in the
leafy, flowery area on the left and in the curling patterns
applied to the frock that Schiele appears to be shedding in
an act which has been likened to the emergence from a
Chrysalis.20 Schiele still allows his genitals to be
covered by a section of cloth that appears to be held up by
a sheer act of will. Schiele's gaze,leering at the viewer,
seems as much threatening as engaging, as if warning him of
the torrential outpouring of sexual angst that will appear
in subsequent self-portraits. Here, as in his seated
portrait of Gerti of the same year, we begin to see the

assertion of an existential void in his portraiture.

In a somewhat later oil titled Self—Portrait with
Trousers Pulled Down (fig. 10), Schiele is shown reclining
wearing a brief shirt or vest with his pants pulled down
below his knees, and he turns his head to gaze at the

viewer. Again, as in the earlier self-portrait, we do not

 

20Frank Whitford, Egon Schiele, (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1981), p. 51.

20

21
yet have an image of the artist completely nude, but rather
partially naked, his penis erect, his hand covering his
mouth in shame as if he had been caught in the act of
masturbating. A number of Schiele's self-portraits deal
with the subject of masturbation, and thus he seems to have
been preoccupied with not only the practice,but also with
observing himself in the act with the purpose of depicting
it. Indeed, the emaciated physique and the sunken, heavy-
lidded eyes could be meant to show the deleterious physical
effects that "self-abuse" was believed to cause. During
Schiele's childhood and adolescence one could still find
numerous books and articles written by the clergy and,
incredibly, medical professionals, recounting horror
stories of how many individuals had lost their health,
sanity, and even their lives as a result of addiction to
this "vice". No less remarkable were the treatments
advocated for the habit, including restraint with chastity
belts or strait jackets, castration, circumcision for both
men and women, and cauterization and even surgical removal
of the clitoris.21 None of the literature on Schiele
addresses his actual masturbatory habits or how these were

dealt with by his parents, however, those paintings which

 

21For a history of these practices cf. Chapter Three of
Alex Comfort, The Anxiety Makars: Some Curious

Preoccupations of the Medical Profession, (London: Thomas
Nelson and Sons, 1967).

22
treat this part of his life show no sign of sensual

enjoyment or even any humor in his depiction of it.

Two paintings of 1911 show more clearly Schiele's

preoccupation with the subject of masturbation. Self—

 

Portrait Masturbating (fig. 11) shows Schiele engaged in the
act itself. His right hand touches his penis, while his
left hand covers his scrotum with a stiff fingered gesture
that begs to be read as a sign and will be discussed later.
Stephen Walrod quotes a study by Phyllis Greenacre of some
unusually gifted patients of hers:
I have thought that such children were eroticized early
and if subjected to extreme frustration, sickness, or
bad handling got readily into states of frenzépd
masturbation, sometimes of a compulsive sort.
Walrod goes on to say that masturbation may have provided
Schiele with an outlet for relieving psychological tension
associated with such frustrations as the sickness of his
mother after his birth, the death of his elder sister
Elvira, his father's gradual loss of sanity and, finally,
his father's death. Besides these, other more immediate
circumstances could account for tensions at this time, such
as Schiele's uncertain finances as an aspiring artist in his

first years of living on his own, and the adamant refusal of

any financial assistance from his well-to-do uncle and

 

22Stephen T. Walrod, Egon Schiele: A Psychobiography,
Ph.D. diss., (Berkeley: The California School of
Professional Psychology, 1978), p.47.

23
guardian, Leopold Czihaczek. Schiele was also as yet
without a mistress, having only made the acquaintance of

Wally Neuzil in that year.

The other self-portrait of 1911, titled E;ga_(fig. 12),
shows Schiele again partly naked, wearing possibly the same
dark robe as in the gala-Portrait Masturbating, holding his
erect penis with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand
while he touches his glans with his right forefinger.
Unlike the Self Portrait Masturbating this portrait shows
the artist leering out at the viewer, as if to direct his
attention to what he is pointing at, making what was a
private act before the mirror a public one. His genitals
are exaggerated in size and are highlighted a bright pink,
unlike the rest of his body, which is an ashen gray, with
pale pink highlights on his lips, nose, ear, and partly
concealed right nipple. Although not actually represented
masturbating, Schiele is both sexually aroused and,

significantly, alone.

Again we find Schiele making the same sign over his
scrotum with his left hand that he made in the Self Portrait
Masturbating, with a wide space between his index and middle
fingers and his thumb extended. The significance of the
gesture is somewhat clearer in other works which will be

discussed later, but there is sufficient indication in this

24
work to conclude that the V-shape of the index and middle
fingers is a symbol for the female genitals, reproducing as
they do the appearance of the vulva with the labia spread
apart. Significantly, Schiele performs this gesture over
his scrotum, the part of the male anatomy homologous to the
female labia majora. Another clue to the feminine nature of
this sign, which appears in other of Schiele's works, is
that directly above it his right breast appears swollen-
"feminized"- in contrast to his left. Such an association
may have been suggested to Schiele by certain images of Siva
as Ardhanarisvara as discussed in chapter 1, although the
sense of serene fulfillment seen in such images is evidently
lacking in Schiele's work. Schiele is seated with his legs
spread wide apart, which increases the work's exhibitionist
character. If we study the painting for a few moments,
however, we notice that Schiele's legs terminate below the
knees. This , along with the deathly hue of the emaciated
body, Schiele's insistence on directing our attention to his
erect member, and his single breast, make for a disturbing,
even a confusing image. Comini accounts for the amputations
as representing the guilt -real or feigned, she does not
discount that Schiele may have been "playing to the
audience" of Freud's Vienna- that he felt about his

23

masturbation. Such an hypothesis has obvious merits,

 

23Alessandra Comini, Egon Schiele's Portraits,
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1974), p.62.

25
while Walrod posits, based on a similar phenomenon in the

earlier Self—Portrait Sitting with Raised Arms that Schiele

 

found himself abandoned and helpless in "a confining

4 Schiele

intrusive void" from which he could not escape.2
was indeed lonely at this time, and his reputation and
finances were far from secure, so he may have felt a certain
powerlessness that compelled him to represent himself in his
self-portraits this way. In light of the present portrait's
title -E£ga- and the fact that both paintings discussed here
are nudes dealing with sexual themes, yet another
interpretation may be possible. Certainly, the amputation
of legs or feet effectively suggest the inability to escape,
but to escape from what? "Our nature as sexual beings,” may
be the answer which Schiele gives in Eaga. The contrast
between the erect, brightly colored penis and the aura of
decomposition of the rest of Schiele's body may give the
clue to the main theme of the work-i.e. that our urge to
procreate as well as our mortality are, as it were, two
sides of the same coin. We are not immortal, so we must
reproduce to maintain our species, and by the same token, if
we reproduce, we must make way for the new generation by
dying. Certainly, there is nothing new in such a statement:
turn—of—the century art is rife with associations of sex and
death. One could argue, for example, that this very theme

is the basis for Edvard Munch's oeuvre. The explicitness of

 

2“Walrod, p. 58.

26
Schiele's image as well as what could be termed his
iconographic terseness- no setting, no other figures, just
the artist's own body, goes far beyond Munch's admittedly

disturbing images.

Such an interpretation helps clarify certain motifs and
stylistic peculiarities in Schiele's works. The frequent
use of sickly, unnatural colors for the flesh passages of
his works may be an acknowledgement of our mortal nature.
One can see a similar juxtaposition of deathly skin tones
with a bright pink healthy color in the mother and baby,
respectively, of The Dead Mother I of 1910 (fig. 13). The
"secret gesture" that Schiele makes throughout his works may
allude to the need for the opposite sex which is implanted
in us and which manifests itself in all of our sexual
feelings and actions, even when a member of the opposite sex

is not available.

A much more personal interpretation, that does not
necessarily exclude either of those just given, is also
plausible. Schiele may have wished to emphasize the
obsessive/destructive aspects of sex, showing himself with
decaying flesh in spite of, or perhaps because of, his
sexual arousal. The destructive force of sexuality would
certainly have been a concern of Schiele's, given his family

history. Considering the toll that syphilis had exacted

27
from his own family, as well as from numerous important
figures at that time, a reference to it in Schiele's art
should come as no surprise. Walrod suggests that Schiele,
who idolized his deceased father, may have identified with
the sexually "guilty" parent and felt compelled to perform
what was then generally regarded as a similarly self-
destructive sexual act, i.e., masturbation, regardless of

the outcome.25

Thus, the sapping away of vitality may be
what is meant by the use of sickly, unnatural flesh colors

in this and other self-portraits.

Moving back in time, we may now more easily understand
a series of four paintings from 1910. The works were bought
by the industrialist Carl Reininghaus, whom Comini describes

s"%, and

as "an avid collector of 'sensational' picture
these certainly fit that category. These are three self
portraits and a portrait of his sister Gerti, all painted on
square canvasses, in which the figures, completely nude, are
placed in a void. Only one of the paintings, the §2l£2
Portrait Sitting with Raised Arms, is extant, but black-and-
white photographs of all of the originals survive, along

with watercolor studies for some. (A deplorable number

Schiele's most important oils are lost, many surviving only

 

25Walrod, p.47.

26Comini, p. 49 .

28
in black and white photographs or reproductions, thus making

their interpretation problematic.)

When one looks at these works, one cannot help but
notice the peculiar forms of Schiele's genitals. In the
Self-Portrait Kneeling with Raiaad Hang; (fig. 14) the
genitals actually appear to be much more like a woman's than
a man's, and comparison with the companion Self-Portrait
with Handa on Hip; (fig. 15) will reveal the extent to which
the breasts have been feminized rather like the right breast
in Eaga. As exposed as the problematic genitals are the
bony angularity of the isolated pose causes the figure to
set on the canvas like a letter on a page- like a sign to be
read, and at the ends of those emaciated arms are hand
gestures that stand out starkly against the background as if
these are also signals that modify the sign of the body and
beg the observer to crack the code and read the message that
is so bluntly stated and yet hermetic. Here we also
encounter the V-shape gesture in the ring and little fingers
of his right hand. All trace of masculinity has not left
his body, however, as there appears to be the outline of a
huge erect phallus in his abdomen, terminating at the
sternum. This is perhaps clearer in the surviving
watercolor sketch, in which this phallus is colored a bright
yellow in contrast to the darker flesh tone of the rest of

the body. Schiele may have been aware of early Gothic

29

Italian Crucifixes, such as the Cross Number 15 of the

 

School of Pisa, of the late twelfth century (fig. 16). Here
the phallicization of the abdomen is highly detailed and

very similar to the manner of Schiele.

Turning to the Salf—Portrait Sittipg with Raised Arms
(fig. 1) we again encounter the phallicized abdomen (a motif
which Schiele will frequently employ). At the base of the
phallus appears a rounded form suggesting a scrotum or

possibly, as Walrod suggests, a womb—like circle.N

Again,
the left breast is feminized and, as Walrod points out, the
left shoulder blade next to it also projects in a breast-
like profile.28 Walrod sees the suggestion of female breast
also in the soft flesh of Schiele's right biceps, which he
is biting or nuzzling. Schiele must rely on himself for
comfort and sustenance, he is forced into an "androgynous"
state of self sufficiency.29 The intensity of the artist's
desires is underscored here by the fiery red glow of his
navel, nipples, and eyelid. Again, we see that the
genitals, unlike the rest of the figure, are not clearly
delineated. Here they appear to be neither specifically

male nor female. Walrod suggests that the painting is an

image of self-punishment from sexual guilt, that the ill—

 

27Walrod, p.59.
28Ibid. p.58.

”Ibid., p.58.

30
defined genitals are reddened scar tissue from castration
and that the lopping off of the feet is a further
displacement of this act. Walrod claims that Schiele craved
to exhibit his sexual and aggressive strivings but, fearing
punishment, he instead chose to expose his castrated state,
hiding his true desires in the phallus of his abdomen}0
The body certainly has a strong sense of being divided into
two halves, i.e., the lower half male and the upper half
female. The "masculine" half of Schiele's character,
failing in its role of self-assertion, forces Schiele to
turn to the "feminine" aspects of his character for
sustenance and protection. Perhaps an attempt at
integration of the masculine and feminine components of his
psyche are what Schiele suggests in the thrusting of the
phallus into the rib cage between his breasts, or perhaps it
is an aggressive attempt to re-establish masculine dominance
over the feminine part of his psyche, which had a prominent

role in his life at that time.

Significantly, a portrait of Schiele's sister Gerti was
also included in this group. The Portrait of Gaati Npga I
(fig. 17) is a stark image of adolescent vulnerability and
self absorption. Gerti stands in the center of the canvas,
her arms wrapped around herself in an awkward embrace. Her

face is turned away from us and her eyes are closed, just as

 

30Walrod, pp. 59-60.

31
Schiele had posed her in another major portrait the previous
year. Her seeming reverie is not entirely peaceful, nor her
self embrace one of self-satisfaction, for her right hand
reaches out in a clawing or grasping gesture while the left
forms a fist and appears to push away. The placement of her
arms now seems not merely self-caressing, but also self-
protecting, shielding her recently matured breasts. The
pose is a variation on that of the Belgian sculptor Georges
Minnes' famous Kneeling gay (fig. 18) which Schiele would
have seen when it was exhibited in Vienna at the
International Kunstschau of 1909. Schiele altered the
position of the hands to suggest his subject's internal
struggle between submission to her new—found sexual desire,
signified by the grasping gesture that she makes with her
left hand and towards which she turns her face, and the
resistance engendered by fear of the new feelings, from
which she turns away and against which she pushes with her
right hand. He also changed the placement of the arms to
produce a strongly emphasized V-shape before Gerti's
breasts. This arm gesture is an attempt to shield her
feminine nature, yet it is ultimately revealing of it, as it
may relate directly to the V—shaped finger gestures which
Schiele used in his galf-Portraitgglothed of 1909 (fig. 19).
Again, as in the Self-Portrait Sitting with Raised Agga, the
subject's feet are cut off, this time more subtly, as the

"cutting" is done by the edge of the canvass, and similarly,

32
the top of the head is missing, thus presenting the figure
as locked in place-caught at a time of life when one's urges

are both most exciting and most frightening.

Interestingly, Schiele presents the girl in a pose
originally assigned to a boy in Minne's work, and this is
not the only time in 1910 that we shall see a gender-switch
among Schiele's appropriation of poses from other artists.
The gender—switch in this instance may point to Gerti's
character as Schiele's feminine alter-ego or "completer".

In his study of incest, Jean Renvoize notes that such a
completing relationship may occur between children in
families in which there is a lack of healthy touching and
reassurance, where a brother and a sister might choose to
turn to one another for warmth. He also notes that children
in a dominant position, such as older brothers, may even
take what they desire by force“, though this may not have
been the case here, as Gerti continued to be a willing model
for Schiele even after he moved away from home and into his
own studio in 1907.32 Schiele indeed may have shared
certain sentiments with a Romantic, such as Percy Bysshe

Shelley, who extols sibling incest in certain of his poems,

such as Laon and Cythna. Shelley was himself reputed to

 

“Jean Renvoize, Incest: A Famaly Pattern, (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), p.138.

”Comini, p.30.

33
have had an incestuous relationship with his younger sister
Elizabeth, and his poems are often paeans to the power of
such relationships to restore "the primal unities where male
and female are no longer oppositions but continuities."33
Twitchell notes that incestuous situations such as those in
the Shelley family may have been as much a consequence of a
"confined area of social movement"34 as anything else, and
such an explanation may apply also to the Schiele family,
who lived in rural villages until a move to Vienna in 1906.
Such alienation may have been intensified by frequent moves,

as well as by the fact that Schiele had been held back in

school.35

A colored drawing of 1911 may reveal the close affinity
Schiele felt for his sister. The Self-Portrait with Raised
gag (fig. 20) shows Schiele reclining languidly, with his
body slightly inclined toward the viewer, and his head
leaning back with a dreamy expression on his face. The
penis is here flaccid, but once again we find an enormous
erect phallus, this time constituting the entire abdomen
from the hips to the ribs. The rest of the body is filled

in with water color, except for the head, and the few sparse

 

33James B. Twitchell, Forbidden Partners: The Incest
Taboo in Modern Cglture, (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1987), p.119.

“Ibia., p.119.

35Comini, p.192 n.19.

34
lines in this part of the figure describe a woman's face.
Comini notes that a number of such drawings exist in which
he/she caresses an erect penis or the disembodied face
performs fellatio on "its" own body.36 She remarks that the
features could be those of Wally Neuzil or of another model
whom Schiele used in the latter half of 1910 and 1911,:37 but
the features as rendered here are not unlike those of Gerti
as frequently recorded by Schiele. Here we have an instance
of a kind of union of two individuals rather like that of
Siva and Parvati or of Hermaphroditus and the naiad
Salmakis, but again, as we saw in gaps, there is a curious
absence of the serene cessation of desire that characterizes

the hermaphroditic state in mythology.

Two other watercolors of 1910 give significant examples
of Schiele's iconography of androgyny. The Self-Portrait
with Head Bent tg_the Left (fig 21) shows the artist
standing erect, but tilted to the left. Again, we find the
hidden phallus and scrotum in the abdomen, this time with a
very clear indication of the glans at the tip. There is
also a slight emphasis on the feminine character of the
right breast, with a thick circle of red framing the nipple.
Walrod remarks that the whole body is phallicized, being so

erect and elongated, with the arms and legs "cut off", as it

 

36Comini, p.92.

37Ibid., p.92.

35
were. He also finds indications again of masturbatory guilt
in the amputation of the arms, so that they could not touch
the genitals were they there, as well, of course, in the

m Schiele seems

very absence of the genitals themselves.
once again to reveal a conflict between his subconscious
desires and his conscious feelings about them. Although he
"punishes" himself by amputating limbs and genitals, his
desire cannot be hidden or extinguished and it still manages
to assert itself throughout the rest of his body. Perhaps
something of this conflict can be read in Schiele's peculiar
facial expression. If one covers over the left side of his
face, the right appears to regard us with a cool, aloof

gaze. With the right half covered, the left leers at us

with a lubricious grin.

The Self-Portrait Nude Facing Front (fig. 22) is the

 

masterpiece of the watercolor self-portraits executed in
this year. As in the Self-Portrait Seated with Raised Arms
the genitals are rendered ambiguously. Above them are the
giant scrotum and phallus, although here they are not so
easily recognizable. The right breast appears somewhat
feminine compared to the left. In the center of his chest,
and apparently the "goal" to which the giant phallus points,
is a bright green tinted object resembling a vulva. The

hand gestures again have sexual significance, as Walrod

 

“Walrod, p.67.

36
says: "[Schielel helplessly watches while behind his back
the traitorous hands perform a symbolic sexual act."39 We
see the "female" spread fingers in both hands here, as well
as the right thumb performing as phallus, according to
Walrod. Schiele gazes out at us with a grimace in which
Walrod finds a combination of disgust, revulsion, and pain.
He finds that Schiele's placement of his hands behind
himself is a desperate attempt to prevent himself from
masturbating, but that they-and his whole body, in fact-
betray him.40 His expression may be read as his reaction to

this failure.

The thumb as phallus is encountered in his Portrait of
Eguarg Kosmack (fig. 23) from earlier that same year. Here
the hands are placed between the knees and considerable
prominence is given to the thumbnails, recalling a flaccid
penis and its glans. Schiele played a similar trick with
the thumbs in his Portaait of PQLQi Lodginsky (fig. 24),
also of 1910, in which the thumbs are placed next to one
another so that the space between them suggests the parting
of the labia majora. In these two portraits Schiele seems
to have been using the thumbs to suggest that a person's
sexuality remains naked and exposed even when that person is

clothed. No doubt the pose as well as the message of these

 

39Walrod, p.72.

4°Ibid., pp.70-72.

37
two portraits derive from Edvard Munch's Puberty (fig. 25),
which depicts the sexual awakening and attendant fear of an
adolescent girl. The shadow which she casts looms up to
take on a presence indicating the girl's sexual destiny, but
Schiele here replaces this with the thumb signs. The thumbs
are also employed as phalluses in two later portraits which
have already been discussed, i.e., the Salf—Portraag
Masturbating and Eaga, Here the thumbs are strangely bent
and do not insert into the V-shape of the spread fingers,
but in both, they point directly to the penis and, in the
Self-Portrait Masturbating, the thumb helps form a V-shape
with the right hand opposing and counter balancing that in
the left. Perhaps the tension of the bent thumb is intended
as analogous to that of an erect penis. Again, we can trace

this gesture back to the Self-Portrait Clothed of 1909.

Chapter Three

Schiele and the Language of Gesture

In assessing Schiele's oeuvre, the viewer cannot help
noticing the degree to which the artist employs gesture in
his works. Both for the frequency of and degree of emphasis
given to highly self-conscious gestures, Schiele's works are
remarkable and perhaps even singular. Often, the hands are
given such prominence in the compositions that they simply
must be meant to convey essential information (cf. gala;
Portrait Clothed and Self-Portrait Nude Facing Front). Even
after the most casual examination of Schiele's works, the
viewer wonders what significance these gestures may have had
for the artist and what he may have wanted them to

communicate to the viewer.

An exaggerated importance given to gesture was
certainly one of the hallmarks of Viennese Expressionism.
Kokoschksa's famous Hans and Erika Tietze of 1909 (fig. 26)
is a good example, and the nervously gesturing figures of
Kokoschka were certainly known to Schiele. It is apparent,
however, that Schiele's interest in hands and gesturing goes
back farther than the early portraits of Kokoschka and even
before the move to Vienna. Around 1906, while still living
in Klosterneuburg, Schiele produced a Magonnafang Child

(fig. 27) under the tutelage of the local drawing

38

39
instructor, Professor Ludwig Karl Strauch. It is a work of
remarkable power and concentration, and all the more so when
one considers the tender age of its creator. With thin,
skeletal hands the Madonna presents the Child to us while He
in turn seems to address us with His upturned hand. In this
one chalk drawing we are introduced to Schiele's fascination

with gesture and religious subjects.

There is a definite consistency in the types of hand
gestures depicted by Schiele, making possible the
classification of some. Schiele has a preference for
gestures that show the hand with the fingers held straight
out, often in a manner which appears stiff, unnatural, and

deliberately self-conscious.

Figure 28 illustrates the principle gestures of this
type which Schiele employs. I do not wish to claim that my
list is complete or that these "stiff fingered" gestures are
the only ones which Schiele uses or to which he may assign
significance. I list them because they seem to constitute
the most significant group of gestures in Schiele's works.

1. Space between index and middle fingers.
II. Space between middle and ring fingers.
III. Space between ring and little fingers.
IV. Space between index and middle fingers, and
between ring and little fingers.
V. Space between all fingers.
VI. All fingers held together.
VII. Space between index and middle fingers, and
between middle and ring fingers.

40
In all cases the thumb is tucked into the palm and, as
Schiele presents these gestures with the back of the hand
towards the viewer, the effect is that the thumb (a

phallus?) is amputated.

Looking at the arrangements of the fingers in these
gestures, it appears that their positioning could be
systematic, that is, that their arrangement could depend on
a significance assigned to each finger. We have no record
of what system, if any, Schiele may have had in mind, but
there are some which are fairly well-known and which he

easily could have discovered.

The first system, and the one certainly most likely
known by a person raised as a Catholic in a Catholic
country, is that of the significance assigned to the fingers
of the right hand when a Catholic crosses himself. In
performing this act, he may hold his thumb, forefinger, and
middle finger together at their tips, while letting his ring
finger and little finger rest against his palm. The first
group of fingers signifies the Trinity, with the thumb
representing God the Father, the index representing God the
Holy Ghost, and the middle finger representing God the Son.

The remaining two fingers are emblematic of Christ's dual

41
nature, the ring finger standing for His divine nature and

the little finger for His human nature.41

Palmistry presents another system, in which each finger
is associated with a particular deity. The thumb is the
finger of vitality and energy. It is associated with
Hercules for virility, and the ball at its base is the Mount‘
of Venus, which governs increase and creativity.42 Here is
a possible source for Schiele's use of the thumb as phallus.
The index is the finger of Jupiter, and governs an
individual's relation to "external" life. The middle finger
is the finger of Saturn, and straddles those halves of the
hand dealing with the "external" and "internal" life,i.e.,
the social and emotional parts of life. The ring finger is
the finger of Apollo and is associated with artistic
ability. The little finger is the finger of Mercury and is
related to our intimate relationships with other people.”
No significance is assigned to groupings of fingers in

palmistry texts, but interestingly, a tendency to hide the

thumb is said to be a symptom of anxiety and unhappiness,

 

41Ad de Vries, Dictionagy of S mbols and Ima er ,
(Amsterdam and London: North-Holland Publishing Company,
1974), p.184-85.

”Ibid., p.184.
43Fred Gettings, The Book of the Hand: An Illustrated

History of Palmistr , (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1965), pp.78-
111.

42
and this is exactly what characterizes so many of Schiele's

pictures.44

The first of Schiele's gestures which we will look at,
gesture I, occurs quite frequently in his works. It
sometimes occurs alone, as in Delirium (fig. 29), Death and
the Maiden (fig. 30), or The Poet (fig. 31), but it also
appears combined with other gestures, as in Melancholy (fig.
32), The Hermits (fig. 33), The Embrace (fig. 34), and
Preacher (fig. 35). Schiele even had himself photographed
performing this gesture (fig. 36), and yet he is not without
precedent in his use of it. In the frontispiece to Europe
(fig. 37), William Blake's creator God performs this
gesture, also with the thumb hidden. Standing for the split
in man's character between the spiritual and the material,
with the middle, ring, and little fingers representing the
Trinity and thus man's spiritual aspect, and the index
finger representing man's fallen, material state, it is
apparent that the gesture would have appealed to Schiele, as
some of the pictures which contain it show a religious
preoccupation that is emphasized by the titles that he gave
them, e.g., The Hermits and Preacher, while others deal with
sexual angst, e.g., Melapcholy, Deliriug, and Death and the
Maiden. If Schiele was sensitive to Blake's Neoplatonic

proclivities, he easily could have chosen to use this sign

 

“Ibid., p.85-86.

43
in connection with sexual activity, i.e., those acts which
most strongly affirm and perpetuate our fallen, material
nature. This indication of a duality through a hand gesture
enriches the dominant theme of sexual duality and the union

of the sexes in the androgyne discussed in Chapter One.

Schiele may have been alerting us to his understanding
of human nature by the gesture which he uses in Melancholy.
Not only is he performing gesture I, but he is using his
index finger to pull down his lower eyelid. This eyelid
pull is a gesture common in central Europe, meaning either
"be alert" or "I am alert".45 Schiele employs this gesture
elsewhere, as in Self—Portrait with Hair Band (fig. 38),
Self-Portrait with Hand to Cheek (fig. 39), and Levitation
(fig. 40). Schiele is perhaps indicating the artist's
nature as one who is alert to matters escaping the attention

of the ordinary person.

Gesture II is also common in Schiele's oeuvre. One
finds it in works with a religious connotation such as
Mother and Child (fig. 41), Self-Seers I (fig. 42), and 11g
Hermits Praying (fig. 43). It also occurs in a nude

portrait of Mime van Osen (fig. 44) as well as Self-Portrait

 

45Desmond Morris et. al., Gestures: Thair Origins and
Distribution, (New York: Stein and Day, 1979), pp.69-78.

44
with Spread Fingers (fig. 45), Melancholy, and Self—Portrait

with Hand to Cheek.

Once again, Schiele's use of a gesture is not without
precedents. In Judaism, when the priests, or kohanim,
deliver the Priestly Blessing, they hold out both hands at
shoulder height with palms facing forward. The thumbs
extend and touch each other at their tips, and there is a
space between the middle and ring fingers of both hands.
This device has become the emblem of the kohanim and is

often carved on their tombstones (fig. 46).46

Gesture II also occurs in a very different context. In
1910 Arthur Edward Waite published his version of the tarot
deck. Card XV shows the Devil with his right hand raised
with the space between the middle and ring fingers (fig.47).
Traditionally, the Devil in the tarot is an androgyne, a
fact which can be seen more clearly in an eighteenth-century
design by Court de Gebelin, which was reprinted in 1888 by
Ely Star in Les Mysteres de l'Horoscopa (fig. 48).“ Here
the Devil clearly has feminine breasts and also raises his
hand in a gesture very similar to that in the Waite tarot.

The Devil's androgyny is emphasized further in a design

 

“Encyclopedia Judaica, s.v. "Priestly Blessing».

47Stuart R. Kaplan, The Encyclopedia of Tarot, (New
York: U.S. Games Systems, 1978), p. 23.

45
published by the Swiss occultist Oswald Wirth in 1889 in
which the planetary sign for Mercury, the alchemical

androgyne, is placed at his groin (fig. 49).48

The theme of androgyny was, as we have seen, of great
significance for Schiele. The appropriation of a sign from
another androgynous being may have had great appeal for him.
The artist's androgyny can thus be underlined, as it were,
in a nude self-portrait like the lost Self-Seers I in which
the artist appears to possess female genitals. Androgyny
can also be established as a theme in such works as Mother
apg_ghild I, Melapgholy, and Self-Portrait with Spreag
Fingers in which the revelation of the anatomy is absent or
incomplete. A further indication of the possible duality
signified by the gesture can be found in the black vase in
the background of Self-Portrait with Spread Fingers, in
which the vase, which possesses a human facial profile,
seems to grow out of the back of Schiele's head. The actual
vase used in this painting has been photographed. Unlike
its shadowy apparition in the painting, the vase possesses
definite features, and is composed of a series of faces,
each with a distinct expression, yet each linked to its
neighbor by a common eye (fig. 50). The vase itself may
thus have provided Schiele with the inspiration for the

composition.

 

4BIbid., p. 23.

46

Given the publication date of 1910 for the Waite tarot
and the appearance a year earlier of the gesture in Mother
and Child I, the source and significance of the gesture
remain problematic. Perhaps this gesture is derived from
the design by Court de Gebelin. Gesture II may ultimately
derive, however, from the Jewish Priestly Blessing. Just as
this gesture became a device for identifying the priests, so
Schiele may have appropriated it with the aim of emphasizing
the priestly nature of the artist. Certainly, Schiele's
oeuvre is rife with religious subjects, and the gesture can

be found in such pictures as Self-Seers I, Two Hermits

 

 

Praying and Mother and Child I, with its strong Madonna and
Child associations. The Christ Child has traditionally
been understood to be a priest who grows up to sacrifice

himself.

Gesture III can be found in the Self-Portrait Nude

 

gaging Frgnt, and in Strigapgangao-Back Viay (fig. 51). As
we have seen in palmistry, the little finger is connected
with intimate relationships with others. Interestingly,
this gesture in Schiele is often performed at or near the
level of the genitals. In Coitus (fig. 52) the woman's
little finger points at the ring formed by the thumb and
index finger of her left hand -a phallic gesture. Obviously
Schiele felt that this sign was important in this

composition as the woman's left arm would have to be

47
lengthened to a remarkable degree in order for her to reach
around her lover. Schiele may have also have been familiar
with other examples of the use of this gesture in a sexual
context. Fred Gettings draws our attention to the
Annunciation with St. Emidius by Carlo Crivelli (fig. 53) in
which the little fingers of both Mary's hands are held apart
from the others. In this context, Gettings claims that this

gesture is a symbol of the Incarnation.49

Gesture IV is one of Schiele's favorites, judging from
the frequency with which he employs it. We have seen it

before in the Self-Portrait Masturbating, the Self—Portrait

 

Keeling with Raised Hands, the Self-Portrait Clothed, the
Self-Portrait Nude Facing Front, The Hermits, and
Aavitation. This gesture also happens to be one of the most

frequently encountered in previous works of art.

The earliest use known to me of Gesture IV is found in
Italian art of the Twelfth century. The Chriat Pantocrator
mosaic in the conch of the apse of the Cathedral of Cefalu

m shows Christ

in Sicily, dated 1148 by Frederick Hartt,
making the gesture with His left hand, in which He holds a

Bible (fig. 54). Later, on a cross of the Christus

 

49Gettings, p.109.

50Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art:
Painting, SculptureI Architagtura. 3rd ed., (New York: Harry
N. Abrams, 1987), P.28, fig. 18.

48
Triumphans type from the early thirteenth century by
Berlinghiero Berlinghieri, Christ makes the gesture with
both hands (fig. 55). Schiele may have been aware of this
cross as well as the Christ on the cross in figure 16 as the
abdomen is phallicized as in some of Schiele's self-
portraits (e.g. galf-Portrait Sitting with Raised Arms, and
Self-Portrait with Haad Bant to the Left). Much later, in
Verrocchio's famous Baptism of Christ (fig. 56), John the
Baptist makes the gesture. Most often by far, one
encounters the gesture in representations of the Madonna and
Child. A notable example is the Madonna della Candelletta
of the early 14905 by Carlo Crivelli (fig. 57), in which the
Madonna's fingers are elongated almost to the degree one

finds in Schiele.

The gesture is more pronounced in Caravaggio's Madonna
of Loreto (fig. 58). One even finds it in Raphael's famous
Sistine Madonna (fig. 59), as well as in a 19th century work
that is obviously dependant upon it for inspiration -
Bouguereau's Madonna of the Angels (fig. 60). In this case
the gesture is moved to the left hand and made even more
pronounced. Bouguereau's adjustment leads one to conclude
that he was aware the gesture possessed some significance.
Michelangelo used the gesture in his Bruges Madonna (fig.
61), but he assigned it to the Christ Child and placed it in

a slightly obscure location (detail, fig. 62). In a later

49
work, in a different context, the gesture appears on the
Sistine Ceiling in the two most famous hands in the history
of art -those of God and Adam in The Creation of Adam

(detail, fig. 63).

Once again we find a source for Schiele's gesture
occurring in the work of the mystic poet/artist William
Blake, who was also much enamored of the work of
Michelangelo. God performs it with his left hand in Gag.
Waiting upon the Tables of the Covenant (fig. 64). Here the
fingers are drawn in a manner strongly reminiscent of Carlo

Crivelli's Madonna della Candeletta. It appears again in

 

The Reunion of the Soul and the Body in both of the upraised

hands of the lower figure (fig. 65).

Gesture IV is not confined to religious art; it is also
found in portraiture. Bronzino was fond of it, and one can
find it in his Portrait of a Young Man (fig. 66) as well as
his Portrait of Maria de'Medici as a Girl (fig. 67).

Artists of lesser note also exploited it. The seventeenth
century English physician and hermetic scholar Robert Fludd
performs it in an engraved portrait (fig. 68), as does the
Elector Palatine Frederick V in an engraved portrait of
himself and Princess Elizabeth of England, produced to

commemorate their marriage (fig. 69).

50

These last two portraits link the use of this gesture
with the leading figures of an emerging hermetic movement in
the early seventeenth century. Robert Fludd did a
prodigious amount of writing, including the monumental
Upgiuague cospi majoris scilicet et minoris metaphysica,
physica, atguafitachnica histogia (Technicaly Physicalyyand
Metaphysical Histopy of the Maggocosm and the Microcosm),
the first part of which was published in 1617.51 Frederick
V made his court the center of hermetic scholarship in the
second decade of the seventeenth century, and it appears
that the Rosicrucians, who were heavily involved with

alchemy, originated there.52

The connection with alchemy again points significantly
to Schiele's interest in androgyny. The androgyne was one
of the most prominent symbols in alchemical thought, and it
was used to illustrate various stages of the process of
refining base metals into the so-called philosopher's stone.
The emphasis in alchemy on the union of the sexes was so
great, in fact, that it was believed that the work had to be
conducted by the alchemist together with a female assistant,

his ”soror".

 

51For details on the career of Robert Fludd, see
William H. Huffman, Robert Fludd and the End of the
Renaissance, (London and New York: Routledge, 1988).

52cf. Frances A. Yates' fascinating The Rosicrucian
Enlightenment, (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1972).

51
An alchemical hermaphrodite appears in the engraving

from Michael Maier's Symbola aureae mensae, published in

 

Frankfurt in 1617, which we looked at in Chapter one (fig.
1). The hermaphrodite clearly performs gesture IV with its
left hand, and does so with a stiffness that gives it the
quality of a sign. The gesture appears to have had a
definite association with hermaphrodites. It occurs also in
an engraving of hermaphrodite Siamese twins from Caspar
Bauhinus' De hermaphroditum monstrosorumgue published in
Frankfurt in 1600 (fig. 70), in which all four hands perform

the gesture.

We see the gesture again in another alchemical work by
Michael Maier, in Emblem 38 of Atalanta fugiens (fig. 71),
also published in Frankfurt in 1617. Here the myth of
Hermaphroditus is illustrated. Here Hermaphroditus' parents
are shown just prior to their lovemaking, and in the
background Hermaphroditus the androgyne stands astride
Parnassus, the two—peaked mountain, through which passes the
axis of the world.53 Again, gesture IV appears both in

Hermaphroditus' left hand as well as in Hermes' right.

Other elements of alchemical iconography may have been

known to Schiele, for example the representation of the

 

53Elemire Zolla, The Androgyne: Reconciliation of Male
and Female, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), p.45.

 

52
fixation of the element mercury, here taken from an
alchemical treatise published in 1572 titled Qalla
Transmutatione Metallica (fig. 72). Here the metal is
represented in the person of the god Mercury, whose fixation
is represented by the loss of his hands and feet. Schiele
is in much the same condition in his Self-Portrait with
Raised Arms (fig. 1). His feet are missing, and his hands
are hidden from our view, so that it is not clear whether he
actually possesses them or not. Interestingly too, Mercury
-both the god and the metal— were consistently understood in
alchemy as androgynes, whether physically represented as
such in illustrations or not. Few of Schiele's self-
portraits have projected his androgyny as strongly as this

one .

Another symbol used in alchemy, which may have had a
personal appeal for Schiele, was that of the marriage of
brother and sister. Again, the theme of androgyny was given
emphasis through the sexual union of siblings. The event is
depicted in Emblem 4 from Atalanta fugiens (fig. 73). Here
the woman embraces her brother while clearly performing

gesture IV with her left hand.

We do not know what prompted Schiele's apparent

interest in alchemical illustrations, but the incest theme

53
may have had a strong attraction for him. One artist whose

work Schiele knew may provide the key.

The Belgian artist Fernand Khnopff's works were known
and admired in Vienna and, like Schiele, he had a powerful
attraction to his own sister. Khnopff frequently employed
his sister Marguerite's likeness in paintings with

androgynous themes.54

One portrait dating from 1887 has her
standing, holding her left arm behind her back (fig. 74).
The pose is reminiscent of Schiele's Self-Portrait Nude
Facing Front (fig. 22). If it served him as inspiration it
is interesting to note that Schiele performs gesture IV with
his lei: hand, which is the same gesture used in the
alchemical illustration of the marriage of brother and
sister. Khnopff was one of the artists exhibiting at
Josephin Peladan's Rosicrucian Salons held in Paris during
the 1890's. Peladan himself was a writer whose entire
oeuvre was devoted to the ideal of the androgyne, and he
played a key role in launching the Rosicrucian revival of
the late nineteenth century, setting himself up as high
priest and prophet and assuming the title "sar".55

Peladan's writings were in fact known to Schiele's early

 

54cf. William R. Olander, "Fernand Khnopff's Art or the
Caresses: the Artist as Androgyne," Marsyas 18 (1975-76).

55cf. Robert Pincus-Witten, Occult Symbolism in France:

Josephin Peladan and the Salons de la Rose-Croix,(New York
and London: Garland Publishing, 1976).

54
mentor, Gustav Klimt, since 1901, and Schiele may have
learned of them through Klimt.56 Khnopff, Peladan, and the
Rosicrucian revival may well have directed Schiele towards
the early seventeenth century origins of the Rosicrucians,
and from there to the alchemical texts in which this

movement was so keenly interested.

Another possible source for gesture IV is in the work
of Aubrey Beardsley, in which it is practically ubiquitous,
however subtle (fig. 75). In 1912-13 Schiele painted a
portrait of then fifteen-year-old Erich Lederer, son of a
well-to-do Jewish family with whom Schiele was staying at
the time (fig. 76). Erich possessed artistic proclivities,
and in a letter to Arthur Roessler Schiele mentions that the
boy draws "like Beardsley".S7 Perhaps this is the reason
Schiele includes gesture IV in the boy's portrait, making it
so pronounced. The portrait also recalls Bronzino's

Portrait pf a Young Man in the subject's pose, and this

picture seems to be Schiele's most direct source.

Schiele must have been aware of the connection between
gesture IV and religious art, as evinced by his self-
portrait as a latter day St. Sebastian in the poster which

he designed for an exhibition at the Arnot Gallery (fig. 77)

 

56Comini, p.217 n.33.

57Comini, p.114.

55
—an apparent reference to his imprisonment in 1912 on
grounds of "immorality" and "seduction". Here both hands
are raised, but unlike the traditional representations of
the saint with his gaze directed heavenward, Schiele's eyes
are closed and his head hangs as if he had already expired.
He thus appears as though nailed to an invisible cross, and
both hands perform gesture IV. Schiele appears to have
wanted to combine the figures of Christ and St. Sebastian,
perhaps seeing the execution and miraculous revival of both

as parallel to his prison experience.

The last three gestures are more resistant to
interpretation than the first four, owing to the fact that
Schiele employs them less frequently than he does gestures
I—IV (I have only two examples of gesture VII) and, with the
possible exception of gesture VII, I have found no
convincing examples of their application in earlier works of
art. Therefore it is difficult to establish a context for
these gestures.

Part of the difficulty in finding an art historical
context for the use of a gesture is being able to determine
whether a certain configuration of the fingers is actually
intended to be read as a sign or not. In Blake's
frontispiece to Europe gesture I is obviously meant as such.
What do we make of the goddess' right hand in Botticelli's

Birth of Venus (fig. 78), however, in which this gesture

56
seems so unforced and spontaneous? Gestures such as II and
IV which, depending on the degree of the spread, are not so
easy to do, present us with somewhat less of a problem when

we encounter them.

Gesture V can be found in the rear figure in §elf~Seers
L, in the subject's right hand in the Portrait ofaAgthur
Roessler (fig. 79), in the Madonna's left hand in the Hgly
Family (fig. 80), in Self-Seers II (fig. 81), and even in a

photograph taken of Schiele by Anton Romako (fig. 82).

Gesture VI appears in the Portrait of Gerti Sghiele
(fig. 83), Agony (fig. 84), Cardinal and Nap (fig. 85), and

Conversion (fig. 86).

As with the other gestures, we find that V and VI are
found in both portraits and religious or allegorical works.
Beyond that, it is difficult to make any iconographic

distinctions between them.

Gesture VII appears in the father's left hand in Aggy
Family as well as the hand of the central figure of
Conversion, both religious works. I have found one possible
precedent for its use in the St. Barbara Altarpiece of 1479
by the Sienese artist Matteo di Giovanni (fig. 87), in which
the enthroned saint performs the gesture with the hand with

which she holds her attribute, the tower.

Conclusion

Egon Schiele was very much a product of his time. Fin-
de-siecle Europe viewed sex in all its aspects with a
mixture of fascination and dread. Schiele combines both
outlooks brilliantly in his self-portraits. One could say
that he was his own most perfect subject as, naturally, one
is more sensitive to one's own feelings than one is to
anyone else's, and thus better able to portray them. The
self-portrait therefore allowed Schiele to capture fully the
tense, febrile sexuality of youth, compounded by its

attendant yearning and loneliness.

The theme of androgyny had a powerful appeal for
Schiele, especially while he produced the self-portraits of
1910-1911. Schiele was living alone at this time and would
not meet Valerie Neuzil until sometime in 1911, so it
appears likely that masturbation was the primary outlet for
Schiele's sexual feelings at this time. In a situation
where he had to be, in effect, his own lover, Schiele must
have been aware of the androgynous task this imposed on his
own psyche. The literature of the Late Romantics and
Decadents was not unknown to Schiele, and their theme of the
masturbatory self-sufficiency and self-absorption of the
androgyne may have had a strong appeal for him at this time.

Although masturbation could serve as an outlet for sexual

57

58
tension, it could not substitute for love, and we frequently

encounter a sense of shame (Self-Portrait with Trousers

 

Pulled Down), panic (Delirium), and even self-loathing
(Self-Portrait Nude Facing Front) in the self-portraits.
Clearly, masturbation was not adequate to meet Schiele's
emotional needs. For this reason the androgyne of the
Decadents appears to have appealed to him the most, and to
have colored his appropriations from earlier images of the
androgyne. Thus, the androgyne appears in Schiele's art as
a very personal expression of adolescent suffering and

longing.

There remains, however a peculiar tension in Schiele's
images. Very often his poses and expressions convey an
angst which is at odds with the messages of bliss and inner
peace inherent in the sources of his androgynous imagery.
Surely, the significance of his sources could not have
eluded Schiele, and therefore this tension must have been
deliberate, so one is left with the question of what he may
have meant by it. Perhaps Schiele meant to depict a sense
of longing for a state of peace which was so different, as
well as distant, from the anguish which he felt on account
of his loneliness and longing. One could also take this a
step further and claim that it may have been the irony
inherent in the unattainability of this state for Schiele

which he actually wished to highlight, contrasting it with

 

59
the highly unsatisfactory, "androgynous" state of
masturbatory self-sufficiency which was his lot in the years
1910-1911. Whatever the significance of this tension, it is
clear that Schiele's works do not reveal their meaning
easily. Schiele's paintings, so highly personal and rich in
allegory, may finally remain a closed book. Here may lie
the ultimate tension in Schiele's works, in that they seem
to cry out for interpretation, and yet resist it so

strongly.

BI BLI OGRAPHY

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Busst, A. J. L. "The Image of the Androgyne in the
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Bynum, Carolyn Walker. Jesus as Mother: Stagies in the
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1982.

Comfort, Alex. The Anxiety Makers: Some Curious
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Comini, Alessandra. Schiela in Prison. Greenwich, Conn.: New
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Danielou, Alain. The Gods of India: HingapPolytheism. New
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Delcourt, Marie. Herpaphrodite: Mytha and Ritea of the
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Dijkstra, Bram. "The Androgyne in Nineteenth Century Art and
Literature." Comparative Literature 26 (1974): 62-73.

Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in
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Eliade, Mircea. Mephistopheles and the Androgyne. New York:
Sheed and Ward, 1965.

60

61

EncycAgpedia Judaica. 16 vols. Jerusalem: Keter Publishing
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Gelburd, Gail. Androgyny in Art. Hempstead, N.Y.: Emily Lowe

Gallery, 19 2.

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62

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63

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FIGURES

64

 

Fig. 1. Schiele, Self-Portrait gitting with Raised Arms.

65

 

Fig. 2. Hermaphrodite.

66

 

Fig. 3. Female Pseudohermaphrodite.

67

 

Fig. 4. Male Pseudohermaphrodite.

 

Fig. 5. Greek Statue of Hermaphroditus.

69

, .\\“\.

.,..p\.\xV\\
—. ..

f

\n

.\ \\\\

.\ .\~

\

.\

Ewe

2% ..

sank

 

\.

H. .. ..\l\.......\\\.\\\.\,.

 

 

6. Alchemical Hermaphrodite.

Fig.

70

 

Fig. 7. Indian Statue of Ardhanarisvara, 12th century.

71

 

Fig. 8. T'ai Chi.

72

 

Self-Portrait I.

Schiele,

9'

Fig.

73

 

Fig. 10. Schiele, Salf—Portrait with Trousers Pulled Dom.

74

 

Fig. 11. Schiele, Self—Portrait Masturbatin .

 

75

 

 

Schiele, Eros.

12.

Fig.

76

 

Fig. 13. Schiele, The Dead Mother___I_.

77

 

Fig. 14. Schiele, Self-Portrait Sitting with Raised Arms.

78

 

Fig. 15. Schiele, Self-Portrait with Hands on Hips.

79

 

Fig. 16. School of Pisa, Cross No. 15, late 12th century.

80

 

 

Portrait of Gerti Nude.

17. Schiele,

Fig.

81

 

Bo .

Georges Minne, Kneelin

18.

Fig.

82

 

 

Self-Portrait Clothed.

19. Schiele,

Fig.

83

        

............I.d.. 1......” .....a..0.. $2.113... ......2........1.... .....5....n...3 3... ......2 3.4.”: 5...”?! ......n: .54.... . .
.‘u !e \c; . . o o . o.\.. o . a... e .
.. o . . . .- . . .. o o .a“.

A
‘1-
. 4.
u
7|

I

'

.
‘

I

...... .......9.r...

‘1 . . ..

....JMMHH...’ ..., .. ..-..m........n H . .. I... “.../...... .1. ...- ... ...... ...”..v 2... Wm”. .u—Um. . ”4.1?4. 1
7... .... . ... .. . . ...... .. .. n. . ... ...”...H... . ... . 0.. . .

_.uw..d ...... ........ . "l. r. ... ....~ . .. . .. . .. . 1. ....rs. o. .1... .

  

 

 

Fig. 20. Schiele, Self-Portrait with Raised Leg.

84

 

 

 

 

t with Head Bent to the Left.

1

 

Self-Portra

21. Schiele,

Fig.

85

 

t

 

Self-Portrait Nude Facing Front.

22. Schiele,

Fig.

86

 

......
a

. .55”. ’5...

    

 

          

 

Schiele, Portrait of Eduard Kosmack.

23.

Fig.

87

 

Fig. 24. Schiele, Portrait of Poldi Lodzinsky.

88

.a.»

A ”I"
#7.: q‘ '7“:

 

Fig. 25. Edvard Munch, Puberty.

89

. 0-”.
£r-g.
".1.” {IL—1’

 

Fig. 26. Oskar Kokoschka, Hans and Erika Tietze.

 

90

 

Fig. 27. Schiele, Madonna and Child.

<f§ eta 5'3

 

Fig. 28. Schiele's

91

 

 

 

 

Principle Hand Gestures.

H3 3

 

 

 

 

 

 

92

 

Delirium.

29. Schiele,

Fig.

93

 

Death and the Maiden.

30. Schiele,

Fig.

94

 

Fig. 31. Schiele, The Poet.

95

w

3.: V
a~P D‘Q.

r

.8...

 

Melanchol

Schiele,

32.

ig.

F

96

 

 

The Hermits.

Schiele,

33.

Fig.

97

 

Fig. 34. Schiele, The Embrace.

Fig.

35.

Schiele,

98

\

x
‘.

i-l

The Preacher.

 

\\
\

ti:-

.|
n,‘
f .‘

...:

99

 

Fig. 36. Photograph of Egon Schiele, 1914.

100

 

Fig. 37. William Blake, Frontispiece to Euroge.

101

 

Fig. 38. Schiele, Self—Portrait with Hair Band.

102

 

Fig. 39. Schiele, Self-Portrait with Hand to Cheek.

 

103

 

Levitation.

40. Schiele,

Fig.

104

 

1d.

i

Mother and Ch

Schiele,

. 41.

Fig

105

 

Self—Seers I.

42. Schiele,

Fig.

106

. ova,» w!

 

   
 

In

Two Hermits Pra

43. Schiele,

Fig.

107

 

Fig. 44. Schiele, Portrait ongigg van Osen.

108

 

Fig. 45. Schiele, Self-Portrait with Spread Fingers.

Fig.

46.

109

 

 

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(I ...-.91- six:- ,-
ll - -_ 'v- K --_".‘.'£r ‘ “35'"
f

.-.._ Kr... . l

  

l~¥- bl‘,}"...\r (I! u" \M- I

".:v.-'...-.‘.gz.a... "2.... : "‘

Jewish Tombstone with Emblem of Kohanim.

  
   
    

110

THE DEIL ,_

 

1

 

-The Devil.

Waite Tarot Card

47.

Fig.

111

.
.1

41’
2

’-
.l
4.
a.
é
.11
...

 

 

~The Devil.

Court de Gebelin Tarot Card

48.

Fig.

112

 

/’—‘ ’\
fl
“ in d _
{ n
A :4.
1')
' g T
_ xx)
5» C J «a
o
c:
o
2 93
- 9
I \
1 l

 

 

HS] Le

 

DIABLE I©

 

49. Oswald Wirth Tarot Card —The Devil.

113

 

Fig. 50. Vase Belonging to Egon Schiele.

114

 

Fig. 51. Schiele, Striding Torso -Back View.

 

115

 

Fig. 52. Schiele, Coitus.

116

. I .,.s
new 3.1.1:», . x325.

q‘

#3.

mm»

P5

this... .

 

Emidius.

th St.

 

Annunciation wi

i,

Carlo Crivell

53.

Fig.

117

 

Fig. 54. Christ Pantocrator, Cathedral of Cefalu, Sicily.

118

 

CIOSS .

1,

Berlinghiero Berlinghier

55.

Fig.

119

 

 

Baptism of Christ

Verrochio,

56.

Fig.

120

v

.w; A!
.

in

km,
ah

 

 

Madonna della Candelletta.

S7. Crivelli,

Fig.

 

121

 

Fig. 58. Caravaggio, Madonna of Loreto.

 

Fig.

59.

 

Raphael,

122

Sistine Madonna.

123

 

 

Fig. 60. Adolphe H. Bouguereau, Madonna of the Angels.

124

 

Fig. 61. Michelangelo, Bruges Madonna.

 

Fig.

125

62. Michelangelo, Bruges Madonna,

 

detail.

126

 

detail.

 

The Creation of Adam,

Michelangelo,

63.

Fig.

127

 

 

God Writing upon the Tables of Covenant.

Blake,

64.

Fig.

128

 

 

 

The Reunion of the Soul and the Body.

65. Blake,

Fig.

129

 

 

Portrait of a Young Man.

66. Agnolo Bronzino,

Fig.

130

 

Fig. 67. Bronzino, Portrait of Maria de'Medici as a Girl.

131

   

Fig. 68. Portrait of Robert Fludd. ‘

132

   

   

 

. 9 . ,v. .
Bl ‘. r " ' ‘ ‘
., la - p -, ...._‘. _,. _ . - ..c .
-- . n L‘- ml- . .- u. a... . Jfiml
4 7 , / -_ 7~___ -4“ ‘3, ~._ ' .' - J‘ " .1». Lu _‘,;._&~...'I ...J 1..»
”flu"... JWquumzu. «....t 'n. .4 ...1... I’m"; n.
i-r' v in. . ., ... {..w '-

u [L .. vqu-nn/r-y-m-Jmu
.J’. .

.4 .. ”1-..:

., .. 1.5-4 r... (.1. .7 .m'.

.,.Lm I. ... 9......”
4.. J.» manna-no.3 411.141 1 "a .w'au

:. m r , .
n an"... 'Ierl,-n.l tub-.10 h .5. I9
I": I. go him-n; '6: I

Fig. 69. Wedding Portrait of Frederick and Elizabeth.

     

133

 

      

    

        

  

; J _ 1E . .3, . NNWM

ax

   

Hermaphrodite Siamese Twins.

70.

Fig.

134

a —=*—-. _ -

 

 

 

Fig. 71. Myth of Hermaphroditus from Atalanta fugiens.

135

 

»
1%

f :.

 

 

72. The Fixation of Mercury.

Fig.

136

 

 

Marriage of Brother and Sister.

73'

Fig.

137

 

 

 

Fig. 74. Fernand Khnopff, Portrait of Marguerite Khnopff.

138

 

 

 

 

Fig. 75. Aubrey Beardsley, Mademoiselle de Maupin.

139

J... fizwéfih

unfit. 4 i in... .......

 

h Lederer.

 

Portrait of Eric

76. Schiele,

Fig.

140

:VC’o‘ ‘

LA‘K

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fig. 77. Schiele, Poster for Arnot Gallery Exhibition.

141

 

Fig. 78. Botticelli, Birth of Venus.

142

 

 

Portrait of Arthur Roessler.

79. Schiele,

Fig.

143

 

Fig. 80. Schiele, Holy Family.

144

 

Self—Beers II.

81. Schiele,

Fig.

145

 

Fig. 82. Photograph of Egon Schiele, 1914.

146

 

Fig. 83. Schiele, Portrait of Gerti Schiele.

147

 

Fig. 84. Schiele, Agony.

148

 

Schiele, Cardinal and Nun.

85.

Fig.

149

 

 

Fig. 86. Schiele, Conversion.

150

 

Barbara Altarpiece.

 

St.

Matteo di Giovanni,

87.

Fig.

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