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00:00In the Baroque Belvedere Palace in Vienna hangs one of the most haunting paintings of
00:12the 20th century.
00:19It actually is moving and disturbing and disruptive beyond belief.
00:25It was a picture that actually made me cry.
00:28A painting of two lovers clinging to each other,
00:31seemingly on the edge of an abyss.
00:33What it does convey is the idea of a universal human theme,
00:40which is very important to all of us.
00:43I mean, on the one hand, death, on the other hand, sex.
00:47The picture contains an unusual autobiographical story.
00:51Painted by one of Vienna's young geniuses, Egon Schiele,
00:55this is his tribute to his lover who stood by him in his darkest hour
00:59and whom he discarded ruthlessly.
01:03But death was to stalk both this picture and the artist who painted it.
01:09Although the male figure is staring out at us
01:12in this very, very, very, very cold, chill way,
01:16you do have a question mark in your mind whether he's dead or alive.
01:21This is a painting that looks at the end of a relationship
01:25and also hints at the end of the world.
01:38Death and the Maiden was painted in Vienna,
01:41the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
01:44where a decaying power gave birth to a culture of innovation and anxiety.
01:51Extremist political ideas and the new science of psychoanalysis
01:55flourished in a climate that combined aggression with morbid doubt.
02:02In the early years of the 20th century,
02:05this empire was described as the second weakest among the world's great powers.
02:12Out of this ferment came Death and the Maiden, painted in 1915.
02:18The death-like male at the centre is a self-portrait.
02:22Egon Schiele was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century
02:26and one of the most self-obsessed.
02:29He painted this work at a turning point in his life.
02:33Schiele was abandoning his first great love
02:36and was about to be swept away by the First World War.
02:40The picture is filled with a sense of death,
02:43the death of a passionate love affair, the death of the old Europe.
02:48At the centre of this city,
02:50it was Schiele who cast himself in the role of Death.
02:55Well, Schiele's face is, of course, translated into the face of Death.
03:02And Death is biting into the neck of the young maiden
03:09in a sort of Dracula way.
03:11So it's a very frightening scene.
03:17Schiele's companion in Death and the Maiden was Wally Neutzel.
03:21She was the daughter of a schoolteacher,
03:24but remarkably little is known about her.
03:29They met in 1911,
03:31probably introduced by the most famous artist in Vienna,
03:34Gustav Klimt, for whom Wally had modelled.
03:37Schiele was 21 years old and Wally was 17.
03:42It was clearly a great love affair.
03:46It was also a great lust affair, to judge from the drawings that Schiele made
03:51of this obviously extraordinarily attractive and sexy woman.
03:59We don't know a great deal about Wally, but from what we do know,
04:02she must have been a fascinating young woman
04:04because at the age of 17 she met Schiele
04:06and she was quite prepared to take her clothes off
04:09and be painted naked and get into a relationship with him.
04:12And she had already been a model for Klimt,
04:15and Klimt is hardly known for his restrained pictures of women's sexuality.
04:20Intense as his relationship with Wally was,
04:23Schiele's greatest subject remained himself.
04:27He painted hundreds of self-portraits
04:30and collaborated with photographers
04:32to produce dramatic images of the tormented artist.
04:38Schiele was obsessed with his own image like no other 20th-century artist.
04:43It's true to say that a great many 20th-century artists,
04:48particularly in the German-speaking countries,
04:51were concerned with the self-portrait, with the self.
04:54But none of them really can be compared with Schiele,
04:57who was, not to put too fine a point on it, a narcissist.
05:03I think someone said that it's no coincidence
05:05that the word ego is the beginning of Egon Schiele's name.
05:09He has an ability to take something very personal
05:12and widen it up and make it into every man's experience.
05:15But clearly he's very interested
05:17in his absolute own visceral experience of life.
05:22Sexual anguish loomed large in Schiele's brief life.
05:26He even painted pictures of himself masturbating.
05:30Schiele was not only fascinated by sex, indeed obsessed by it,
05:35he was also fascinated and obsessed by death,
05:40probably in equal measure.
05:43When Schiele met Wally,
05:45he was depressed and wanted to leave Vienna.
05:48The great Gustav Klimt had told Schiele he was a remarkable artist,
05:52but his work was not selling.
05:54Schiele and Wally made the curious and ultimately disastrous decision
05:59to move to the small town of Neulimbach, 30 miles from Vienna.
06:03Here, an out-of-town artist,
06:05Schiele had found a way to make a living
06:08Neulimbach, 30 miles from Vienna.
06:11Here, an unmarried bohemian couple living together provoked suspicion.
06:17Examples of Schiele's erotic preoccupations,
06:20drawings of very young girls, lay around the house he shared with Wally.
06:24In provincial Austria, this was a recipe for disaster.
06:28He did paint these extraordinary erotic pictures of young women
06:32and they did get him into trouble
06:34because they were openly displayed around his studio
06:37and he didn't think that it was worth keeping them hidden.
06:40And people saw that and he got arrested.
06:42He got arrested for these depraved pictures
06:45which might corrupt innocents and youth,
06:47so he had to stand trial for that.
06:55In 1912, Schiele spent 24 days in prison in Neulimbach,
07:00where he painted watercolours of his cell.
07:03At his trial, the judge burnt one of his erotic drawings in the courtroom.
07:09Schiele, being a narcissist,
07:12is also, and it's not a difficult leap to make, a bit paranoid.
07:17That's to say, he believes the whole world is against him.
07:21Nobody really appreciates him sufficiently as an artist.
07:25The greatest fuel to this delusion of his, really,
07:29about how the world hated him,
07:31was his time in prison.
07:33I'm sorry, really, to sound so censorious,
07:37but he does have the ability to get on one's nerves,
07:42even 100 years after the event, so to speak.
07:49Throughout Schiele's trial and imprisonment,
07:52Wally stood by him as a loyal friend,
07:55and yet we know of only one document written by her.
07:58This curious scribble in one of Schiele's notebooks
08:01is a comment that has been interpreted in different ways.
08:05I declare today, the 8th of January, 1913,
08:09that I'm not in love with anyone in the world.
08:12Wally.
08:14Was Wally playing hard to get,
08:16or does the note prove that she was under Schiele's thumb?
08:20Well, they tell us that Schiele was obviously the stronger person,
08:28and wanted to have the lead,
08:31so he must have pestered her to make a statement.
08:34And what could be a better statement than an official one?
08:39Some people have seen this as a sign of Schiele trying to manipulate her
08:43and say that, you know,
08:45he signed this contract, you don't want to be married to me.
08:48But that seems really implausible.
08:50We know that she was quite free-spirited and bohemian,
08:53and it seems humorous, the way it's set down.
08:56I imagine more it was a lover's discussion
08:59and that she was declaring her independence.
09:06In 1914, the First World War broke out,
09:10but Schiele was busy gazing out of his window,
09:13fascinated by two sisters he had glimpsed in his neighbourhood.
09:18He wrote this beautifully painted letter to them,
09:21inviting them both out on a date.
09:23He even suggested his girlfriend, Varley, could act as a chaperone.
09:27Initially unsure which of the girls he fancied more,
09:30Schiele tried to persuade them he was a respectable young man.
09:35Dear Miss Edith and Miss Adele,
09:37I'm sure your mama will allow you to go with Varley and me to the cinema,
09:41or to the Apollo, or wherever you want.
09:44Please be reassured that I was just fooling around as a hooligan momentarily.
09:49I'm not really like that.
09:51Warmest greetings, Egon Schiele.
09:56Schiele began to seriously woo the younger of the two sisters, Edith Hans.
10:01To his friend and patron, Arthur Roessler, Schiele wrote...
10:05I intend to get married advantageously, not to Varley.
10:11Much as I adore and am thrilled by Schiele's art,
10:17Schiele the man, I'm afraid, doesn't appeal to me very much at all,
10:21and this is one of the episodes which...
10:26..puts me right off him, because he's clearly marrying for money.
10:31It's quite cold-blooded, the way Schiele looks at Varley
10:34and decides she's not quite the ticket,
10:36she's not quite top drawer enough for him.
10:39He wants a more advantageous marriage,
10:41and he's prepared to sacrifice her.
10:45After a close relationship lasting four years,
10:49Schiele seems to have made a ruthless decision.
10:52He would get rid of his friend and lover.
10:55But first, Varley could perform one last service for his art.
10:59She would be the model for the big statement he was planning to paint.
11:05His first step towards his masterpiece was this small painting
11:10His first step towards his masterpiece was this small preparatory sketch.
11:15The drawing shows that Schiele had worked out the dimensions.
11:19It was going to be big.
11:21180cm by 150cm are scribbled on the side.
11:25He's deliberating on the scale of the work,
11:29which is almost 2m by 1.5m.
11:33He's also breaking up that area
11:37by using a grid, which is rather traditional, in fact,
11:41in terms of academic practice.
11:43I think this is something he must have learned from his early training.
11:50Schiele painted Death and the Maiden in 1915
11:54in his studio in the Viennese suburb of Hietzing.
11:58Between January and June,
12:00Schiele worked on his major artistic statement.
12:03The painting may have come out of his relationship with Varley,
12:06but it has an obvious affinity
12:08with the work of the leading artist in Vienna.
12:14Gustav Klimt's The Kiss
12:16was Vienna's most iconic image of love between man and woman.
12:20Now, Schiele set out to paint his own vision of the power of love,
12:24but in a darker vein.
12:26Death and the Maiden is hung very close to Klimt's Kiss and the Belvedere,
12:30and they are obviously pictures that nod at one another.
12:33We know that Schiele was influenced by Klimt and admired his work,
12:38and it does seem to be a response
12:41to the very romantic and tender,
12:44almost spiritual aspects of The Kiss,
12:47where love is elevated to be a greater good that can save mankind.
12:54Klimt's The Kiss is still a key element
12:58The Kiss is still a conventional,
13:01quote-unquote, beautiful painting,
13:05a sort of luxurious fresco
13:09any industrialist would love to have in his music room.
13:14And Schiele is the complete antithesis.
13:18It's an expressionist painting.
13:21It is, in the sense of the bourgeois, ugly,
13:25and it's full of personal emotion.
13:36Where Klimt's The Kiss is sumptuous and geometric,
13:40Schiele's couple are splayed on a crumpled white sheet
13:44spread on a barren landscape,
13:46a landscape that hints at the war that was destroying Europe,
13:49as Schiele worked on his painting.
13:55The background of Schiele's Death And The Maiden
13:58shows us this devastated wasteland,
14:01almost as though it's a World War I battlefield,
14:05on which, or in which, these figures are cast
14:11on this rather crumpled would-be sheet or drape,
14:16which kind of functions like shroud.
14:19This couple are kind of clinging on for dear life,
14:23but they're clearly separated.
14:25The geography is pulling them apart.
14:27Their bodies are only touching at the top half.
14:30I mean, it's a really fragmented picture.
14:33Everything about it is lumpy and awkward
14:36and pulling in two separate directions like an earthquake.
14:41MUSIC
14:51It is the emotions within a person
14:57which are translated into visual realities,
15:03and the emotions are overstressed.
15:07He does it, for instance, by making the proportions
15:13between hands and legs and the body deliberately wrong,
15:19so the hands are larger, the feet are larger,
15:23in order to express a feeling, an emotion.
15:28Naked legs, naked bootless naked legs,
15:33possibly naked underneath, who would know?
15:36It's very powerful that the man is wearing
15:39what looks like a World War I greatcoat,
15:42and the woman is wearing what looks like the luxurious underwear
15:46of the decadent Vienna of the pre-World War I days.
15:50And so you've got this collision of the two cultures
15:53that Schiele found himself caught up in so powerfully,
15:57the luxuriance and decadence of the end of an empire.
16:01MUSIC
16:07As Schiele put the finishing touches to his painting,
16:11he arranged a final meeting with Wally.
16:14Schiele had had a brilliant idea.
16:16He would explain to Wally how their relationship could continue
16:20after his marriage to Edith Harms.
16:23According to Schiele's friend Arthur Roessler,
16:26Wally and Egon met for the last time in his regular haunt,
16:30the Café Eichberger, where he played billiards almost every evening.
16:35Schiele took an envelope out of his jacket pocket
16:38and handed it to her with the mumbled words,
16:41It's all in here.
16:44What Wally read was curious in the extreme.
16:47She didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
16:50What she held in her hand was no farewell letter,
16:53but the strangest of documents in which Schiele solemnly promised
16:57to go with her on several weeks' holiday every year.
17:01But, Egon, how do you picture this?
17:04Do you think that Edith will ever allow this?
17:07Or that I would agree to it?
17:09You mean well, I'm sure, but I've given up on you once and for all,
17:13and that's how it's going to stay.
17:17Then Wally left without tears or sentimentality,
17:20but also without any bitterness,
17:22just sad, resolved to go on learning life.
17:30Schiele's farewell to Wally seemed somewhat cruel,
17:33and there is a cruel streak to what Schiele painted
17:36in his first version of this picture.
17:38In this intriguing photo,
17:40we see that Schiele initially painted the woman's buttocks as naked.
17:44There is a photograph of an earlier stage of the painting
17:48in which the woman's buttocks are exposed
17:51through a kind of rectangular opening in the back of her dress,
17:54and this has always struck me as very odd,
17:56because the final version of the painting
17:59does make the woman seem actually quite chaste.
18:03It makes you feel that she's humiliated in some way,
18:06that her flesh is poking through,
18:08that she's seen as a sexual object, but not an erotic one.
18:13It makes you feel far more protective of her
18:18as somebody who has been the victim, almost,
18:21of the man who is both clasping and pushing her away.
18:25I think it would be a more shocking picture
18:27if he had left it in the original state.
18:29I think the first version is absolutely Schiele's
18:33true and passionate version,
18:35and if I would, as a collector, would have the choices of the two,
18:41I would obviously choose the first one.
18:45Schiele's friend, Arthur Roessler, claims that he warned the artist
18:49the bare bottom was too provocative.
18:52Whatever his motive,
18:54Schiele decided he would protect Varley's modesty.
19:02For this programme,
19:04the Belvedere carried out its first infrared and UV examination
19:08of the painting.
19:09The results demonstrate that Schiele lavished an awful lot of paint
19:13on covering up Varley's backside.
19:16The infrared and the UV photographs that we did recently
19:20show us very clearly a little bit more than we know before.
19:24It's the first version with the bare bottom here,
19:29and the same in the UV with the light green parts
19:33used as a paint to destroy the bare bottom.
19:41When Schiele finished Death And The Maiden,
19:44he had himself photographed posing next to his masterpiece.
19:51The window of his studio is visible at the back of the photo.
19:57Cannily, Schiele colluded with the photographer
20:00to create an image of the artist scrutinising himself in the mirror.
20:11In this photo, Schiele looks like a sharp young man,
20:15and his painting looks like a 20th-century masterpiece.
20:19But in fact, Schiele's painting was the latest
20:22in a long line of images linking sex and death.
20:37The theme of Death And The Maiden,
20:39coupling a beautiful girl with a skeletal figure,
20:42had been recurring in northern European paintings for 500 years.
20:47It goes back as far as the 16th century,
20:50South German, Hansbald und Grin.
20:52You see it over and over again.
20:54You see a skeleton embracing a nubile young woman,
20:59gorgeous, tight skin,
21:02touching her often in a very suggestive way.
21:10In the 19th century, the image inspired
21:13one of the greatest songs in the German language,
21:16Schubert's Death And The Maiden.
21:20Artists such as Edvard Munch made the theme more erotic,
21:23emphasising the sexual dimension of death caressing a young girl.
21:33What Schiele does with Death And The Maiden
21:36is, of course, transpose it into a context
21:40which, to me, is eerily contemporary.
21:43This wasteland that could almost be a battlefield from World War I,
21:47couldn't it? It could be Verdun or the Somme or anywhere.
21:50But he's given us, in that extraordinary painting,
21:53this image of this collision between the allegorical theme
21:56that goes back for five centuries nearly,
21:59together with a very contemporary feel
22:01about the terrible, anguished pain of modern man in World War I.
22:11Schiele had succeeded in reinventing the idea of allegory
22:14in a contemporary style.
22:16He even surpassed the attempts at allegory
22:19painted by his master, Klimt.
22:25Klimt tried to reinvent allegory
22:28and, indeed, some of his subjects deal with death and women.
22:34Always a kind of joke death, it seems to me, lurking in the background.
22:38Now, Schiele tries to, as it were, reinvent allegory again
22:43and he tries to do it by basing his allegorical subjects and the figures
22:48on himself, together with a woman that he'd been living with for so long,
22:54Wally Neuzil, and whom he was about to dump.
23:00Death And The Maiden, indeed.
23:08The painting looks back to old ideas of allegory in art.
23:12It also captures the new psychological ideas
23:15that were being pioneered in Vienna by Dr Sigmund Freud.
23:20It might also be a symbol of a very deep depression
23:25because he had to leave Wally and he must have felt very badly
23:31and so perhaps this, in a Freudian way, is his self-analysis.
23:38EXPLOSION
23:45Having completed Death And The Maiden,
23:47Schiele was called up by the army.
23:52Soon he found himself employed as an official war artist,
23:55though he never saw action in battle.
23:59EXPLOSION
24:06In Vienna, there was a sense of living on borrowed time.
24:10One Viennese writer described Vienna as a laboratory
24:14for testing the end of the world.
24:16Another called the city a joyful apocalypse.
24:20Vienna really was at the end of the road
24:22in terms of its long history as an empire, wasn't it?
24:25It was all going to collapse.
24:26It was all going to go down or up in smoke
24:30and I think we do find that in Schiele.
24:34There's one outburst he made once.
24:36Alles ist lebend tot.
24:38Everything is living dead, he said.
24:41And that's what so much of his art is about as well.
24:46But death in this picture can also be seen as the death of the old Schiele.
24:51After Schiele's marriage to Edith Holmes,
24:54he developed a new style.
24:56In his portraits, he moved away from agonised figures in isolation.
25:02Schiele's style does change.
25:05It loses its edge.
25:07It becomes less obsessive,
25:11less haunted, less neurotic,
25:14more, dare I say, conventional.
25:17He locates these figures very much in an environment
25:22and for the first time when he's painting in oils,
25:25he is actually producing a quality of paint,
25:30a sensuous quality which he's not been interested in before.
25:37Varley walked out of Schiele's painting and out of his life.
25:42She was determined to begin again
25:44and the war offered her that opportunity.
25:47She joined the army as a nurse
25:49but, tragically, her new life didn't last long.
25:52In 1917, in a field hospital in Croatia,
25:56she contracted scarlet fever.
25:58A few days later, she died.
26:05The artist and his wife were not spared either.
26:08As the pandemic of Spanish flu spread across Europe,
26:11both Schiele and his wife, Edith, contracted the illness.
26:15A pregnant Edith died on 28th October 1918.
26:20Four days later, Schiele followed her.
26:25His last words were about himself.
26:28The war is over and I must go.
26:31My paintings should be seen in museums around the world.
26:46This fragile-looking man, holding a painting of sunflowers by Schiele,
26:51is Franz Martin Haberditzel,
26:53director of the Oesterreichische Galerie in the Belvedere
26:57during Schiele's lifetime.
26:59Haberditzel was a very important director
27:02of the Oesterreichische Galerie, of course,
27:05and he met Egon Schiele very early.
27:08He was the very first and also the only director worldwide
27:14who bought an Egon Schiele painting directly from the living artist.
27:23In 1930, Haberditzel bought Death and the Maiden for the Belvedere.
27:2890 years after Schiele's death,
27:30his paintings draw thousands of people to the gallery.
27:36This couple, still clinging to each other,
27:40seem to address our own anxieties.
27:43The expression on the man's face very much shows a slight fear, I think,
27:48of should he be there, and yet he's enjoying being there
27:52and he hopes nobody knows he is there.
27:55I think it's an image of love, yes, yes, absolutely.
27:59Because it's also, to embrace someone who's sick or dying or whatever,
28:04you must love someone, I think.
28:06Yes, I think it's a picture of love, definitely, yes.
28:11HE SINGS IN GERMAN
28:20It doesn't just feel personal about Schiele and his model.
28:24It feels how we all feel, I think,
28:26about the desperate nature of human relationships.
28:29We want to cling to them, but ultimately, whether it be through death
28:33or whether it be through loss of love or someone being removed from us
28:37by a huge and ghastly event, it will end.
28:39And he conveys that so powerfully.
28:52The final part of Professor Jim Al-Khalili's fascinating series
28:55on quantum physics is next tonight on BBC4, Atom.
29:09Atom.