A SHORT, TORMENTED SPAN

OF the handful of painters that Austria has produced in the 20th century, only one, Oskar Kokoschka, is widely known in the U.S. This state of unawareness may not last much longer. For ten years a small group of European and U.S. critics has been calling attention to the half-forgotten Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele, who died 42 years ago at the age of 28. The critics' campaign finally inspired the first major U.S. exhibit of Schiele's works. The show has been to Boston and Manhattan, will in time reach Pittsburgh and Minneapolis. Last week it opened at the J. B. Speed Museum in Louisville, at the very moment that a second Schiele exhibit was being made ready at the Felix Landau gallery in Los Angeles.

Schiele's paintings are anything but pleasant. His people (see color) are angular and knobby-knuckled, sometimes painfully stretched, sometimes grotesquely foreshortened. His colors are dark and murky, and his landscapes and cityscapes seem swallowed in gloom. But he painted some of the boldest and most original pictures of his time, and even after nearly half a century, the tense, tormented world he put on canvas has lost none of its fascination.

The Devil Himself. The son of a railway stationmaster, Schiele lived most of his childhood in the drowsy Danubian town of Tulln, 14 miles northwest of Vienna. He was an emotional, lonely boy who spent so much time turning out drawings that he did scarcely any schoolwork. When he was 15, his parents finally allowed him to attend classes at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Even there he did not last for long. Cried one professor after a few months of Student Schiele's tantrums and rebellion: "The devil himself must have defecated you into my classroom!"

For a while his work was influenced deeply by the French impressionists, and by the patterned, mosaic-like paintings of Gustav Klimt, then the dean of Austrian art. Gradually Schiele evolved a somber style of his own--and he had few inhibitions about his subject matter. His pictures were roundly denounced as "the most disgusting things one has ever seen in Vienna." He himself was once convicted of painting erotica and jailed for 24 days--the first three of which he spent desperately trying to make paintings on the wall with his own spittle. For years he wore hand-me-down suits and homemade paper collars, was even driven to scrounging for cigarette butts in Vienna's gutters. Drafted into the Austrian army, he rebelliously rejected discipline, wangled a Vienna billet, went on painting. It was not until the last year of his life that he had his first moneymaking show.

Melancholy Obsession. The unabashed sexuality of so many of his paintings was not the only thing that kept the public at bay: his view of the world was one of almost unrelieved tragedy, and it was too much even for morbid-minded Vienna. He was obsessed by disease and poverty, by the melancholy of old age and the tyranny of lust. The children he painted were almost always in rags, his portraits were often ruthless to the point of ugliness, and his nudes--including several self-portraits--were stringy, contorted and strangely pathetic. The subject he liked most was the female body, which he painted in every state--naked, half-dressed, muffled to the ears, sitting primly in a chair, lying tauntingly on a bed or locked in an embrace.

There was one bright spot in Schiele's life: his wife Edith, whom he married in 1915. But three years later, when Edith was expecting their first baby, she was stricken by influenza and died. "Edith is now better off than we are," Schiele told his friends. "With her all is well. We should not complain or mourn." Within three days, having caught the same disease, Schiele, too, was dead.

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