Hi!
Hello! Few things:
This newsletter launched just over a year ago, and I noticed earlier this week that many of you lovely people who took out a yearly subscription around then have decided to keep funding me for the next year. Thank you very much! That’s very kind! I really enjoy writing this newsletter and it’s nice to know that you enjoy reading it! Unless you just forgot to block the direct debit, in which case I’m sorry but that’s pretty funny! In any case, quite literally couldn’t do it without you, so thank you.
Wonderful journalist-turned-psychotherapist Eleanor Morgan has just launched her own newsletter and the first essay, on anger, is really good and thought-provoking.
Want to warn that the essay below contains Some Sex Stuff and men, I swear to god, do not be weird about it. Do not make this weird for us. We’re all adults here. Let me write about art in peace. Thanking you kindly.
Went on a bit of a Tumblr hiatus for a while, hence the lack of stupid Tumblr posts peppering this newsletter, but I am now back on it and to apologise I’ve attached several stupid posts which made me laugh just below.
Bye!
The Tumblr corner
A column
I remember reading a piece a while ago, written by a woman who found Anthony Weiner sexually appealing. Do you remember Anthony Weiner? He was that American politician who had to resign because he just wouldn’t stop sending pictures of his penis to women. That guy.
The worst thing about him is that he really did look like the sort of guy who would pull down his pants and point the phone camera towards his junk; you’d look at his face and think “yeah, I can’t say I’m surprised by this”. He always looked just that little bit too sweaty.
Somehow that’s what the woman found compelling. I’m not going to name her here by the way, not because I want to spare her the embarrassment of having an old guilty crush dredged up years after the fact, but because we have feuded since then and I don’t want to give her the traffic. Wrong me once and you can guarantee I’ll never forget it.
Still, that random blog post has been stuck at the back of my brain like an old piece of gum for about a decade now. The point she’d been trying to make, by using Weiner as an example, was that she found sleazy guys inherently attractive. There was something there, about their sexuality being so obviously uncontrollable, that turned her on.
It was an interesting piece of writing because I could see where she was coming from, but couldn’t entirely agree. It made me feel like we were both part of the same spectrum, but she’d ended up quite far down one end, when I was busy hanging out near the middle ground.
It is true that, sometimes, there is something appealing about someone who is clearly sexual and clearly unable to hide it. Though she found it solely titillating, I confess to being too aware of existing as a woman in a patriarchal world to truly revel in it. We all know what men can do when they’re not thinking, and worries for my own safety will, most of the time, override any sordid curiosity I would have otherwise entertained.
There is, however, one place in which I get to safely indulge in the loucheness of unbridled male sexuality: Egon Schiele’s work. I’m not entirely sure when I really, truly discovered him; I come from quite an artsy family, and must have heard the name at an early age. What I do remember is buying a coffee table book of his paintings and drawings around 13 years ago.
I’d been out shopping but had failed to find any clothes I wanted to buy. It was early evening and I could tell I was about to go home empty handed - something you really do not want to happen when you’d decided to make a frivolous purchase - and so rushed inside some random bookshop.
There was a sale on, which I naturally looked at first, and I found this huge book for around a tenner, down from quite a lot more than that. I must have been 20 at the time, and the idea of being the sort of sophisticated adult who owned doorstoppers about famous painters appealed to me, so I bought it.
I don’t think I actually opened it for the first decade. Somehow, though, it managed to survive every house move I went through. In that time I managed to lose jackets, sunglasses, shoes, novels, notebooks, bags and pieces of furniture, because that’s what happens when your living situation is unstable. The Schiele book, on the other hand, always remained with me.
Again, I couldn’t tell you when I first decided to really look through it. Part of me wonders if it just seeped into my pores, by osmosis, just because I’d owned it for so long. All I know is that by the time I did flick through it a few years ago, most of Schiele’s work already felt familiar.
Similarly, I went to the Leopold Museum in Vienna last spring and, instead of discovering something new, I spent the afternoon feeling like I’d finally been reunited with a long-lost lover. I found Schiele’s paintings to both be entirely familiar and so electrifying I could barely handle them. I stood in front of Reclining Woman (1917) for five, ten minutes then, as I was about to leave on the ground floor, ran back up a few floors to go look at it another time. I felt tethered to it.
You could look at it now on your screen and it wouldn’t quite do it justice, by the way. There’s something about the blue that borders the bedsheets, in person, and the soft pink of her cheeks and nipples, and the soles of her feet and her partially hidden vulva. It is, as a work of art, ferociously alive.
What you see when you look at it isn’t only a naked woman, but the sheer force of Schiele’s lust. You can tell he painted every inch of her flesh while thinking of hungrily grabbing it; he captured her while longing to touch and devour her, or having recently done so. She is lying there, on those sheets, spreading her legs without even really meaning to, lost in thought, aware she is being observed but not quite minding it.
It both feels like a very private scene and a strikingly public one. There is a physical connection between the two of them and it manages to be entirely, privately theirs while looking like it was intended for our consumption. Though we are, by definition, merely a passive audience, Schiele’s tense gaze forces us to become voyeurs as well, looking at her body in the way that he did, longing to reach for her skin and grasp whatever we can get our hands on.
That is what I like about Schiele, and what has been missing from a lot of the essays I’ve read about him. I will always click on anything discussing his work but none of it has ever quite hit the mark. I wanted it explained to me, just what I found so compelling about his nude paintings and sketches, and instead what I got most of the time was boring treatises on the line between art and porn.
I think that’s the least interesting thing about his art, if I’m honest. Sure, he painted a lot of naked men and women in ways which could be construed as titillating, but who cares? Lots of people have done that before. Lots of people are doing it today. Lots of people will still be doing it tomorrow.
Instead, what makes Schiele’s work so magnetic is - was - his ability to make his own desperate lust so visible. Many of his self-portraits are agonisingly tense, as are many of the nudes he drew and painted. They aren’t just passively lewd but very actively sensual. Spend too much time looking at them and you’ll feel your heartbeat quicken, and the palms of your hands getting sweatier.
There is a deep and urgent yearning there, and you can tell he found it unbearable because he just had to get it out of his system, out of his body and his blood, by putting it all on canvas after canvas. You can tell that he was ravenous for skin and flesh from the way he painted them, from the sharp angles and the fingers that often look mangled. He was so alive it was suffocating, and that hunger came out in the shape of lust but, in a different world, in a different man, it could have come out as something else.
We’re always drawn to people who seem more alive than the rest of us, and Schiele so blatantly was one of them. Again, the sexuality is only part of the point - the sensuality, on the other hand, is what really matters. We touch and taste and see and feel but we spend most of our lives pretending that we prefer thinking anyway, even though we know we’re lying to ourselves.
Being able to stand in front of a piece of art and suddenly feel like a body aching for other bodies is a special thing; it rips off the layers we’ve conveniently built around ourselves and shows us who we really are instead. It is both a torture and a delight, and isn’t it the essence of human nature that those two things are often very close to one another?
This is why I read that woman’s blog about the scumbag politician and, in an odd way, understood immediately what she meant. There is something perversely compelling about unsightly expressions of sexual desire, because desiring something or someone makes you feel so deeply alive.
Being faced with someone unable to repress these urges the rest of us push down and hide from others can be exhilarating, because we know they shouldn’t act the way they do, but we can’t quite look away. Egon Schiele was, at times, not a good man and I have read my fair share of tedious pieces about separating the art from the artist, and they all miss the point entirely.
A thoroughly good man wouldn’t have been able to put all this tension into these brushstrokes. Someone able to control their urges couldn’t have made all these paintings which seemingly vibrate with desire. Egon Schiele was remorselessly alive, and I wouldn’t have let him drive me home but christ, I’m glad he left all this art behind.