by William Boyd

The modern world was created by those who haunted the Austrian capital in the first 14 years of the 20th century. The writer returns to the place that gave rise to his latest novel, Waiting for Sunrise

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It was Egon Schiele who started my Vienna obsession. Schiele and Klimt. Up until the 1970s – when Rudolf Leopold’s catalogue raisonné of Schiele’s paintings and drawings appeared – Schiele was a virtual unknown. I can remember while I was at university in the 70s the sudden outpouring of postcards and posters, books or reproductions that occurred. Suddenly everyone loved Schiele and was enthralled by his short, tormented life. Schiele’s angular, mannered, brilliant draughtsmanship, the blatant near-pornography of his nudes, male and female, were a thrilling revelation. I went to Vienna for the first time to write a piece about Schiele, or to be more precise to write a piece about the Leopold Museum that contains the world’s biggest collection of his work. Even after decades of familiarity the actual canvases and drawings retain their power to shock and disturb. In some ways, Schiele is the perfect symbol of the Viennese antithesis – namely that this small, safe, solid, beautiful, bourgeois capital city should have housed in the early years of the 20th century such a contrapuntal, boiling ferment of modernism in every art form.

It’s an interesting thought experiment to stand before Schiele’s large, almost life-sized, naked self-portrait – ”Seated Male Nude” – and imagine what it must have been like to see it for the first time in 1910. The lurid, putrifying colouring, the emaciated body, the orange nipples, the dense, dark pubis, the clumped genitalia, the absence of feet – almost as if they’d been amputated. It’s still incredibly, disturbingly powerful. Beside Schiele’s graphic audacity, Klimt’s etiolated nudes seem almost fey. Klimt’s drawings veer tentatively towards eroticism, also, but they seem half-hearted and sketchy beside Schiele. Schiele is one of art history’s greatest draughtsmen – up there with Ingres, Degas and Picasso. He was destined to take Klimt’s crown as the pre-eminent artist of the Jugendstil movement when Klimt died in February 1918. However, Schiele himself died eight months later, in the influenza pandemic that ravaged Europe and the world at the end of the first world war. He was 28 years old.

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