Egon Schiele. The poignant body. Graphic biography

There is an image of the artist lying on a pillow, now dead, looking like a pose from one of his works: from there the narrative starts to move quickly over Vienna, in a bird’s-eye view often used in his works, and down between the station platforms where Schiele as a child watched enraptured as the trains passed by. Then boy Schiele steps off the train. We are in Vienna a few years later, when he moves there to attempt admission to the academy. He has his hair shot up, an oversized suit inherited from his guardian who has a massive physique. Schiele might look like a cross between a punk and the tramp created by Charlie Chaplin. Vienna is immense and is at its apogee. In just a few years it has become a multi-ethnic metropolis and is about to implode like the rest of the Habsburg empire. It is opportunity, it is seduction, and it will be the scene of the rise of the young Schiele, who watches, observes, stores, faces, expressions. Bodies, so many bodies moving, walking twisting through the folds of the urban monster. In Schiele’s eyes there is wonder, there is desire, there is all the talent ready to explode. Until Spanish fever takes him away, tragically and at only 28 years of age, along with his wife, who was six months pregnant. In addition to the historical and biographical elements in this graphic novel the people who were close to him in life take turns to speak. There is Klimt, the first to believe in his talent. There is Wally muse, model and jilted lover. There is his wife, with her unborn child. But the objects in his paintings also speak. The brushes, the canvases, the paper, the pencils. And then Schiele himself, ideally in a space of formless matter, like a brush-made texture of color, shows up, and talks about his artistic vision, 100 years after his death.