Schiele & Basquiat, Art & Life

In principle they have little in common, yet Egon Schiele (1890–1918, Vienna) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88, New York) both died at age twenty-eight, after having created, in just a decade, an oeuvre as dense as it is prolific and rebellious. Schiele made nearly 300 paintings and several thousand drawings; Basquiat produced more than 1,000 paintings and as many drawings. Two recent exhibitions at the Fondation Louis Vuitton made these dissenting voices resonate. Suzanne Pagé, the artistic director of the foundation, explores them for L’Officiel Singapore

On the face-offbetween Basquiat’s work and Schiele’s

A copy of an artwork may deceive and shock. An oeuvre, never. That’s why it’s great to be able to show these works. The exposing of the works and being exposed to the works are entirely different things. Indeed, being in contact with the work itself has something quite corrosive about it. When I look at Schiele I always feel the electric, nervous character of his drawings. And this is not transmissible by way of an image. There are significant misunderstandings about Schiele, and that interests me. He develops a vision of implacable fearlessness and rigor, first of all with regard to himself. He looks, and it is a gaze that scrutinizes the deepest depths, no matter the prohibitions that may have been prevalent during his era. He depicts sexuality very frontally, with both curiosity and fear, but it is very clear that it is a gaze that he focuses on himself first, then on the women with whom he identifies. The portraits are terrifying in what they reveal about how he scrutinizes himself. We may recall that the Vienna of 1900 is also marked by the discovery of Freud’s work. It was a period of great excitement in all fields: art, architecture. Schiele thus focuses on a world of the pre-avant-garde, then of war. In his work, as in Basquiat’s, we are witness to extraordinary intensity.

On the construction of the artist’s vision