December 3, 2018 The Big Picture Rethinking Schiele By Cody Delistraty The passage of time tends to either confirm the supposed transgressions of historical figures, or absolve them thereof. But Egon Schiele, whose centenary is being celebrated at museums across the world, presents a particular lens through which to think about the line between art and exploitation. Egon Schiele. Standing Female Nude with Blue Cloth, 1914. [Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg. Picture: © Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg] Egon Schiele first began hosting teenage girls at his studio in Neulengbach, Austria, around 1910. About thirty miles from Vienna, he had a small painting studio with a garden out back. Boys and girls, often from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds, would come spend time there with him and his model-slash-lover Walburga Neuzil, whom he called Wally. Schiele was only twenty at the time. Wally was seventeen. The age of consent in Austria was fourteen (as it is today), and their relationship wasn’t much of a scandal. What was a scandal was Schiele’s painting the children and teenagers who came by his studio and, as would be written in his arrest warrant two years later, his “failing to keep erotic nudes in a sufficiently safe place”—that is, exposing these young people to his supposedly pornographic paintings and drawings. In April 1912, Schiele was arrested and accused of “seducing” Tatjana Georgette Anna von Mossig. Mossig, a thirteen-year-old girl from Neulengbach whose father was an esteemed naval officer, had asked Schiele and Neuzil to take her to Vienna to live with her grandmother. Like many young people, she wanted to escape her provincial town. The artist and his lover agreed to take her, but once they got to Vienna, Mossig had a change of heart and wanted to return home. The next day, Schiele and Neuzil dutifully returned her. In the meantime, however, her father had gone to the police and filed charges of kidnapping and statutory rape against Schiele. That the young man was an artist—and one who depicted younger women—helped fuel the father’s suspicions. A third charge was leveled, too: public immorality for exposing young people to his art. Read More
November 29, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: When You Weep, Sorrow Comes Clean Out By Kaveh Akbar In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. ©Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, This year has been full of so many new experiences, in the best possible ways. It’s disorienting. How did I get to this place? How is everything so strange? Am I allowed to feel happy, to accept good things for myself? Even if it’s all so fleeting? I’m unfamiliar with the geography of joy. How might I learn to navigate this space? Sincerely, Bewildered in the Best Way Dear Bewildered, The geography of joy! What a wonderful place to find yourself. When my life slowly started to improve after getting sober, I was mystified. I had familiar psychological algorithms for pain and desperation and loneliness and despair, but I didn’t know what to do with gratitude or contentment. Some of the labor of recovery, for me, has been working to allow new, good things into my life, even when my brain wants me to reject them in favor of the joyless desolation it knows so well. For you, I offer Naomi Shihab Nye’s “So Much Happiness.” The bewilderment you speak of is the same bewilderment I have known, and it is the bewilderment Nye points to when she writes: It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. With sadness there is something to rub against, a wound to tend with lotion and cloth. Yet, as she says: But happiness floats. It doesn’t need you to hold it down. It doesn’t need anything. Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing, and disappears when it wants to. You are happy either way. I hope that you discover a path into and through your new joy, one that will allow you to feel it fully, to be immersed in it, to “hold it, and share it, and in that way, be known.” –KA Read More
November 20, 2018 Devil in the Details In Bed: The Mattress as Art By Larissa Pham Larissa Pham’s new monthly column, Devil in the Details, will focus on single objects throughout art history. In this installment, she looks at beds through the lens of Sarah Lucas’s exhibition “Au Naturel,” currently on view at the New Museum in New York City. Sarah Lucas, “Selfish in Bed II,” 2000. (© Sarah Lucas. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London) I’ve been spending a lot of time in bed lately—partly because I have been a little depressed; partly because I have been jet-lagged and therefore awake for every sunrise of the last four weeks; partly because all the beds I’ve found myself in lately are so big they seem to take up the entirety of the room, like a ship so large it becomes an island, and the rest of the map not worth exploring. There’s not much to do in bed, and yet you can do everything there. A bed can come to contain everything. Whenever I change my sheets, I am startled to encounter the ghost of me so deeply impressed on my mattress, where for five years I’ve only ever slept on one side. A me-size shadow of sweat, surrounded by little archipelagoes of period blood and chalky haloes of come. I can still recall a post that was popular in certain corners of sad-girl Tumblr, probably almost a decade ago; it was a photograph of a mattress, quilted and faded sateen, and spray-painted. It said PEOPLE FELL IN LOVE ON ME. Once, when an ex really missed me, he told me he wanted to send me a photo of the bloodstain I’d left on his mattress years earlier. When love is good, it’s like a Toulouse-Lautrec. You know the one—Le Lit. “In Bed.” All of life a haze of oil pastel. Everything thickly colored, rendered in tenderness, bright lines on toned paper. Two figures in bed, their shining faces turned toward each other in a warm room. When love is trying its best, it’s the Laura Owens rendering of the same drawing, from 2000, where the warm tones have been replaced with a stark wash of greenish blue, and the lovers’ heads peep out, barely defined—their eyelashes and mouths described with delicate lines. Read More
November 9, 2018 Senses of Dawn The Sight of Dawn By Nina MacLaughlin This is the fifth installment of a five-part series on the senses of dawn. Each piece (touch, sound, smell, taste, sight) was published at daybreak. Original illustration by Jackson Joyce My grandmother lived on a cliff on an island and the walls in her front room were the color of bone, the color of the soft underside of certain mushroom caps. They were stark and alive in an earthly way. Two windows faced east and the wide-planked floors were painted a salty blue. At sunrise, light slid over the ocean and into the room, then speared it with a burning rip of peach, the day entering full force. Another window to the right of the bed faced southeast toward town. The curtains were white, thin, and the wind moved all through the room. The room was charged. The curtains were not erotic, though they drifted in the wind like nightgowns. The heavy bureaus were not erotic, and when the drawers were pulled open, always with effort, they smelled of mothballs and dusty linen. The walls were bone. The floors were blue. They were not erotic. Something moved through this room, wind or ghosts or both. The room was charged with a presence I’m not sure I’m meant to name nor could if I wanted to. I have known no room so intimately lit by dawn’s entry. Dawn burned in, and one morning a lover in the bed said, “Look.” Neither of us was all the way awake. And we turned toward each other, this was when we were new, and we pressed against each other. Maybe it was the ghosts that whispered yes, yes, now, right now, while you’re fleshed and ready, while you still cast shadows, now, yes, an urging from another world, touched by dawn’s rose fingers. We heeded it. And we slept again and woke when the morning was real. The house is gone. My grandmother, too. But there are moments, in between sleep and wake, when I am in this room, and I see the windows and those white curtains, the dark weight of the bureaus to the right, a closet space in the left corner of the room doored with an off-white piece of cloth. And then my eyes begin to adjust. The bureaus burn away like fog in sun. The windows seem to be pulled up and away, as though on strings, and my own wide desk comes into view. The closet retreats through the wall, and bookcases appear in its place. Two windows descend to my right, overlooking no ocean. The eyes adjust; the edges get revealed; the blur comes into focus. Read More
November 8, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: You Have Become Everything You Needed To Become By Claire Schwartz In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Claire Schwartz is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I find myself distracted these days—mostly by the violence of the news, which streams in circles. I want to engage thoughtfully, but it’s difficult when everything is “breaking” and urgent. Do you have a poem for this age of terrible information? I want to do what I can in solidarity with those who are putting everything on the line, but I get overwhelmed by the width and scale of injustice. I’d appreciate any help you can offer for narrowing in and focusing my efforts without tuning reality out. At the moment my world is spinning, and I just feel helpless. With Love, Can’t Do It All Read More
November 8, 2018 Senses of Dawn The Taste of Dawn By Nina MacLaughlin This is the second installment of a five-part series on the senses of dawn. Each piece (touch, sound, smell, taste, sight) will run at daybreak (EST) this week. Original Illustration by Jackson Joyce In touch, sound, and smell, dawn gives a sense of triumph. It’s a golden feeling of awe and optimism: trumpet blasts and peachy whiffs and caresses. It’s not always so. There’s another side of dawn, a side that has nothing to do with hope or gold. There’s the dawn defined by dread, when your eyes are open too early and the light turns gray and mustardy. This is the dawn when you’ve been awake all night, when the fanged and hungry muskrats of insomnia have chewed the corners of your mind. They’ve spent the night whispering lies about the small pink blotch of skin on your chest that will bloom into cancer and seep through your flesh and into your heart, or reminding you of every false, infuriating word your father said, or giving you a close look at the soundless black abyss that waits for you. This is the dawn when you’ve been up all night drunk, on drugs, a lunatic. The taste is sour. It is stale. It is the rotting tang of summer dumpsters. It tastes like sucking spilled whiskey from the sleeve of a wool sweater. It tastes like things you want to forget about yourself. It tastes like the amoxicillin you drank as a child to cure the infection in your ear. It tastes like dust, like desiccated residue, like skin and shit and heavy, metal particles that linger in the air. It tastes like regret. And it tastes, too, like fear. Toothpaste doesn’t help, or it helps only a little bit, because the taste is not just on your tongue, but down your throat and in your belly, coating your lungs, lining the sick, wet crannies of your poisoned guts. The taste of fear comes from the knowledge, as the sky begins its shift, that you have murdered this next day, one that hasn’t even lived yet, and no mouth-to-mouth will bring it back. What have I done? Read More