The come-on
Egon Schiele insisted that the erotic is as heroic a subject as wars or religion. He combined high art and pornography in a manner only possible in radical Vienna of the pre-first world war years. But it still landed him in jail. By Jonathan Jones
Detail from Schiele's 1911 painting, Semi-Nude Girl, Reclining
Entartete; it means degenerate. It was an overused word, taken absurdly seriously, in Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century. Degenerates were everywhere, you would discover if you read the rightwing anti-semitic press. Degenerates at the opera, in the art galleries.
Degenerate sexualities and degenerate races. It was, incredibly, a serious medical term. In 1905, the great Viennese doctor Sigmund Freud, in his Three Essays On Sexuality, attempted to pour liberal cold water on the fetid notion. "It may well be asked," he drily commented, "whether an attribution of 'degeneracy' is of any value or adds anything to our knowledge."
Egon Schiele might have wondered the same thing as he lay on the narrow bed in his jail cell, looking at the feeble light coming in through the solitary narrow barred window above the locked door. The only bit of colour, in his drawing of the holding-cell at Neulengbach police station, is an orange, the round piece of fruit bright on the drab blankets. In the title of the pencil and watercolour study, he remembers that, "The single orange was the only light." Self-portraits as a prisoner show the 22-year-old artist suddenly looking middle-aged; he has a prisoner's beard and wraps himself in a heavy coat against the cold coming through that unglazed window.
The great Austrian Expressionist artist Egon Schiele was arrested in April 1912. If ever there was a moment when the adventurous, cosmopolitan, radical, eroticised culture of Vienna, one of the great centres of modernism, came smack up against the terrors, taboos, hypocrisies and hatreds of the unenlightened, prejudiced majority of a society whose citizens included the young Adolf Hitler, this was it. Schiele was arrested on suspicion of showing erotic drawings to young children who posed for him, of touching the children while he drew them and of kidnapping one of the young girls who frequented his studio.