Presenting a radically different picture of Egon Schiele’s work this study documents (in one-to-one comparisons) the extent of the artist’s visual borrowings from the Viennese humoristic journal Die Muskete. Claude Cernuschi analyzes each comparison on a case-by-case basis primarily because the interpretation of cartoons and caricatures is highly contingent on their specific historical and cultural context. Although this connection has gone unnoticed in the literature in retrospect this correlation makes perfect sense. Not only was Schiele’s artistic production frequently compared to caricature (and derided for being “grotesque”) but Expressionism and caricature are natural allies. One may belong to “high” art and the other to “popular” culture yet both presuppose similar assumptions and deploy a similar rhetorical position: namely that the exaggeration of human physiognomy allows deeper psychological “truths” to emerge. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history visual culture popular culture and politics. |Egon Schiele and the Art of Popular Illustration | Visual Studies
