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serve to expose the more desultory aspects of the self, and thus his images appear less as pornographic, and more as pieces that actually challenge and oppose the traditionally pornographic, by immediately and shockingly exposing those parts of the human nude previously coveted, and exposing them for all to see.

The critic Reinhard Steiner has greater reservations about the classification of Schiele's work as pornographic. He suggests that “[i]t may well be true that Schiele was out to exorcise sexual devils, and was living out in his imagination 'impulses that could not always be satisfied in reality'. […] However, this does not seem fully adequate as an explanation […]. [G]iven the frequently unsightly, tortured look of […] nakedness, it would be a mistake to overstress the erotic component.” The unpleasantness of Schiele's paintings, although they tend to highlight certain areas of human obsession, specifically with the focus on genitalia and the exaggerated features of models, tend to go against the grain of voyeuristic pornography, and instead stigmatize and attack the viewers conceptions of desire, by painting the bodies in such a negative way. Although the politics of exploitation were present, in a sense, Schiele inverts these processes, and subsequently provides pornography with its binary opposite.

The Art Of Ugliness

Schiele was ahead of his time in a number of ways, by revolutionizing the subject matter he painted, by contemporizing the age-old study of the human nude, and, moreover, by painting pictures that wouldn't necessarily have themselves a natural market in provincial Vienna. Schiele's portraits are “ugly”, and they are striking in their ugliness. The composition of the pieces are skewed, and the subjects are drawn as emaciated and rotting. The eye is simultaneously drawn to, and away from his harsh, realist canvas, as though one is witnessing a human car crash, or an exhibition of atrocity which cannot be ignored.

However, I argue that the most important aspect of Schiele's work, and the part of Schiele that cannot be ignored, is how he paved the way for future expressionist painters by conveying, and subsequently revolutionizing the art of “ugliness”. Mitsch suggests that “Schiele's art […] unites a strong realism with alienation effects resulting from his recognition of the autonomy of stylistic means.” It is the “alienation effect” that is important in Schiele's work. His genius is in the fact that he used his prolific artistic and technical talent to broach a subject that would ultimately challenge the viewer into questioning and interrogating the concept of self. Schiele, by ditching the traditional aesthetic codes, by abandoning the romantic and the classicist modes of drawing the nude, and by unflinchingly portraying the nude as a thwarted, twisted and confused subject, in turn opened the floodgates for other, similarly inclined painters, determined to show the darker aspects of the human psyche in art.

The reaction to Schiele's work after his untimely death in 1918 is interesting, and proves that his early work still had the ability to shock long afterwards. His later, more sober work gained much acclaim very quickly, but it took many years, and a sexual revolution, for S本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。