Looking at art like Schiele's is a form of mental-exercise. You train yourself to be able to understand people in bad situations. You practice how to reject appearances that are misleading, surfaces which make you think that the other person feels the way she shows and makes you think more, spend more energy on understanding what's besides their masks. His painting present you with unpleasant parts of life. If you practice looking at this painting you can develop an affinity of thinking about what matters for you and others. You learn to see these worries, fears and emotions as dimensions other people have regardless of what they express at the moment. You learn to see them and yourself as more human. And this is useful. You don't feel so alone, you don't feel so alien. You won't be so afraid of them.
The Museum of Fine Art in Budapest is a heavyweight on the exhibition market since several years. Their comprehensive Van Gogh and Cezanne exhibitions attracted huge numbers of visitors both from inland and abroad. Of course the big ones usually take place in the autumn-winter season, when people are more likely to spend their free time at the museum. (If only they would know how sweet the cooled air is on a hot summer day!)
This summer the Museum offers a nice little specialty: neighbor Austria's very own Egon Schiele. The exhibition takes place in two large rooms. The first one focuses on Schiele's young years. We can see some drawings from his years at the Academy, and some of his painting still under the influence of Klimt and other contemporaries. As always, the curators of the exhibition have done nice work and collected some prime example to illustrate the era, the predecessors of Schiele and his contemporaries. This context helps one both to track influences and to see what makes his art distinct.
And there is plenty to see: beginning with his obsession with dead, through his clever treatment of problems of self-identity and of mother-child relations, to his fascination with the female body and its erotic portrayal, we get glimpses of many of the main topics that moved Schiele. A painful loss is that his paintings on family and loneliness are not represented (I especially missed his The Family (Die Familie). Nevertheless, such peaces as Hermits (Die Eremiten), and Self-seers (Selbtseher) compensated us abundantly.
A striking feature of Schiele's expressivism is the way it reveals unseen aspects of reality: your naive eyes show you patterns around you, but they do not show what those patterns evoke in you, what they mean for you, how you feel about them. Schiele's paintings are as if your vision would be enhanced. You see into the souls of people. Behind calm faces and flat surfaces there is violent anger, despise, fear, loneliness or temptation. Behind regular little streets of a city, there is an already dying, fearfully hiding town, with dull, sorrowful houses (for example in his City on the Blue River (Stadt am blauen Fluss)).
Schiele sees what you see, but he paints more: he paints what he feels, what he knows his subjects feel or what the hypocritical, judicious morality of the age tries to blind you to. His paintings do not aim to do what photography does, they do not target the faithful capturing of light reflected from surfaces travelling into your retina. They aim at transforming your vision and leading you to a combined view. They unravel secrets, you couldn't or didn't want to see. He shows you what troubles you, what worries flesh-beings.
To be honest, despite it's relatively small size the exhibition made an impression on us. We walked silently for some time and after sitting down for a coffee in the City Gardens (Városliget) H. broke down and cried for some time. Schiele was partly the cause. He made her see some things unpleasant and reminded her of some things we do not want to think about right now, during this wonderful trip of ours. Nevertheless, I can only recommend the exhibition.
