Wangechi Mutu on Egon Schiele

He has clarity in his humanness, in his present-ness: ‘I'm here, right now, and not for long.’

My name is Wangechi Mutu. I’m an artist.

I make drawings in my sketchbooks before I get into larger paintings. When I discovered Egon Schiele, I realized that actually a lot of his work was just on small sheets of paper. The power, the simplicity, and the clarity in his line is absolutely dumbfounding.

There’s nothing easy about that pose. In fact it’s very complicated to make believable with just line. She’s got her head twisted away, her hand is between her legs, there’s no background, there’s no seating. He can imply the delicacy in her fingers, this tension and movement, with this one simple, simple material.

I love accessories, shoes, stockings, the flourishes of human vanity: things that describe a person’s choices outside of being born. What would they wear? How much money did they have to spend on their teeth, on their hair? These things say a lot about us as social beings.

But I’m also fascinated by the nude female body, and I’ve been studying fertility emblems that express the power of female creativity. I think in this case—in the pose, in the line, in her coyness—it’s tender, but then, of course, they’re nothing coy about sitting in front of a man with your knees up in the air. Inside her is this sexuality and potency that he’s trying to, I think, draw out in the most humble, pared-down way. As a result, I think something massive happens.

He’s really empathizing with poor people, with women who don’t seem like they have great stature. And I just think, two minutes—he completed this, you know? And how many people can do that and just move on to the next thing, and not worry about it, not go back and try to improve on it. I think it’s also this indication of a very young soul, a young mind. This is an artist who died young. This is a person who was doubted as a master, you know. He would draw if no one ever knew who he was, but his signature is right up next to his work. He’s almost like a graffiti artist. It’s like a little tag. He’s, like, super territorial. He knows he’s doing something special.

He’s not full-on abstracting, and he’s not a Cubist, and he’s not breaking up the figure violently. He’s just giving the minimum amount of information to guide your eye. There’s nothing proper about it. It’s raw—it’s raw the way sex is raw, the way relationships are raw.

What I have noticed in my work is if I'm seeing things that disturb me, those things come out of my work in an unedited and unfiltered manner. In Egon Schiele’s work, he’s observing cruelty humans have for one another. This emaciated self-portrait—I don’t know if he was this skinny, but I think he’s trying to think about that idea of the body pushed to its extremes. It’s all about this human condition and asking, “Why are we here when life is so rough?”

These are not oil paintings: they’re not being painted or drawn with the idea of infinite life. He has clarity in his humanness, in his present-ness: “I’m here, right now, and not for long.”