Before meeting Graff and his patients, Schiele made art that was largely derivative. He had studied at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts with mixed results, and landed a few pieces at a major international exhibition in 1909, but his style was still Klimtian and Jugendstil, full of decorative froth and languorous, dreamy bodies. Fast-forward a year, and everything had changed. His work was suddenly a rogues’ gallery of ghoulish figures with keyed-up colors and unnaturally shrunken or engorged body parts. Even Schiele knew it: “I went through Klimt until March,” he wrote in a letter. “Today I believe I am someone completely different.”
The cocktail of influences piped into Schiele’s brain around 1910 had a few key elements. He was repeatedly exposed to the looser brushwork of Max Oppenheimer and Oskar Kokoschka; newly enthusiastic about Javanese shadow puppets; and charmed by a wacky friend, Erwin Osen, a mime, an artist, and a cabaret performer, who drew Schiele’s attention to the body language of the mentally ill. There was also a flock of patrons around to puff up his confidence and provide some income. Heinrich Benesch, a railroad inspector, was so obsessed with Schiele that he begged him never to discard or burn any sketches, but to hand them over. “Please,” Benesch said, “write the following equation in crayon on your stove: ‘stove=Benesch.’ ” Schiele’s work was too crude for aristocratic tastes, unlike Klimt’s, but was well suited to a particular slice of the educated middle class with a penchant for bodily oddity: doctors. One of Schiele’s most devoted supporters was a physician named Oskar Reichel. Another was Erwin von Graff.
“Seated Female Nude with Black Stockings” (1910) and “Kneeling Semi-Nude” (1917).
In the portrait from 1910, Graff looks like a nervous chimney sweep. His face and arms are mysteriously darkened, as if powdered with soot, but somehow—and this is the first of a dozen quirks in the painting—his white shirt is in near-mint condition. The exhibition catalogue puts forward the idea of radiodermatitis, suggesting that Graff’s frequent use of X-rays damaged his skin, which is plausible for his hands but might not explain what’s happened to his head: a swirl of black, sienna, and green, with white slits for eyes and teeth. The peculiar way he holds his arms, as if he’s about to sing the national anthem, is supposedly a surgeon’s hygienic pose. But there are too many stray details that cut against the grain of his professionalism, giving the painting an almost comic air. The most obvious is the little bandage wedged on his fingertip, like a pat of butter. Then there’s the shy pinky tucked behind his forearm, the torched eyebrows, and the crooked smile. Graff seems to be returning from Hell and having a chuckle about it.
Schiele could have placed Graff next to an operating table, like Rembrandt’s Dr. Nicolaes Tulp or Eakins’s Dr. Samuel Gross. He could have given him the dignity of Goya’s Dr. Arrieta, or made him look dashing, like Sargent’s Dr. Pozzi, with his crimson robe and Turkish slippers. Instead, Schiele strips Graff of a stethoscope and examination room, and reduces the background to platelets of white. Who would know that Graff was a talented doctor, or a hearty and athletic man who liked the outdoors and played the cello, or that he had two divorces on the horizon? His body, with its mottled face and hands, is the only wisp of narrative.