Intelligent life

Comprei uma revista esnobe no aeroporto mas... era a unica revista de cultura na loja! Ate' o Brasil tem mais revistas de cultura que o aeroporto de Madri.

De todo modo, tres textos bons. O melhor, "What sobriety does to novelists" eu precisaria digitar. Este sobre o Leopold Museum em Viena e' interessante e esta' disponivel no site:

"Schiele’s short, tormented life has its own bitter and dark romance. This amazingly gifted young artist, born in 1890, was nurtured in the spirit of Austria’s Secession movement—a rejection of the Beaux Arts classic style and the stuffy mediocrity of the salons. He was inspired by Klimt’s decorative eroticism and, in the first decade of the 20th century, turned it into a form of daring, expressionistic figuration—supercharging it in the process. The work Schiele produced in the last ten years of his life was as powerful and individual as late Van Gogh: it was as if Arthur Rimbaud had turned painter.

The outrage and bourgeois horror provoked by the overt carnality of his skinny, distorted male and female nudes was predictable; prosecution for perversion of minors less so. In 1912 Schiele, then living in a small provincial town, made the mistake of inviting pubescent girls to his studio and using them as his nude models. He was eventually acquitted of child abuse but found guilty of having erotic images around children and imprisoned for 24 days. The experience had a profound and disturbing effect on him.

Despite this scandal, by the end of the first world war his reputation was growing and he was just beginning to be spoken of as the natural heir to Gustav Klimt when the 1918 flu pandemic claimed in October, first, the life of his heavily pregnant wife, Edith, and then, three days later, the artist’s own. Egon Schiele was dead and forgotten at 28, but with an astonishing body of work behind him, waiting for Rudolf Leopold to discover it and present it to the world."

(William Boyd, Intelligent life, junho 2009)