Egon Schiele at the Courtauld: a one-note samba of spindly limbs, nipples and pudenda

One day, as a student — or so the story goes — Egon Schiele called on Gustav Klimt, a celebrated older artist, and showed him a portfolio of drawings with the abrupt query, ‘Do I have talent?’ Klimt looked at them, then answered, ‘Much too much!’ One gets an inkling of what Klimt was getting at from the feverishly intense work on show in Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude.

From childhood, Schiele drew with manic fluency. His father, a syphilitic stationmaster, was irritated to discover that a sketchbook, a gift to the boy intended to last for months, had been filled in less than a day. In 1906, at the age of 16, he sailed through the entrance examination to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts to become the youngest student in his class (the following year Adolf Hitler ignominiously failed the same test).

As time went on, the Vienna Academy seems to have regretted letting him in. His teacher, the severely conservative Professor Griepenkerl, implored Schiele when he left, ‘For God’s sake, never tell anyone you studied with me!’ The reason was that Schiele was simultaneously a prodigy and an enfant terrible.

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He found his distinctive style very early. His entire oeuvre is that of a young man; most of the work in the first of the two rooms of this densely packed little exhibition dates from 1910–11, when Schiele (1890–1918) was just 20. That helps to explain some tendencies: a half-disgusted preoccupation with sexuality and a similarly queasy fascination with examining his naked self. The male figures mainly seem to have been modelled by the artist, though it is hard to be certain since the head is often not included.

As the title indicates, this is a selection that concentrates on drawings of people without any clothes on — which make up the majority of Schiele’s works on paper (although his themes also included portraits and landscapes).