Art & Creativity Quote by Egon Schiele

Schiele’s line is a provocation aimed straight at the anxiety engine of the early 20th century: the frantic need to be “new.” Saying “Art cannot be modern” sounds, on the surface, like a rejection of the avant-garde race he was visibly part of. But the trick is in “cannot.” He’s not scolding artists for experimenting; he’s denying that fashion has jurisdiction over what art ultimately is.

Schiele worked inside a Vienna intoxicated with “modernity” as a brand name: Secessionist slogans, new psychoanalytic vocabularies, new politics, new surfaces. His own work, with its jagged bodies and erotic candor, reads as aggressively modern even now. So the statement functions less as retreat than as a land-grab. If art is “primordially eternal,” then Schiele gets to claim that his distortions aren’t style for style’s sake; they’re excavation. The warped anatomy, the exposed nerves, the uneasy sexual honesty become not a trend but a return to something older than taste: fear, desire, mortality, shame.

“Primordially” is the tell. It doesn’t mean timeless in the museum-poster sense; it means pre-civilized, before polite language. Schiele’s intent is to separate art from the calendar and reattach it to the body. In a culture that marketed “modern” as progress and cleanliness, he insists that the raw material of art is not progress at all, but the stubborn continuity of human appetite and fragility. The subtext is defiant: you can call my work decadent, perverse, too much. I’ll call it ancient.