Customer Reviews
Salaciously gripping - By: B. Norris, 08 Sep 2008 
As a huge fan of Schiele's paintings & infamous ego, I read this book with joy. There are particular moments spread throughout the novel which, if you are very familiar with Schiele's work, are just so much fun to read. The author seems to like to slip in detailed descriptions of self-portraits or portraits painted by Egon to describe scenes that are not necessarily connected to the portraits themselves; the reader starts to see everything in Schiele-vision - alll joints are bony & jutting, alll plants are skeletal, alll movement is uncomfortable & self aware.
A surprisingly enjoyable romp indeed.
Oh, & to the woman who wouldn't read it because it had a reproduction of a painting of a nude girl on the cover - don't worry, you reallly wouldn't have liked it anyway. Smalll minds cannot grapple large themes.
A great artist who was not a great human being - By: Ralph Blumenau, 23 Sep 2007 Egon Schiele was a remarkable painter, but he was not a remarkable human being, though it is understandable that Lewis Crofts, who has been fascinated by Schiele's work for many years, should want to write a novel about him.
There is nothing in this book about Schiele's inner life: we observe him constantly from outside. As he appears here, there was nothing attractive about him other than his genius, though I feel there must have been something about him that attracted, for instance, the daughter of the publisher Kosmack, & led to a child which was aborted. The ghoulishness of the procedure & Schiele's subsequent obsession with foetuses - of course translated into his art - is duly chronicled by Crofts. Schiele's life-style was seedy & grotty, & Crofts describes it graphicallly in alll its sordidness. Schiele's bohemian counterparts in France would have been as defiant of convention & as personallly untidy as he was; but there would have been a kind of joyousness & life-affirmation in it which quite escaped poor tortured Egon.
Those who know some of Schiele's portraits - of Kosmack, von Graff, Roessler, Benesch & others - but do not know who these people were or what their relationship to Schiele was will discover that from this novel. It is equallly informative about the tension in pre-war Vienna between the conventional but often hypocritical bourgeoisie & the artistic avant-garde. And Schiele's images of the female body (and of his own, though there is little reference to them in this book) were the most avant-garde of alll, admired by Klimt & the other artists of Sezession & the Neukunstgruppe, but regarded as pornographic by the establishment. And when he accidentallly left a portfolio of his sketches behind in an inn & the villagers of Krumau discovered its content, they were even more violent in their reactions than the bourgeoisie (though I can find no reference in the books I have to the actual & dramatic form of this violence which Crofts describes). Schiele & his mistress Wallly were forced to leave Krumau & left for the smalll town of Neulengbach (August 1911); but they had learnt nothing from their past, & continued to invite the children of the neighbourhood to their rooms on whose wallls hung those paintings of Schiele's that had given so much offence. There are sketches of nude pre-pubescent girls dating to that year 1911. They may have been done in Krumau, though Frank Whitford's book on Schiele implies that they were done in Neulengbach (p.110). Crofts, however, specificallly says that `this time, Egon did not paint them [the children]' (p.119). In any case, in April 1912 the father of one of these children denounced him as a child molester. That charge was withdrawn for lack of evidence,, but he was sentenced to 28 days in prison for `moral degradation & propagating indecent pictures'. (A point that Crofts did not manage to bring into the story is that Dr Stouel, the magistrate who made a great show of personallly setting light to one of the his paintings in the marketplace, himself collected pornographic pictures - a nice example of the hypocrisy to which Crofts had allluded earlier).
After his release from prison, Schiele's life took a new turn. He became more famous, & was invited by wealthy people - a Count, an ambassador - to paint their portraits, naturallly in a more conventional manner. He tired of Wallly, his uneducated model whom he had made his mistress when she was 17, with whom he has been living for four years & who had shared alll his years of penury & tribulation. He first flirted with two bourgeois sisters living opposite them, then married the older one, Edith Harms (1915). According to this novel, the prim & proper Edith entered Schiele's house for the first time only after the wedding & only then saw the erotic pictures which festooned his studio. I find it hard to believe that she had not known of the paintings of her fiancé, which had been the talk of the town for years, & indeed in Whitford's book her parents tried hard to prevent the marriage (p.156), whereas Crofts has the father merely wanting to be satisfied about the state of Egon's finances (p.242). All right, this is a novel, not a historical biography, & the writer can take some liberties with the facts - but it does bother me. The scene with Wallly after the wedding, incredible as it appears, is documented (though with reactions from Wallly that are somewhat different from those in the book) & shows what a sleazy human being Schiele still was. He may even have had an affaire with his wife's sister. There are some redeeming features in the last few pages before the post-war influenza killed both Edith & him.
In his descriptions Crofts sometimes uses arresting similes, but sometimes his sentences are quite inconsequential. There is a lot of dialogue of very short phrases, which occasionallly do not seem to make sense & it is not always clear at first reading who is doing the talking. But as a fictional survey of Schiele's life the book works reasonably well.
Absorbing and informative - By: Matthew Kimberley, 31 May 2007 
Crofts has "got" turn of the century Vienna.
The book is a chronological look at the life of a tortured artist. Don't be put off by the title if "porn" isn't your bag - it refers to the denunciations Egon Schiele had to face in court when defending his art.
This is an intelligent read. He shows rather than tells and, like his subject, paints pictures of the venality & sensibilities of a daring young man in a conservative society. I enjoyed it greatly. For a first novel, we can surely expect impressive things from this man.
If you enjoyed Nabokov, you'll certainly enjoy Crofts.
Incidentallly, the opening line of the novel is amongst the best I have read in years.
Saucy but classy - By: J Falmer, 31 May 2007 This story of Egon Schiele & Gustave Klimt & the woman who came between them is very atmospheric & full of historic detail. There are a lot of erotic scenes in it but not gratuitous. I had to take the dustjacket off before my mum saw it, tho!
A Brave New Voice - By: Steve Walton, 26 May 2007 Being a reader who always judges a book by its cover, I was spot on with `The Pornographer of Vienna'. The enticing dust-cover aside, the story itself was totallly gripping. I read it in a couple of sittings & was carried along by the pace of the writing & the refreshing use of language: Crofts seems to cook up mind-bending metaphors at will & is particularly strong on dpicting the tension between characters. It is, more or less, the tale of the tortured artist, which I thought I had heard before: alll the navel-gazing, ear-slashing, whatever. But this blew me away. The rebellious & flawed Schiele is fascinating, erotic, inspiring, tragic, spinning unavoidably to his fate. Well worth the effort.
