Nudes
Boeckl's nudes are mostly charcoal and pencil drawings.
They seem like sketches, delicate and frail - as though hovering weightless
in space. Their singularity places them amongst the greatest achievements
in 20th-century European drawing, and there is little to compare with them
in European art. Besides representing the human body, Boeckl is concerned
with forcing it open to produce something new:
"The nude drawings of the period
1918-1922 occupy a special place in my work. At that time, Schiele's drawing
cast its spell over the whole of the young generation. Permeated with my best
feelings, these drawings resemble small mines penetrated by a rare ray of
sunshine. The seed works its way in between the open layers. I have drawn
a lot; just once, a tiny result."
Otto Benesch, former director of the Albertina, also saw
in Boeckl's nude drawings "germ-cells of new evolving form":
"These drawings have an element of growth; a process of becoming takes place
in front of the viewer's eyes. The bodies shimmer, come into bloom, as a plant
unfolds."
A
further development of growth is the opening of the bodies, as in the opened
corpses of the later pictures. Boeckl's evening class for nude drawing at the
Academy of Fine Arts acquired legendary significance as an obligatory exercise
for art students.
Georg Eisler, one of his students, tells us: "Sometimes
Boeckl sits down amongst the students and makes his own drawings. His pencil
grinds, as if reluctant, over the paper. he leaves a strong, decisive line -
like the line a navigator draws on a map. Again and again, appraising, scrutinising,
Boeckl erases it. A new line defining the form appears, now becoming finer,
now thickening deeply, darkly, to embark - after repeated erasures - on its
new path around the form. It is as though four or five drawings were being made,
one over another, on the same page."
