Perhaps no artist did more to eviscerate the demure academicism of the 19th-century nude painting than Egon Schiele. His drawings, gouaches, and watercolors of spindly, ephebic prostitutes engaged in various acts of masturbation can be — and have been — read as a radical transgression against bourgeois propriety, as a proto-feminist emancipation of female sexuality, a primitivist identification with the supposedly liberatory irrational powers of the female “Other,” as an expressionist update of male voyeuristic business as usual, or as erotica bordering on child pornography. Schiele expert Jane Kallir offers a sympathetic reading of Schiele’s art in “Egon Schiele’s Women,” a lushly illustrated and biographically comprehensive tome that tracks the artist’s depictions of the second sex, from his early experiments with his sexually precocious sister Gerti, to the Sapphic entanglements of the anonymous “black-haired girls,” to his intimate sketches of his muse and lover, Wally, to — lastly and finally — his more conventional portraits of his respectable bourgeois wife, Edith. An exhibition containing much of the work in the book opened on October 23 and runs through the end of the year at Galerie St. Etienne, where Kallir works as co-director.

Kallir roots biography in the socioeconomic context of Vienna in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Freud and Darwin had brought sexuality out of an obscurantist haze, while scientifically formalizing the inferiority of women. The art of Schiele's contemporaries — including his mentor Gustav Klimt — represented women as either chaste virgins or evil seductresses, turning on a mutually dependent Madonna/Whore paradigm. As Kallir writes, while “fin de siècle men wanted to believe in the existence of a pure woman, they also wanted — needed — their whores.” Did they ever! At the turn if the century, Vienna was the capital of prostitution, a city of 1,800,000 with a sizeable underclass of 15,000 to 20,000 prostitutes, many of whom posed as artists models and mingled with a downwardly-mobile cabal of avant-garde artists.

“By tipping the reclining nude upright,” she argues, “by allowing her to return his gaze, Schiele ratified the independent power of female sexuality. There was no longer a controlling male narrative holding the woman in check.” Kallir’s argument is a seductive one. It endorses the viewing of sexy pictures as politically progressive. There are moments, however, where Kallir’s apologism borders on polemic naiveté. When she says that “Schiele’s creation of erotica was intended neither to sublimate sexual desire (as in conventional art) or to arouse it (as in pornography),” she is willfully blind to the indubitable raunchiness of so many of his nudes. In some passages, Kallir may overstate the egalitarian impulse of Schiele’s erotics. Isn’t the artist/model relationship itself a controlling male narrative par excellence?

Kallir argues that the best of Schiele’s models were “independent actors,” but it’s not clear how the disparities in age and class between the artist and his generally younger, poorer sitters might have compromised their agency. It is known that Schiele’s studio was a mecca for misfit children, that he was incarcerated in 1912 for allegedly seducing a girl who was below the age of consent, and that those charges were later dropped. If Manet’s notorious “Olympia” shocked polite society with its frank depiction of confrontational, unmediated female sexuality (and, moreover, unapologetic prostitution), Schiele’s raggedy, wanton girlchildren (“kind-madchens,” in the parlance of the day) proposed a new sexuality that was anti-bourgeois while in keeping with the bourgeois male prerogatives that were his birthright.

Looking at Schiele’s deviantly kittenish and polymorphously perverse subjects, it’s tempting to make him into a romantic sex-positive proto-rock star rebelling against the straight-laced mores of his time; less tempting make him into a child-molester. As Kallir cogently argues, the truth about Schiele is probably neither, or rather, something in between. “Schiele was not a feminist,” she says, but “many of Schiele’s drawings were covert, probably unwitting, attacks on the dominant patriarchy." Kallir thoughtfully links the Austrian artist's erotic artworks to his self-portraits of his own emaciated naked body, noting that he was as disposed to objectify himself as he was his paramours and prostitutes. A sympathetic voyeur, he seems to identify with his models as a subaltern species outside the margins of middle-class respectability, even as he objectifies them.

"Egon Schiele's Women" is on view at Galerie St. Etienne, 24 West 57th Street, through December 28th.