Friday, July 27, 2018

THE PARIS REVIEW, Sade & Teen Erotica

Here's a recent tweet from The Paris Review and my reply:



The tweet links to this post:


And here's a relevant excerpt from Nymphalis carmen: Nympholepsy in Nabokov’s Oeuvre:
Appel noted [in The Annotated Lolita] that “Sade’s Justine" is a reference to Justine, or, The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791) by the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) and that Justine was: “an extraordinarily resilient young girl who exists solely for the pleasures of an infinite succession of sadistic libertines. She undergoes and array of rapes, beatings, and tortures […]” (442)

And Quilty shared with H.H.: “[…] I am a playwright. I have written tragedies, comedies, fantasies. I have made private movies out of Justine and other eighteenth century sexcapades.” (298)

Justine wasn’t the only nymphet who was abused in Justine, or, The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791). There were others. Here’s an excerpt that will serve as a fitting example: “Hardly have we taken up our post when Rodin enters, leading a fourteen-year-old girl, blond and as pretty as Love; the poor creature is sobbing away, all too unhappily aware of what awaits her […]” (536)
The number of NSFW warnings in the The Paris Review tweet are justified. The illustrations are too salacious - even for this blog. However, here's a modified image of two nymphet lipstick lesbians.


Saturday, July 21, 2018

YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE (2018): Rescuing a Nymphet [Teen] Prostitute


Here's the IMDb plot summary for You Were Never Really Here (2018):
A traumatized veteran, unafraid of violence, tracks down missing girls for a living. When a job spins out of control, Joe's nightmares overtake him as a conspiracy is uncovered leading to what may be his death trip or his awakening.
And here's part of Amazon's plot summary for Jonathan Ames' novella (2013):
Joe has witnessed things that cannot be erased. A former FBI agent and Marine [...] earns his living rescuing girls who have been kidnapped into the sex trade. When he's hired to save the daughter of a corrupt New York senator held captive at a Manhattan brothel, he stumbles into a dangerous web of conspiracy, and he pays the price. [...]

[Spoiler] Since we're of the strong opinion that the film can't be understood without reading the novella, we're going to summarize the shocking book but share a GIF (below) from the Amazon Studios film:
Votto "an up-and-coming lawyer with his own law firm, couldn't finance a campaign [for New York state senator]. He needed money, backing [...] So he went to Long Island, to Bay Shore, to the [mafia] men [...]

[...] the boss, Novelli, a bald, squat man in his sixties with brutal hands, said he would do it. He'd put Votto in office, but [Lisa] his [13-year-old] daughter would have to pay for the campaign.

He made it clear that if Votto resisted, he'd have him killed, make it look like an accident.

So Votto, a coward, gave them his daughter. He told himself that to be a great man in this world you had to be ruthless, even barbaric.
But a month after Lisa's disappearance, his wife could tell that he was hiding something [...] he confessed to her [...] and Novelli's people had her killed, made it look like an accident.

Then that anonymous text had come, ["Your daughter is in new york in a brothel at 244 east 48th street [...]] and suddenly he couldn't take it anymore.

So, in a state of mania, he [...] contacted [ex-Marine] McCleary. He'd get Lisa back and defy them, defy Novelli.
We won't spoil the rest of the shocking story. But this isn't the most shocking scene we've come upon from Ames. This scene from Ames' HBO show Bored to Death is shocking as well.

Friday, July 13, 2018

Balthus' THE STREET: A Nymphet's Crotch Groped Before & After the MoMA

Balthus' The Street: Before (1933) and After (1955) the MoMA

We're reading Weber's Balthus: A Biography in preparation of the second edition of Nymphalis Carmen: Nympholepsy in Nabokov’s Oeuvre

We asked and answered the following question in Nymphalis Carmen:
And who was one of Nabokov's favorite painters? Based on my leading question, you may have been able to guess that it is none other than Balthasar Klossowski de Rola or simply Balthus. Nabokov shared in Strong Opinions

"The aspects of Picasso that I emphatically dislike are the sloppy products of his old age. I also loathe old Matisse. A contemporary artist I do admire very much, though not only because he paints Lolita-like creatures, is Balthus." (167) 

And Balthus shared, translated into English, in the documentary Balthus the Painter (1996), referring to Nabokov: “I think we feel the same thing in the presence of young girls.”
In addition, we've blogged about Balthus in the past. For example, we wrote about how, despite over 8,000 virtual signatures on an (online) petition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art refused to removed Balthus' Thérèse Dreaming (1938). But I didn't realize that The Street (1933), which I've passed several times at the MoMA, had a previous - even more salacious version. 

Here's MoMA's description of The Street:
The Street, Balthus's first large painting, was one of several that scandalized audiences when it was included in the artist's earliest solo exhibition, in Paris in 1934. Balthus rendered each of the figures in his scene of Paris's rue Bourbon-le-Chateau frozen mid-movement; none of them seem to notice the aggressive sexual struggle underway at the painting's far left [...] The Street was of great interest to Surrealist artists for its rendering of a crowded street as an uncanny site of mental isolation and for its exploration of sexual taboos.
Intriguingly, the art history major who wrote that blurb didn't mention that The Street was modified by Balthus in 1955 at the request of James Thrall Soby. 

Here's a summary of Weber's writing on the history of The Street:

Soby, whose taste in art was "bold enough to confront the formidable", purchased The Street in Paris in 1936 and promptly placed it on a wall in his Farmington, Connecticut home. Soby admitted that The Street hadn't sold in three years due to "[...] the depiction of the young man at the edge of ecstasy reaching over the hem of the girl's hiked-up skirt toward the young girl's genitals."

Soby was "delighted in the shock value" of The Street, he had "a lively sense of humor", "a deep pleasure in upsetting the bourgeoisie" and "[h]e was keyed up by - in his own words - the "young girl being seized by the crotch [...]"

However, Soby didn't anticipate that his five-year-old step-son and his playmates would "[...] titter wildly over The Street." Consequently, Soby placed the painting in a fireproof vault. 

However, in 1955, after Reverend James L. McLane, who ironically hung some of Balthus' "most provocative" paintings of nymphets in his church in Los Angeles, "bawled [him] out for three hours for being so cowardly as to hide a great painting away in a darkened vault", Soby exhibited and bequeathed the painting to the MoMA after it had been modified by Balthus. "[...] the Mongolian boy's hand had been moved very slightly to a less committed position on the young girl's body, though his eyes were tense with the same fever."

The Street has been exhibited in the MoMA at least eight times. Here are three examples:

 "Balthus." December 19, 1956–February 3, 1957

 "Selections from the Collections, Photography, Painting and Sculpture, Architecture and Design"
March 8, 1982–February/March 1983

 "The James Thrall Soby Bequest" March 22, 1979–May 9, 1979

Thursday, July 12, 2018

The "Real" Lolita and Humbert: Sally Horner and Frank La Salle

Sally Horner and Frank La Salle

In Lolita, Phyllis’ mother, Mrs. Chatfield, “with a fake smile, all aglow with evil curiosity”, "attacked" Humbert: 

Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank LaSalle [sic], a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948? (289) 

For some reason, in The Annotated Lolita, Appel didn’t annotate the rhetorical question. However, in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Boyd noted:

Nabokov undertook research of all kinds [in preparation for Lolita.] [...] He noted newspaper reports of accidents, sex crimes, and killings: “a middle-aged morals offender” who abducted fifteen-year-old Sally Horner from New Jersey and kept her for twenty-one months as his “cross-country slave,” until she was found in a southern California motel [...]” (211).


But it was Alexander Dolinin who made the connection between the rhetorical question and Nabokov’s research. Dolinin wrote in “What Happened to Sally Horner?: A Real-Life Source of Nabokov's Lolita”:

The phrase [...] is a deliberately planted riddle that invites the reader to do some research in old newspaper files. However, the necessary information is difficult to find, because major American media didn’t cover the La Salle case [...].


By that time, [Nabokov] “beset with technical difficulties and doubts” (Strong Opinions, 105), he had almost halted work on his new novel and would not have missed an interesting prompt provided by the “given world.” [...] their story reads as a rough outline for the second part of Lolita.

The second part of Lolita abounds with echoes of the story [...] elements of the novel’s nightmarish plot seem both to derive from the real-life precedent and to refer back to it. The sequence and time-span of events are strikingly similar.


Humbert made a previous reference to the Sally\La Salle case:


“Only the other day we read in the newspapers some bunkum about a middle-aged morals offender who pleaded guilty to the violation of the Mann Act and to transporting a nine-year-old girl across state lines for immoral purposes, whatever they are. Dolores darling! You are not nine but almost thirteen, and I would not advise you to consider yourself my cross-country slave […] I am your father, and I am speaking English, and I love you (150).”

Appel made an annotation here but not in reference to the Sally\La Salle case. However, Dolinin noted: 

Changing the age of the girl, Nabokov indicates that in the inner calendar of the novel the allusion to the case of Frank La Salle is an anachronism: Humbert is talking to Lolita in 1947, that is a year before the real abduction when Sally Horner was nine or ten years old. Yet the legal formulae used by the narrator as well as his implying that he, in contrast to La Salle, is really Lolita’s father, leave no doubt that the passage refers to the newspaper reports [...]



Sarah Weinman’s post “The Real Lolita: The story of 11-year-old Sally Horner’s abduction changed the course of 20th-century literature. She just never got to tell it herself” provides the details about how La Salle seduced Sally. Here’s an abridgment: 

On June 13, 1948, 11-year-old Sally Horner was a student at Northeast School in Camden, New Jersey. Urged on by her middle-school classmates, Sally walked into the Woolworth’s on Broadway and Federal to steal a five-cent notebook. 

Once inside, she reached for the first notebook she could find [...]. She stuffed it into her bag and sprinted away, careful to look straight ahead to the exit door. Then, right before the getaway, came a hard tug on her arm.


“I am an FBI agent,” the man said to Sally. “And you are under arrest.” She cried. She cowered. 

He pointed across the way to City Hall, the tallest building in Camden, and said that girls like her would be dealt with there. If it went the way they normally handled thieving youths, he told her, Sally would be bound for the reformatory.

But his manner brightened. It was a lucky break he caught her and not some other FBI agent, the man said. If she agreed to report to him from time to time, he would let her go. Spare her the worst. Show some mercy.

Sally felt her own mood lift, too. He was going to let her go. 

On her way home from school the next day, though, the man sought her out again. Without warning, the rules had changed: Sally had to go with him to Atlantic City—the government insisted. She’d have to convince her mother he was the father of two school friends, inviting her to a seashore vacation. He would take care of the rest with a phone call and a convincing appearance at the Camden bus depot.

His name was Frank La Salle, and he was no FBI agent [...]

Sally and La Salle—he used the alias “Frank Warner” at that time—moved into a rooming house at 203 Pacific Street in Atlantic City. She called her mother on several occasions, always from a pay station, to say she was having a swell time. For six weeks, Ella Horner thought nothing was amiss—she believed her daughter was on summer vacation with friends.

After the first week, Sally said she’d be staying longer to see the Ice Follies. After two weeks, the excuses grew more vague. After three weeks, the phone calls stopped. Ella’s letters could no longer be delivered. Sally’s last missive was the most disturbing: she and “Warner” were leaving for Baltimore. Something woke up inside Ella’s mind: she’d been duped, her daughter snatched away not with violence, but with sweet-talking stealth. Ella received Sally’s final letter on July 31, 1948. She called the police later that day.

Cops in Atlantic City descended upon the Pacific Street lodging house, where they learned the man called Warner had posed as Sally’s father. They’d found enough evidence to arrest him, but it was too late: he and Sally had disappeared. Two suitcases full of clothes remained in their room, as did several unsent postcards from Sally to her mother and friends. There was also a photograph, never before seen by Ella or the police, of a honey-haired Sally, in a cream-colored dress, white socks and black patent shoes, sitting on a swing. Her smile was tentative, her eyes fathoms deep with sadness. She was still just 11 years old.


Sally Horner in Atlantic City in 1948

The man called Warner was really Frank La Salle, and only six months before he abducted Sally, he’d finished up a prison stint for the statutory rape of [...] five girls between the ages of 12 and 14. 


Having cleared out of Atlantic City, knowing the police were in pursuit, La Salle and Sally settled in Baltimore by September 1948. They kept up the father-daughter pose [..] —until April 1949. She attended Saint Ann’s Catholic School at 2200 Greenmount Drive [...]

They left Baltimore and headed southwest to Dallas, the timing of the move appearing to coincide with Camden County indicting La Salle a second time. Back in 1948, prosecutor Mitchell Cohen indicted La Salle for Sally’s abduction, which carried a maximum sentence of three to five years in prison. This second, more serious indictment, for kidnapping, handed down on March 17, 1949, carried a sentence of 30 to 35 years. If La Salle did get word of the new indictment—he told Sally they needed to leave Baltimore because the “FBI asked him to investigate something”—he didn’t want to be in striking distance of Camden, where police could find them.

Using the last name of LaPlante, they lived on Commerce Street, a quiet, well-kept trailer park in a more run-down part of Dallas, from April 1949 until March 1950. Their neighbors regarded Sally as a typical 12-year-old living with her widowed father, albeit one never let out of his sight except to go to school. But she seemed to enjoy taking care of her home. She would bake every once in a while. She had a dog. La Salle provided her with a generous allowance for clothes and sweets. She would go shopping, swimming, and to her neighbors’ trailers for dinner. And while La Salle, as LaPlante, set up shop again as a mechanic, Sally attended Catholic school once more, at Our Lady of Good Counsel. 

A copy of Sally’s report card from her time at Our Lady of Good Counsel between September 1949 and February 1950 indicates she was a good student [...].

[...] the consensus about Sally and her “father” was that they “both seemed happy and entirely devoted to each other.” Nelrose Pfeil, a neighbor, said, “Sally got everything she ever wanted. I always said I didn’t know who was more spoiled, Sally or her dog.” Maude Smilie, living at a nearby trailer on Commerce Street, seemed bewildered at the idea of Sally being a virtual prisoner: “[Sally] spent one day at the beauty parlor with me. I gave her a permanent and she never mentioned a thing. She should have known she could have confided in me.”

Ruth Janish was married to an itinerant farm worker. During a fallow period at the beginning of 1950, the Janishes lived in the West Dallas trailer park at the same time as Sally Horner and Frank La Salle. Soon after she met them, Ruth began to suspect that Frank was not, in fact, Sally’s father. 

Ruth tried to cajole Sally, still recovering from her appendectomy, to tell her the “true story” of her relationship with La Salle in Dallas.

The Janishes left for California in early March 1950, thinking they’d have better luck finding work there, but on arrival, Ruth hatched the beginning of a plan. First, she wrote La Salle, urging him and Sally to follow them to the San Jose trailer park, where they could be neighbors again. The Janishes had even reserved a spot in the park for them.

La Salle was in. He and Sally drove from Dallas to San Jose, the house-trailer attached to his car, and arrived in the park by Saturday, March 18, 1950.

Before leaving Dallas, Sally mustered up the courage to tell a friend at school of her ordeal at La Salle’s hands. The friend told Sally her behavior was “wrong” and that “she ought to stop,” as Sally later explained. As her friend’s admonishment sank in, Sally began refusing La Salle’s further advances. And on the morning of March 21, 1950, Ruth Janish’s determined concern and Sally’s burgeoning need for change collided in a San Jose trailer park.

With Frank La Salle safely away for several hours, Ruth invited Sally over to her trailer. Knowing this was her only chance, Janish gently coaxed more honesty out of the young girl. She wanted to go home. She wanted to talk to her mother and older sister. Janish then showed Sally how to operate the telephone in her trailer so the girl could make long-distance phone calls.

Sally called her mother first, but the line was disconnected;...Next, she tried her sister Susan, who lived with her husband, Al Panaro... “Al, this is Sally,” she said. He tried to contain his excitement. “Where are you at?” “I’m with a lady friend in California. Send the FBI after me, please!” Sally cried. “Tell mother I’m okay, and don’t worry. I want to come home. I’ve been afraid to call before.” Sally’s brother-in-law assured her he would do that if she would stay where she was.

After Sally hung up the phone, she turned to Ruth. “I thought she was going to collapse,” Mrs. Janish said. “She kept saying over and over, ‘What will Frank do when he finds out what I have done?’”

The next day, La Salle was charged with violating the Mann Act for transporting a female along state lines with the intent of corrupting her morals. 

Judge Rocco Palese sentenced him to 30 to 35 years at Trenton State Prison, with the shorter sentence for abduction to be served concurrently. 

La Salle never saw the outside world again. He died of arteriosclerosis in Trenton State Prison on March 22, 1966, 16 years into his sentence. He was just shy of 70 years old.

[15-year-old] Sally and the young man, 20-year-old Edward John Baker[...], set out as planned [from a resort in the shore town of Wildwood] in the early morning hours of August 18, 1952. Just after midnight [...] Baker drove his 1948 Ford sedan into the back of a parked truck on the road, knocking it into another parked truck. Baker emerged from the four-car collision with minor injuries[...] The crash killed Sally instantly.



If you haven’t read (The Annotated) Lolita for some time, Dolinin notes some pointed similarities between Sally\La Salle and Dolly\Humbert:

The second part of Lolita abounds with echoes of the story. Lolita’s captivity lasting nearly two years, the “extensive travels” of Humbert Humbert and his “child-bride” all over the United States, from New England to California, their soujourns in innumerable “motor courts,” a stay in Beardsley where Lolita goes to school, the hero’s constant claims that he is the girl’s father, “not very mechanically-minded [a hint at La Salle’s profession] but prudent papa Humbert” (208)—all these elements of the novel’s nightmarish plot seem both to derive from the real-life precedent and to refer back to it. The sequence and time-span of events are strikingly similar. Sally Horner lived with Frank La Salle for twenty-one months, went to school in Dallas where she confided her secret to a friend, resumed travels with the kidnapper and finally, three weeks later, made a crucial telephone call asking for help, escaping her captor. After twenty-one months with Lolita, when the pair stays in Beardsley, Humbert suddenly realizes that she has grown up and is slipping away from his power. He suspects that she has told everything to her schoolfriend Mona, and might be cherishing “the stealthy thought … that perhaps after all Mona was right, and she, orphan Lo, could expose [Humbert] without getting penalized herself” (204). They have a terrible row, but Lolita manages to escape and make a mysterious phone call, afterwards telling Humbert: “A great decision has been made” (207). They resume their travels and about a month later Lolita manages to escape. When in the final chapter of the novel Humbert states that he would have given himself “at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges,” he mimics Frank La Salle’s sentence.


Several details transposed by Nabokov from newspaper reports seem to underscore an affinity (or, better, a “rhyme”) between Sally Horner and Dolly Haze. Both “nice looking youngsters” are daughters of widowed mothers; both have brown hair; Lolita’s “Florentine hands” and “Florentine breasts” evoke not only Boticcelli but also the first name of Florence Sally Horner. It was in the sad story of the New Jersey girl that Nabokov found a psychological explanation of Lolita’s acquiescence in her role of sex-slave. Copying La Salle, Humbert terrorizes his victim with threats that if he is arrested, she “will be given a choice of varying dwelling places, all more or less the same, the correctional school, the reformatory, the juvenile detention home…” (151).



In the Books section of the August 2018 issue of Vanity Fair, Sarah Weinman wrote about two new books about the Sally\La Salle case. In her piece, “Two new books go in search of the real Lolita”, Weinman mentioned her book with is hyperbolic title, The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World (out in September from Ecco) and T. Greenwood’s novel Rust & Stardust (out in August from St. Martin’s).

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Famous Ephebophile: Dane Cook (45) & Teen Kelsi Taylor (19) | Old\Young Sexual Affair

"Dane Cook, 45, gets cozy with 19-year-old musician girlfriend as they grab late night pizza to-go"

Update 7/11/18: The Daily Mail posted the article "Dane Cook, 45, gets cozy with 19-year-old musician girlfriend as they grab late night pizza to-go". Here are some excerpts and paparazzi photographs:
Comedian Dane Cook, 45, and his 19-year old girlfriend Kelsi Taylor beat the summer Los Angeles heat with a little late night feast.  

The couple was spotted grabbing a pizza to-go from a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard on Monday as the temperatures soared into the triple digits.

And it turns out the pair didn't stray far from each other as they hugged and casually touched each other while waiting for their pizza pie.

The couple have been reportedly dating for about a year and a half [and since  Taylor's birthday is in October, that would mean that they started dating approximately three months after her 18th birthday.]

Ross McDonagh posted on the Daily Mail that: "Dane Cook, 45, has been dating 19-year-old singer/actress Kelsi Taylor for the best part of a year.

Apparently, the age-gap pair have been dating since the nymphet was 18: "[...] Each of their Instagram accounts is filled with cosy shots of the two travelling the world as well as hanging out locally in LA. They shared shots form Christmas, Thanksgiving, and even the teenager's 19th birthday party in October."


Arguably, Cook is more famous for his stand-up comedy than his acting. 

Interestingly, Taylor starred in Beach Seasons (2014). Here's the IMDb plot summary for Oivind Naess' short film: "A shy 14-year-old girl (Kelsi Taylor) with a crush on her fitness coach must compete with her older sister for his attention."

Sunday, July 8, 2018

Balzac's THE BLACK SHEEP [LA RABOUILLEUSE]: Old\Young | The Malicious Physician & the Virginal Beauty


The back of the Penguin Classics' paperback edition of Honoré de Balzac's The Black Sheep [French: La Rabouilleuse] reads:
The novel revolves around the contrasting characters of two brothers. Philippe Bridau, the elder [...] had a brief but glorious career in the army before the fall of the Emperor [Napoleon]. A handsome and dashing figure [...] he is still more popular than his younger brother, Joseph, a man of less adventurous spirit whom his mother considers a shiftless, good-for-nothing artist. 
For the purposes of this blog, we're going to focus on chapter 13 - "Flore Brazier". In the chapter: 
"[...] on his way back from his rounds, the malicious, depraved old man [Dr. Rouget] noticed a ravishingly beautiful [12-year-old] little girl [Flore] sitting beside the meadows in the Avenue de Tivoli"
Balzac further describes Flore, who is an underprivileged tattered laborer, as having "one of the most beautiful, virginal faces ever imagined by a painter", "miraculous beauty", a "pretty sunburnt chest", a "charming body", a "reddish tone", and "[...] little nymph's blue eyes, with their attractive lashes, [that] would have brought any painter or poet to his knees."

70-year-old Dr. Rouget, whom Balzac described as an "evil-looking man" with a "middle-class voice", said to the nymphet, "Do you want to come home with me? You'll be fed and clothed, and you'll have pretty shoes to wear."

The nymphet's uncle, Brazier, intervened, but eventually bargained, "Look here, pay me two years in advance and I'll leave her with you [...] [she's] as innocent as a new-born child." Then Balzac wrote: "On hearing this last sentence, the doctor was struck by the word 'innocent'."

Consequently, "[...] Flore was an object of envy to every girl within a radius of thirty miles, although in the eyes of the Church her way of life was thoroughly reprehensible."

However, despite reading the Old Testament to learn how "[...] King David kept warm in his old age [...]" and despite Flore submitting to Dr. Rouget's requests like "[...] an Eastern slave would have done [...]", Dr. Rouget's "[...] plan of debauchery had been defeated by nature [...]". This is contradictory to Howard Stern who opined on his SiriusXM Radio show that the cure for impotence is not Viagra but young women.

Subsequently, the "bitter" physician died and Jean-Jacques, the physician's 37-year-old son, became Flore's keeper. 

Saturday, July 7, 2018

The Met Breuer, Egon Schiele & Nude Teen Watercolors


We went to The Met Breuer to see three Egon Schiele pieces that are exhibited in the Obsession: Nudes by Klimt, Schiele, and Picasso from the Scofield Thayer Collection. 

Here's an excerpt from The Met Breuer's Exhibition Overview:
This exhibition at The Met Breuer presents a selection of some fifty works from The Met's Scofield Thayer Collection—a collection that is best known for paintings by artists of the school of Paris, and a brilliant group of erotic and evocative watercolors, drawings, and prints by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Pablo Picasso, whose subjects, except for a handful, are nudes. The exhibition is the first time these works have been shown together, and provides a focused look at this important collection; it also marks the centenary of the deaths of Klimt and Schiele.
Below are the three Schiele pieces with descriptions from the museum:

Seated Nude Girl Clasping Her Left Knee (1918)

"Here, the young daughter of one of Schiele's models shields her nudity with a pulled-up knee, unlike in the lithograph of Girl (1918) [...]"

Girl (1918)

"The girl leans her head pensively on what might be a pillow, and by opening her legs unselfconsciously reveals her pubic area. Seemingly oblivious to the implication and potential reception of the girl's exposure." ["Seemingly" is probably a fitting word, because there's a chance that the girl was not "oblivious".]

Standing Nude Girl, Facing Left (1918)

"Here, the same daughter of one of Schiele's models appears in three-quarter profile."

To put the three pieces into perspective, it may help to read Jeanette Zwingenberger's description of Schiele's Two Girls (Lovers) (1911) in her book Egon Schiele.

Two Girls (Lovers) (1911) 


Coupled with The Met Breuer's admission that the watercolors are "erotic and evocative" and Zwingenberger's admission that Schiele had an "obsession with all aspects of the erotic", it's very safe to say that The Met Breuer has sided with art, in the art versus [child] pornography debate.

Cody Delistraty wrote in his post "Rethinking Schiele" on The Paris Review :
Egon Schiele first began hosting teenage girls at his studio in Neulengbach, Austria, around 1910 [...] girls, often from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds, would come spend time there with him and his model-slash-lover Walburga Neuzil, whom he called Wally. Schiele was only twenty at the time. Wally was seventeen. The age of consent in Austria was fourteen (as it is today), and their relationship wasn’t much of a scandal. What was a scandal was Schiele’s painting the children and teenagers who came by his studio and, as would be written in his arrest warrant two years later, his “failing to keep erotic nudes in a sufficiently safe place”—that is, exposing these young people to his supposedly pornographic paintings and drawings.
Tatjana Georgette Anna von Mossig (1912)
In April 1912, Schiele was arrested and accused of “seducing” Tatjana Georgette Anna von Mossig. Mossig, a thirteen-year-old girl from Neulengbach whose father was an esteemed naval officer, had asked Schiele and Neuzil to take her to Vienna to live with her grandmother. Like many young people, she wanted to escape her provincial town. The artist and his lover agreed to take her, but once they got to Vienna, Mossig had a change of heart and wanted to return home. The next day, Schiele and Neuzil dutifully returned her. In the meantime, however, her father had gone to the police and filed charges of kidnapping and statutory rape against Schiele. That the young man was an artist—and one who depicted younger women—helped fuel the father’s suspicions. A third charge was leveled, too: public immorality for exposing young people to his art.

When the police came to arrest Schiele, they took around 125 of his drawings, classifying them as “degenerate”; as a symbolic gesture, a judge burned one of them in court. In total, Schiele would spend only twenty-four days in prison after the first two charges—kidnapping and statutory rape—were dropped, but the charges of degeneracy stuck, as they have stuck to his legacy.
Tatjana in Color (2003)

In 2003, Tatjana in Color, a play written by Julia Jordan, was performed at A Culture Project on Bleecker street here in New York City. Jerry Tallmer wrote in his review of the play, "The Egon Schiele affair from the girl’s point of view" in the The Villager: 
The play sweeps us deliciously into her version (and kid sister Antonia’s woozy version) of events leading up to and beyond Schiele’s arrest in April 1912 for the rape of 12-year-old Tatjana, and the trial-by-magistrate that ended with Schiele serving 21 days in prison for corruption of the morals of a minor.