Homage to the Great Punks of Our European Heritage : ARROGANCE<i> by Joanna Scott (Linden Press/Simon & Schuster: $18.95; 283 pp.</i> ;<i> 0-671-69547-9) </i>

“Arrogance” is the title and often the subject of Joanna Scott’s new novel loosely based on the life of artist Egon Schiele--the Johnny Rotten of his generation.

The Austrian Expressionist was the very model of arrogance when critics attacked his naked self-portraits and erotic drawings during the first decades of the 20th Century. Slashing at the academy and bourgeois hypocrisy, Schiele believed that his art was part of a new language emblematic of the modern era. Today, he would be the target of Jesse Helms, and the religious right. He couldn’t get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Schiele lived only 28 years, much of it embattled, from a sad and abused childhood to his sudden death from Spanish influenza in 1918. Yet, during his brief life, he created images that remain so provocative and memorable that he is considered an indelible figure in the history of Expressionism.

With a suffering, rebellious and flamboyant protagonist, a gripping biography might be expected. There isn’t one in print. But this is an impressionistic and fictional sketch of Schiele’s life, a selection of vignettes woven together with turn-of-the-century ambience. Scott eschews chronology for a cinematic cross-cutting of incidents, so that Schiele’s childhood is braided with accounts of his adult behavior. The picture is complete but fractured and colored, as though reflected through a stained-glass window.

For example, the first chapter of the book zig-zags back in time as follows: Schiele, at 22, huddles in his jail cell in the village of Neulengbach, on April 15, 1912, unaware that he has been arrested for painting young girls in suggestive poses. Rewind to 1904, when 14-year-old Egon and his younger sister Gerti watch their father die at home.

A still younger Egon shows Gerti a series of self-portraits. She laughs at them, attracting the unwanted attention of their father, Adolph, who seizes the drawings and burns them in the kitchen stove. Flash forward to the adult Schiele in his jail cell dwelling on the memories of an earlier vacation in Trieste with Gerti, thought to be his favorite model.

In the manner of Dos Passos, the book’s serpentine narrative is interrupted with Schiele’s diary entries, Viennese gossip, news reports and the philosophical or psychological jargon of the day. The result is a collage whereby one gleans the sense of Schiele’s grim life.

You quickly realize that his notorious arrogance is a weapon to be used in self-defense. His alcoholic father, the stationmaster of Tulln outside of Vienna, punishes and berates his son sadistically. Schiele’s long-suffering mother Marie pleads in vain that her son will apply his considerable talents to engineering. You begin wondering why little Egon’s more aberrant interests did not take a more deviant, proto-Fascist turn.

Instead, he enters the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Within a couple of years, he is invited to work with the more innovative Wiener Werkstatte , and rebels against the conservative teachings of the academy. In 1909, he helps organize the Neukunstgruppe in Vienna. His work is shown at the Kunstschau --where Van Gogh also exhibits--and is denounced as perverted caricature by some, though he receives praise and commissions from the influential critic Arthur Roessler. Vienna’s preeminent artist of the late 19th Century, Gustav Klimt, champions Schiele, and as a gesture of friendship, passes along his lover and model, Vallie Neuzil.

Vallie and Egon move to Krumau, where Schiele’s mother was born, and then to Neulengbach. Schiele uses adolescent village girls as models for his provocative drawings and paintings. It is the erotic nature of this work that leads to his arrest and detention for 27 days.

In 1912, the couple move back to Vienna. Schiele meets Edith Harms, the proper daughter of a prosperous family. He abandons his devoted, bohemian mistress Vallie and marries Edith in 1913. Four days later, he is drafted and serves as a military artist.

In 1918, Edith, pregnant, dies of Spanish influenza; a few days later, Schiele succumbs to the same disease. His work is shown in the 1918 exhibition of the Vienna Secession and, ironically, it is the first to bring him international acclaim.

These facts of Schiele’s life are never so concisely nor so conventionally chronicled in Scott’s novel. Instead, Schiele’s life is revealed elliptically. The supporting characters--collectors, friends and family--and the Austrian setting assume an importance equal to that of Schiele himself. This prevents a reader from becoming engrossed in the story; sympathy for Schiele is derailed repeatedly by asides and observations. But this is clearly the author’s intention, and those detours become enjoyable in themselves.

For example, Scott describes Vienna at the turn of the century as a beautiful corpse-- Eine schone Leiche --a place of decadence and desire, fading imperialism and legendary indulgences. Occasionally, Scott will enhance the mundane through the enthusiastic eyes of a character like the carefree and hedonistic Vallie. The saucy mistress is given voice to become the most apealling character in the book, living in the moment, spending her modest income on the famous Viennese sweets.

Scott delights in describing these excesses, excessively. “She likes to examine the chocolates before she decides what to buy,” writes Scott. “Truffles flavored with pineapple, with orange, with apricot, with coconut, miniature marzipan fruits and marzipan potatoes and even marzipan in the shape of mushrooms, a Haselnuss Wurst roll, almond chocolates crisscrossed with white icing, chocolate-covered cherries, pretzels, orange rinds, white chocolate with raisins, bitter chocolate with raisins, milk chocolate, nut clusters, chocolates filled with whiskey, kirsch, gin, and cognac. How to decide?”

Elsewhere, the reader is advised to become a tourist and take in the sights: “Some of you will wander the streets to admire the jewelers’ window displays, others will head for the Karntnerstrasse to see, of all things, the coffins--extravagant containers unlike any others, decorated with floral carvings and cherub friezes, inlaid with ivory and tortoise shell.”

Scott is sensitive, and not coy, when writing about sexual games--Egon’s affair with a mute Gypsy boy; Vallie’s liaison with Klimt; or Vallie and Egon together, both naked, dueling with paintbrushes in the studio: “They dueled with colors, they blotched, striped, bruised themselves, until the hues distracted Egon and he grew more interested in the designs than his own desire. He began to study Vallie with a critical appreciative eye, the way he evaluated all his unfinished work. His erection softened and he urged his lover to remain still while he painted gold halos around her nipples, a silver belt around her waist.”

This last encounter is witnessed by a 15-year-old girl, a fictional character who models for Schiele. She tells of her worshipful relationship with the artist and, from the first chapter, the story is supposed to be hers. She speaks from the vantage of an adult after finding that Schiele believed she had turned him in to the authorities.

The idea that the narrator of Schiele’s life should be one of the adolescent models said to be corrupted by his avant-garde ways is appealing, an opportunity to explore Schiele’s motivations, prurient or otherwise. This fictional narrator says that the village girls were subtly changed after posing for Schiele and that they competed for the honor.

But nothing more is revealed. The reader doesn’t have a sense of the innocence or malevolence of the enterprise. Not that moral conclusions need to be established, but as it is now, this fictional narrator seems arbitrary and distracting. She pops up here and there like an insistent drunk and shreds the pattern of Scott’s otherwise precise prose.

One of the most satisfying aspects of “Arrogance” is the treatment of Schiele’s art--which many an art critic might envy. Scott has taken pains to write specifically and lucidly, capturing the bemused outrage of the misunderstood, unappreciated artist. She demonstrates the cause of his arrogance. “In Vienna, art had to create its purpose,” she writes. “The haberdashery peddlers, the Spanish riders, the bargemen, the innkeepers--all had their purpose in the city, all labored by rote. But an artist worked without any prescribed function and had to convince the people that there was value in his projects.

“The Secessionists were popular because they delighted in frivolity; even the more inventive artists in the Klimtgruppe were the equivalent of supreme pastry chefs . . . Egon is alone in his determination to offend the people, believing it to be the artist’s rightful purpose to deflate the lies of ornament and sentimentality. Every line he draws is like a thrust, a penetration, and each dab of paint an ejaculation . . . Egon has given them his semen to drink, pure, undiluted semen. And to be undiluted in Vienna is to be unwanted, shunned, deliberately ignored.”

With this, her third novel, Scott emerges as a writer who should not be ignored.