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Egon Schiele Self-Portrait, 1911 Oil on wood, 27.5 ¥ 34 cm Signed and dated lower right: Egon Schiele 1911 Inv. No. 104.207 Estate of Arthur Roessler, 1954
This highly expressive self-portrait of Egon Schiele (1890–1918) was created in 1911 in Neulengbach where the young painter had settled down after ˇeský Krumlov in Bohemia the townspeople in C with their narrow notions of morality had made it impossible for him to continue living in the small town. Living a withdrawn life in the country, the young artist seemed to be striving for selfassurance. He depicts himself in the left-hand half of a horizontal format picture, with his head turned slightly to the right-hand shoulder, spreading the fingers of his left hand in front of his dark torso. Behind him, some of his paintings seem to be visible, like for instance one of the pictures showing a ˇeský Krumlov city landscape. withered tree and a C The white surface in the right-hand half of the picture was mostly interpreted as a tabletop with a piece of bright-coloured material on it. However, it could also be an – unfinished – picture. A darkly glazed clay vessel can be seen to the right of the head, the contour of which resembles a sharply featured profile. In art history this detail has repeatedly been linked to Paul Gauguin’s “Self-Portrait with Yellow Christ” – likewise a horizontal format on which a jug with physiognomic features is depicted behind the artist’s head to the right. Schiele could have seen this picture at the 1907 Gauguin exhibition in Vienna’s Galerie Miethke or at the 1909 International Kunstschau and have been inspired by it. In any
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case the double image of Schiele’s face with the “profile” of the clay vessel can be interpreted symbolically: the depiction with a kind of Janus head may have corresponded to his self-image at the time, or rather, to how society saw him. The vivid facial expression and gestures of this self-portrait can be found in many of Egon Schiele’s works, for instance in a number of drawings and watercolours, or in the photographic portraits that he created in 1914 from collaboration with his photographer friend Anton Trcˇka. They overlap with the requirement of expressionism for exaggerated depiction of emotional expression; in terms of Austrian history of art they link up the grimacing self-portraits of the Baroque sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (see No. 47) with Arnulf Rainer’s painted over faces. Egon Schiele opted for wood as the material used in this small-format self-portrait as the result of a recommendation by his mentor Arthur Roessler, who advised him to adopt this technique in the spring of 1911, as it apparently made pictures of this type and size easier to sell. USt Lit.: Peter Baum: Körpersprache im Werk von Egon Schiele, in: Egon Schiele (Exhibition Catalogue of the Fondation Pierre Gianadda), Martigny 1995, pp. 29-32. Rudolf Leopold: Egon Schiele. Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, Salzburg 1972, p. 194. Erwin Mitsch: Egon Schiele, Munich 1978, pp. 32ff. Sehnsucht nach Glück. Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele (Exhibition Catalogue of Schirn Kunsthalle), Frankfurt 1995, p. 266.