Jazzy Lemon’s Reviews > Egon Schiele: Eros and Expressionism > Status Update

At the 49th Secession Exhibition, Schiele showed over
45 pictures and, at last, he achieved national
recognition as a master painter. Only a month
earlier, in February 1918, the artist’s great mentor, Klimt, had
died. Of course, this death brought with it an entirely new role
for the painter who quite suddenly found himself the
figurehead of an entire artistic movement.

Schiele constantly swung between the social desire to
shock and provoke, on the one hand, and the artistic
impulse to create form and harmony on the other.
This latter interest is what distinguishes his work from that
of other, more grotesque, definitively socialogical, artists like,
for example, George Grosz.

Schiele has moved away from Expressionism and towards Impressionism
and he manages to combine form and colour into one harmonious whole, despite his insistence on the true ugliness of the external world.

This is a newborn infant with the heaviness of age already upon him, beginning a journey through life that can only be painful and demanding. Schiele has here abandoned a cozy, traditional image of family life in favour of an unadulterated adherence to ‘truth’.

Schiele, here, is not merely sketching the model and the
model’s reflection but also portrays himself sketching
both of these in reverse. In a very modern way, Schiele here is
layering viewpoint upon viewpoint to achieve a sense of the
intricacies of identity and, simultaneously, drawing attention
to the fact that none of these images is actually ’real’ since
they are all refracted through a mirror.

"Schiele ignored light and shadow effects which model the body, dispensed with shadow strokes and divests the character of all spatial containment."