Austrian Expression

Egon Schiele worked within a movement known as Austrian Expressionism, a movement that emerged from former art movements such as fin de siècle and a more locally known movement referred to as Jugendstil. Schiele’s work historically shows the artifacts of former movements, but he took certain aspects of the former techniques and amplified them. For example, his line cannot go unnoticed. His figures are pushed to the front of the picture plane via heavy contour lines and an absence of background information. It is quite impressive to see such confidence in one’s line work the way Schiele portrays in his works. Another forward quality that his work expresses is the amount of emotional force conceived via color. Using primarily water colors, Schiele would lay yellows, blues, greens, and violets gruffly beside one another. A figures head displayed as bright crimson not only gives the viewer a since of uncomfortableness but a wanting to know more. The same fashion of detail was given to the figures limbs as well. Even more curious is that figures are often composed gesturally with obscured hand signals that hark back to symbolism. Another factor of Schiele’s work, in the sense of expressionism, is the way the figures are arranged. Most of the compositions are that of a nude female, whose body was arranged in a rather erotic manner, expressing what can only be described as “primordial desires” according to Schiele. It is this level of expression that Schiele outweighs, as a psyche work of art, of that of his colleagues. 

Info Credit

Mitsch, Erwin. The Art of Egon Scheile. New York: Phaidon Press Limited., 1975.

Schroder, Klaus A & Sceemann, Harald. Egon Scheile and His Contemporaries – Austrian Painting and Drawing from 1900 to 1930 from the Leopld Collection, Vienna. New York: Neues Publishing Company.,1989.