Egon Schiele. Esther Selsdon

hand and head, he lay bare in a ghostly manner the spiritual skeleton of her whom he portrayed”. To the colour lithograph of his drama, murder hope of women, he commented: “the man is bloody red, the colour of life, but he lies dead in the lap of a woman, who is white, the colour of death.” Man and woman in the dance of life and death.

      Phantom-Like Creatures

      With a few lines, schiele sketched the outlines of the body on paper. A thigh is reduced to two lines. The stroke is dynamic, grows fainter, following the structural ductility of a fast thrown-in movement. Jagged, with hard angles he loves the bone structure. Schiele’s strokes are like calligraphy, which captures the body’s expression in just a few lines. In contrast to the reluctant, bony aspect of the shoulders and pelvis is the round diffraction of the chest. Orange nipples and vulva become wounds. The physiognomy of his models, however, remains anonymously phantom-like; the button eyes could sooner belong to a doll, which could be any woman. The body posture is directed at the gaze of the viewer, before whom she exhibits her genitals. The splayed gesture of the hands is peculiar: these appear intractably hard and call to mind the hands of schiele.

      Body Perspectives

      Schiele ignored light and shadow effects that model the body, and instead dispensed shadow strokes that divested the character of all spatial containment. In his atelier, he often worked on a ladder from where he captured his models from a bird’s eye view perspective in an extreme visual angle of under- and oversight. This calls to mind one of his verses: “an intimate bird sits in a leafy tree, he is dull coloured, hardly moves and does not sing; his eyes reflect a thousand greens.” He isolated the creatures in his view, set them in a world without time or place. Bodies form space. An example of the spatial lack of orientation of his subjects is the commissioned artwork for friederike maria beer, the fashion-conscious daughter of a cabaret proprietor who actively followed viennese art events.