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Lot Essay
'I see myself evaporating, exhaling ever more powerfully. The oscillations of my astral light are becoming quicker, more abrupt, simpler, resembling to a great understanding of the world. And so I keep on, always generating more, giving out this seemingly endless light from within me so that love, which is everything, which has given me this ability and which leads me to that which I am instinctively drawn, and to create new things from the new, things which I have nevertheless already seen. My being, my decaying, translated into abiding values, must have a compelling power over other well or better educated beings, like a religion that appears credible. The furthest will acknowledge me, they will look at and see me while my detractors will live under my hypnosis! I am so rich that I must give myself away' (Egon Schiele, 'Letter to Oskar Reichel', quoted in C.M. Nebehay, Egon Schiele 1890-1918 Leben, Briefe, Gedichte, Vienna, 1979, p. 184).
Painted in 1910, Selbstbildnis, Kopf (Self-Portrait, Head) is one of an extensive series of self-portraits that rank among Schiele's finest achievements. The self-portraits that Schiele executed in this seminal year reflect not only how Schiele had assimilated the tradition of late Symbolism to use the figure as an expression of mood, but also mark a departure from that tradition towards a stronger, more psychological, intense and vital means of painting, now characterised as 'Expressionism'. 'I went by way of Klimt til March. Today I believe, I am his very opposite' Schiele wrote in a letter to Dr Josef Czermak in 1910. By this, he meant that the deeply psychological and introspective art he had now developed revealed the inner nature of man and the underside of the decorative Viennese façade which Klimt's work so brilliantly celebrated.
At the forefront of Schiele's pioneering exploration of the inner nature of man, as it revealed and expressed itself on the outer surfaces of the face and body, was Schiele's almost compulsive self-portraiture. Possibly influenced by his friend Erwin Osen, a mime artist, and by 19th Century photographs of hysterics and mental patients, Schiele sought to explore, in his penetrating self-portraits, the formal language of the body as a material echo of the inner soul. In so doing, he developed and captured in paint an idiosyncratic and heightened form of facial expression and gesture, as a means of giving visual manifestation to his inner emotions. As Jane Kallir has written of these works, 'Here he puffs out his chest, there he pulls down an eyelid, and then again, his hair stands on end as though electrified by a high voltage shock. At one moment, he basks in newfound sexual potency, the next he is horrified by his physical desires. Now he struts forward, and then again, he pulls back in evident terror. Haunted by death, yet driven by a passion for life, Schiele in these works reveals both vulnerability and bravado. It is here, above all that his dualism - his ability to embody contradictions - is most eloquently expressed' (Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele, New York, 1994, p. 75).
Only twenty years old at the time of these works, Schiele captures in them all the emotional turbulence of adolescence, and lays it bare before the viewer. In his self-portraits he is always simultaneously aware of himself as both the object and subject of the picture. These self-portraits were for Schiele not merely a cast of personal characters that emerged from his own psyche, but also, when given form in this way, visual guides to self-understanding. This endless narcissistic posturing and self-introspection would be hard to stomach, were it not for the raw honesty with which Schiele observes and portrays himself. Depicting himself against a blank infinite background, there is an existential quality to these works that heightens the vitality of the human figure and emphasises it as a material embodiment of spirit.
Selbstbildnis Kopf depicts only the head of Schiele, his raised forehead, spiky electrified hair and radiant white silhouette, all displaying the charged energy behind his ferociously intent gaze. In this work, as he was to do in several of his self-portrait oils of 1911, Schiele depicts himself as an almost mystical apparition, radiating astral energy. Like the prophets, mystics and doubles of these paintings, Schiele's lone head, with its fierce concentrated gaze, seems to emanate from the page in this work like the lone head of Christ on Saint Veronica's shroud. Such is the vitality and pictorial drama generated by this painted head that, as Schiele must have recognised, there is no need to depict the body. The force of Schiele's face is strong enough to dissolve the rest of the picture into irrelevance. It is in works like this that Schiele demonstrates that his art is not portraiture in the conventional sense, but a study and representation of man's inner life. 'I paint the light that comes out of all bodies' (Egon Schiele, Letter to Leopold Czihaczek, 1 Sept. 1911).
Painted in 1910, Selbstbildnis, Kopf (Self-Portrait, Head) is one of an extensive series of self-portraits that rank among Schiele's finest achievements. The self-portraits that Schiele executed in this seminal year reflect not only how Schiele had assimilated the tradition of late Symbolism to use the figure as an expression of mood, but also mark a departure from that tradition towards a stronger, more psychological, intense and vital means of painting, now characterised as 'Expressionism'. 'I went by way of Klimt til March. Today I believe, I am his very opposite' Schiele wrote in a letter to Dr Josef Czermak in 1910. By this, he meant that the deeply psychological and introspective art he had now developed revealed the inner nature of man and the underside of the decorative Viennese façade which Klimt's work so brilliantly celebrated.
At the forefront of Schiele's pioneering exploration of the inner nature of man, as it revealed and expressed itself on the outer surfaces of the face and body, was Schiele's almost compulsive self-portraiture. Possibly influenced by his friend Erwin Osen, a mime artist, and by 19th Century photographs of hysterics and mental patients, Schiele sought to explore, in his penetrating self-portraits, the formal language of the body as a material echo of the inner soul. In so doing, he developed and captured in paint an idiosyncratic and heightened form of facial expression and gesture, as a means of giving visual manifestation to his inner emotions. As Jane Kallir has written of these works, 'Here he puffs out his chest, there he pulls down an eyelid, and then again, his hair stands on end as though electrified by a high voltage shock. At one moment, he basks in newfound sexual potency, the next he is horrified by his physical desires. Now he struts forward, and then again, he pulls back in evident terror. Haunted by death, yet driven by a passion for life, Schiele in these works reveals both vulnerability and bravado. It is here, above all that his dualism - his ability to embody contradictions - is most eloquently expressed' (Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele, New York, 1994, p. 75).
Only twenty years old at the time of these works, Schiele captures in them all the emotional turbulence of adolescence, and lays it bare before the viewer. In his self-portraits he is always simultaneously aware of himself as both the object and subject of the picture. These self-portraits were for Schiele not merely a cast of personal characters that emerged from his own psyche, but also, when given form in this way, visual guides to self-understanding. This endless narcissistic posturing and self-introspection would be hard to stomach, were it not for the raw honesty with which Schiele observes and portrays himself. Depicting himself against a blank infinite background, there is an existential quality to these works that heightens the vitality of the human figure and emphasises it as a material embodiment of spirit.
Selbstbildnis Kopf depicts only the head of Schiele, his raised forehead, spiky electrified hair and radiant white silhouette, all displaying the charged energy behind his ferociously intent gaze. In this work, as he was to do in several of his self-portrait oils of 1911, Schiele depicts himself as an almost mystical apparition, radiating astral energy. Like the prophets, mystics and doubles of these paintings, Schiele's lone head, with its fierce concentrated gaze, seems to emanate from the page in this work like the lone head of Christ on Saint Veronica's shroud. Such is the vitality and pictorial drama generated by this painted head that, as Schiele must have recognised, there is no need to depict the body. The force of Schiele's face is strong enough to dissolve the rest of the picture into irrelevance. It is in works like this that Schiele demonstrates that his art is not portraiture in the conventional sense, but a study and representation of man's inner life. 'I paint the light that comes out of all bodies' (Egon Schiele, Letter to Leopold Czihaczek, 1 Sept. 1911).