.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
For Egon Schiele, the human figure was the main vehicle through which he conveyed both passion and belief. In Stehender Mann, executed in 1913, he has created an image that is filled with tensions, and these function on various levels of content and style. The sense of line itself is informed with an anxious, almost convulsive quality, a jaggedness that reveals Schiele's phenomenal draughtsmanship while also invoking a strange and frenetic energy. The subject has been shown as though in the process of putting on an item of clothing, an arrested moment that in fact gives the impression of a strange contrapposto, while also perhaps hinting at the artist's increasing interest in photography. The clothing also adds a flash of fire-like colour to the picture. Even the fact that the man has been shown with his back turned to the artist, and hence to the viewer, introduces a level of tension. This figure becomes an everyman, a faceless template upon which we impose our own ideas and identifications. As is so often the case in Schiele's pictures of male figures, Stehender Mann acts as a form of self-portrait. This is emphasised by the fact that it so closely relates to several other images of men standing wearing rags, as well as the autobiographical oil painting Begegnung, which featured prominently in the background of the 1914 portrait photograph of the artist taken by Anton Josef Trcka.
Begegnung was one of the works in which Schiele placed himself within his own idiosyncratic mythology, as is emphasised by the fact that the painting was also known as Selbstbildnis mit der Figur eines Heiligen-- it showed the artist's encounter with a saint. This highly personalised mythology was fuelled in part by his persecution at the hands of a non-understanding public. This had resulted, the previous year, in his arrest and conviction on charges of corrupting youths by exposing them to 'indecent' images. The experience of his arrest and imprisonment had resulted in Schiele feeling like a martyr. He was suffering for the cause of art. It is this tension, this belief in his own suffering and its validity, that informs the deliberately emaciated appearance of the figure in Begegnung and, by extension, in Stehender Mann. This picture evokes the artist, still struggling financially, the victim of persecution, wearing nothing but coloured rags. And the experience of wearing rags was one that Schiele himself had known all too well following the cessation of his allowance from his uncle some time earlier. His clothes had soon fallen to tatters, heightening the sense that Schiele was a hermit-like martyr to his own cause.
In Stehender Mann, the clothing, the material that makes up these 'rags,' provides a dense area of colour that heightens the contrasts between the flesh tones in the rest of the picture, while also picking out the small areas of red used to highlight various parts of the body. At the same time, this depicted material provides a textural counterpoint: this densely-worked area of abstract patterning, which on closer inspection reveals itself to be made up of a kaleidoscopic range of colours, heightens the visual variety of the picture and the surface. Schiele would have added this after the initial drawing, which may have been done with the use of the large mirror that featured so prominently in his apartment, rather than using a model; crucially, in his drawings, Heinrich Benesch stated that Schiele only worked from life, not from imagination. Benesch, one of Schiele's greatest patrons, left an invaluable account of the artist's working methods that provides some insight into the making of Stehender Mann:
'The beauty of form and colour that Schiele gave us did not exist before. His artistry as draughtsman was phenomenal. The assurance of his hand was almost infallible. When he drew, he usually sat on a low stool, the drawing-board and sheet on his knees, his right hand (with which he did the drawing) resting on the board. But I also saw him drawing differently, standing in front of his model, his right foot on a low stool. Then he rested the board on his right knee and held it at the top with his left hand, and, his drawing hand unsupported, placed his pencil on the sheet and drew his lines from the shoulder, as it were. And everything was exactly right. If he happened to get something wrong, which was very rare, he threw the sheet away; he never used an eraser. Schiele only drew from nature. Most of his drawings were done in outline and only became more three-dimensional when they were coloured. The colouring was always done without the model, from memory' (H. Benesch, quoted in R. Steiner, Egon Schiele 1890-1918: The Midnight Soul of the Artist, Cologne, 1991, p. 33).
Begegnung was one of the works in which Schiele placed himself within his own idiosyncratic mythology, as is emphasised by the fact that the painting was also known as Selbstbildnis mit der Figur eines Heiligen-- it showed the artist's encounter with a saint. This highly personalised mythology was fuelled in part by his persecution at the hands of a non-understanding public. This had resulted, the previous year, in his arrest and conviction on charges of corrupting youths by exposing them to 'indecent' images. The experience of his arrest and imprisonment had resulted in Schiele feeling like a martyr. He was suffering for the cause of art. It is this tension, this belief in his own suffering and its validity, that informs the deliberately emaciated appearance of the figure in Begegnung and, by extension, in Stehender Mann. This picture evokes the artist, still struggling financially, the victim of persecution, wearing nothing but coloured rags. And the experience of wearing rags was one that Schiele himself had known all too well following the cessation of his allowance from his uncle some time earlier. His clothes had soon fallen to tatters, heightening the sense that Schiele was a hermit-like martyr to his own cause.
In Stehender Mann, the clothing, the material that makes up these 'rags,' provides a dense area of colour that heightens the contrasts between the flesh tones in the rest of the picture, while also picking out the small areas of red used to highlight various parts of the body. At the same time, this depicted material provides a textural counterpoint: this densely-worked area of abstract patterning, which on closer inspection reveals itself to be made up of a kaleidoscopic range of colours, heightens the visual variety of the picture and the surface. Schiele would have added this after the initial drawing, which may have been done with the use of the large mirror that featured so prominently in his apartment, rather than using a model; crucially, in his drawings, Heinrich Benesch stated that Schiele only worked from life, not from imagination. Benesch, one of Schiele's greatest patrons, left an invaluable account of the artist's working methods that provides some insight into the making of Stehender Mann:
'The beauty of form and colour that Schiele gave us did not exist before. His artistry as draughtsman was phenomenal. The assurance of his hand was almost infallible. When he drew, he usually sat on a low stool, the drawing-board and sheet on his knees, his right hand (with which he did the drawing) resting on the board. But I also saw him drawing differently, standing in front of his model, his right foot on a low stool. Then he rested the board on his right knee and held it at the top with his left hand, and, his drawing hand unsupported, placed his pencil on the sheet and drew his lines from the shoulder, as it were. And everything was exactly right. If he happened to get something wrong, which was very rare, he threw the sheet away; he never used an eraser. Schiele only drew from nature. Most of his drawings were done in outline and only became more three-dimensional when they were coloured. The colouring was always done without the model, from memory' (H. Benesch, quoted in R. Steiner, Egon Schiele 1890-1918: The Midnight Soul of the Artist, Cologne, 1991, p. 33).