.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
In 1910, the year in which Schiele drew Liegendes schlafendes Mädchen, he developed a mature and personal style that reflected a growing sense of artistic independence. While he was enrolled in the Vienna Academy of Visual Arts, Schiele had sought inspiration in local masters such as Gustav Klimt, whom the young painter had met in 1907 and came to regard as a creative father figure. Klimt's sensual and highly ornamented paintings were a marked contrast to the Academy's classical program, and Schiele embraced their ambiguous figure-ground relationships and two-dimensional stylization of the picture plane. Schiele left the Academy in 1909, the same year in which he participated in the large international Kunstschau at the Secession. This exhibition exposed Schiele to other works by Viennese artists as well as international entries by Vincent van Gogh and Edward Munch; their explorations of expressionist subjectivity in painting provided Schiele with a more primal and emotive alternative to the elegance of the Jugendstil style.
Klimt had largely abjured negative space in his painting by filling his backgrounds with two-dimensional decorative ornamentation. Schiele now moved past his teacher and embraced the void, favoring empty and undefined backgrounds. As Jane Kallir has commented:
"What remained were the taut, spare lines that formed the boundary between object and background. Both in Schiele's drawings and in his paintings, line was the unifying force, the device that fixed the more or less realistically depicted subject and kept it from veering off into the abstract environs. From his years of academic training and Jugendstil posturing, the artist had concocted a unique combination of naturalistic rendering and expressive stylization. Increasingly, in his oils as well as his watercolors, forms were defined by the gyrations of the paint" (in Egon Schiele: Life and Work, New York, 2000, pp. 67-68).
The subject and composition of the present work capture a powerful sense of inwardness, which signified a defiant withdrawal from society within Austrian and German Expressionism. Sleeping figures were popular symbolist ciphers for interiority, and Schiele extends this idea into the portrayal of her body, which lacks fully articulated limbs. Her ambiguously truncated extremities and close proximity to the edges of the sheet contribute a slightly unreal quality to her self-absorbed, sensuous repose. This delicate balance of distortion and beauty in Schiele's work often surprised his contemporaries, such as the critic A.F. Seligman, who described his pictures as "hideous-fantastic caricatures," but also conceded that "in these grotesque portrayals there is nonetheless a sophisticated, playful virtuosity of line, a highly idiosyncratic taste for color, and a strong feeling for effect" (quoted in ibid, p. 144).
The high, slanted placement of the figure on the sheet also suggests that Schiele captured this image of the sleeping girl while kneeling or sitting beside her bed, which creates a visually intimate encounter with the model. Schiele shares his privileged vantage point with the viewer, in effect making him a voyeur to the scene. As Klaus Albrecht Schröder notes: "Schiele makes the process of observation his theme, by giving thematic status to the observer. In his contrived perspective, the directionality of the artist's gaze--and of the viewer's, however many decades later--is reestablished every time" (in Egon Schiele: Eros and Passion, New York, 2006, p. 114).
Klimt had largely abjured negative space in his painting by filling his backgrounds with two-dimensional decorative ornamentation. Schiele now moved past his teacher and embraced the void, favoring empty and undefined backgrounds. As Jane Kallir has commented:
"What remained were the taut, spare lines that formed the boundary between object and background. Both in Schiele's drawings and in his paintings, line was the unifying force, the device that fixed the more or less realistically depicted subject and kept it from veering off into the abstract environs. From his years of academic training and Jugendstil posturing, the artist had concocted a unique combination of naturalistic rendering and expressive stylization. Increasingly, in his oils as well as his watercolors, forms were defined by the gyrations of the paint" (in Egon Schiele: Life and Work, New York, 2000, pp. 67-68).
The subject and composition of the present work capture a powerful sense of inwardness, which signified a defiant withdrawal from society within Austrian and German Expressionism. Sleeping figures were popular symbolist ciphers for interiority, and Schiele extends this idea into the portrayal of her body, which lacks fully articulated limbs. Her ambiguously truncated extremities and close proximity to the edges of the sheet contribute a slightly unreal quality to her self-absorbed, sensuous repose. This delicate balance of distortion and beauty in Schiele's work often surprised his contemporaries, such as the critic A.F. Seligman, who described his pictures as "hideous-fantastic caricatures," but also conceded that "in these grotesque portrayals there is nonetheless a sophisticated, playful virtuosity of line, a highly idiosyncratic taste for color, and a strong feeling for effect" (quoted in ibid, p. 144).
The high, slanted placement of the figure on the sheet also suggests that Schiele captured this image of the sleeping girl while kneeling or sitting beside her bed, which creates a visually intimate encounter with the model. Schiele shares his privileged vantage point with the viewer, in effect making him a voyeur to the scene. As Klaus Albrecht Schröder notes: "Schiele makes the process of observation his theme, by giving thematic status to the observer. In his contrived perspective, the directionality of the artist's gaze--and of the viewer's, however many decades later--is reestablished every time" (in Egon Schiele: Eros and Passion, New York, 2006, p. 114).