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Lot Essay
Executed in 1910, the present work emerged during a period of radical stylistic experimentation in Schiele’s oeuvre, as he boldly stepped out from the shadow of his mentor Gustav Klimt and began to develop a powerfully expressive pictorial language of his own. Schiele himself described this metamorphosis in a letter dated 1910, "I went by way of Klimt until March. Today, I believe, I am his very opposite" (quoted in R. Steiner, Egon Schiele: The Midnight Soul of the Artist, Cologne, 2004, p. 30).
Painted during his first full year of artistic independence from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Sitzender Bub mit gefalteten Händen displays a new emphasis on the expressive capabilities of contour and brushwork. Filling the framework of his febrile lines with thin washes of color, Schiele uses his brush to create mass, texture and a sense of animation, achieving subtle color transitions as well as wet-on-wet effects that a less proficient artist would struggle with. The forms, especially noticeable in the rendering of the fabric of the young model’s shirt and hands, are defined by the gyrations of the paint.
Having turned twenty in June 1910, Schiele was in many ways himself still an adolescent, albeit one who achieved early maturity as an artist. Children and adolescents often feature in Schiele’s oeuvre with recurring frequency between 1910 and 1911. Such figures from poorer areas of Vienna were not only willing to pose for significantly smaller amounts of money than professional models, but, perhaps more importantly for Schiele, they also had an air of nonchalance and unrestraint which allowed him to explore human nature in its most uninhibited form. In a letter to his friend Dr. Oskar Reichel, who’s portrait is drawn on the reverse of the present sheet, Schiele wrote, “I am happy, I am happy... the children call me 'Lord god Painter' because I go around the garden in this smock. I draw all sorts of children and old women, leather faces, idiots, etc.” (quoted in J. Kallir, op. cit., p. 111).
Jane Kallir has written, “Schiele leapt in a single bound from decorative stylization to expressive stylization…Traditional portraits, including those painted by Gustav Klimt, are attempts to create, for posterity, a record of the sitter’s unchanging essence, comprising a definitive amalgam of personality, physical appearance, and social station. Schiele’s 1910 portrait and self-portrait drawings recognize this attempt to be illusory…Facial expression, body language, and exaggerated gestures (often involving the hands) underscore the mood in each of these works. They portray transient, not eternal, states” (Egon Schiele: Self-Portraits and Portraits, exh. cat., Belvedere, Vienna, 2011, p. 85).
Painted during his first full year of artistic independence from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Sitzender Bub mit gefalteten Händen displays a new emphasis on the expressive capabilities of contour and brushwork. Filling the framework of his febrile lines with thin washes of color, Schiele uses his brush to create mass, texture and a sense of animation, achieving subtle color transitions as well as wet-on-wet effects that a less proficient artist would struggle with. The forms, especially noticeable in the rendering of the fabric of the young model’s shirt and hands, are defined by the gyrations of the paint.
Having turned twenty in June 1910, Schiele was in many ways himself still an adolescent, albeit one who achieved early maturity as an artist. Children and adolescents often feature in Schiele’s oeuvre with recurring frequency between 1910 and 1911. Such figures from poorer areas of Vienna were not only willing to pose for significantly smaller amounts of money than professional models, but, perhaps more importantly for Schiele, they also had an air of nonchalance and unrestraint which allowed him to explore human nature in its most uninhibited form. In a letter to his friend Dr. Oskar Reichel, who’s portrait is drawn on the reverse of the present sheet, Schiele wrote, “I am happy, I am happy... the children call me 'Lord god Painter' because I go around the garden in this smock. I draw all sorts of children and old women, leather faces, idiots, etc.” (quoted in J. Kallir, op. cit., p. 111).
Jane Kallir has written, “Schiele leapt in a single bound from decorative stylization to expressive stylization…Traditional portraits, including those painted by Gustav Klimt, are attempts to create, for posterity, a record of the sitter’s unchanging essence, comprising a definitive amalgam of personality, physical appearance, and social station. Schiele’s 1910 portrait and self-portrait drawings recognize this attempt to be illusory…Facial expression, body language, and exaggerated gestures (often involving the hands) underscore the mood in each of these works. They portray transient, not eternal, states” (Egon Schiele: Self-Portraits and Portraits, exh. cat., Belvedere, Vienna, 2011, p. 85).