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Lot Essay
Executed in 1910, Profil eines Kindes von der linken Seite dates from a period when Schiele began to draw young children with increasing frequency. He found his models amongst the vagrant children of Vienna's slums, choosing them not merely because they could be convinced to pose for a pittance, but because their relaxed, unselfconscious and uninhibited behavior allowed him to observe true human nature stripped of all the pretense and convention of Imperial Viennese society. A dispassionate observer of life as what he described as its perpetual process of 'living/dying,' Schiele reveled in drawing children, as he saw in them the full vitality and fierce energy of life, something that he also equated with the creative drive and powers of the artist. It was in this year that the young artist would also achieve a major stylistic breakthrough in his art, arriving at a unique combination of naturalistic rendering and expressive stylization that derived from his earlier experiments with Jugendstil formalism.
Barely twenty years old when the present work was created, Schiele had learned to perfect a line that was both accurate and charged with emotion. Profil eines Kindes von der linken Seite is a graphic representation of great intensity, in which Schiele has confidently and concisely captured his subject in a way that demonstrates his gift for acute observation. The boy is captured in profile, his tucked chin and downcast eyes framed by beautiful lashes turn away from the viewer while his oversized blouse protectively conceals all other body language. The viscose medium of gouache allowed Schiele to experiment with greater textual variety, which is exquisitely explored in the loose swathes of pink, brown and blue pigment that animate the head and arm of the boy. By leaving the surrounding negative space blank, Schiele instills the work with a sense of existential alienation, a vision provoked as much by his own perception of himself as much as what he perceived in the sitters themselves.
Barely twenty years old when the present work was created, Schiele had learned to perfect a line that was both accurate and charged with emotion. Profil eines Kindes von der linken Seite is a graphic representation of great intensity, in which Schiele has confidently and concisely captured his subject in a way that demonstrates his gift for acute observation. The boy is captured in profile, his tucked chin and downcast eyes framed by beautiful lashes turn away from the viewer while his oversized blouse protectively conceals all other body language. The viscose medium of gouache allowed Schiele to experiment with greater textual variety, which is exquisitely explored in the loose swathes of pink, brown and blue pigment that animate the head and arm of the boy. By leaving the surrounding negative space blank, Schiele instills the work with a sense of existential alienation, a vision provoked as much by his own perception of himself as much as what he perceived in the sitters themselves.