Egon Schiele prints hang all around my flat, you can't escape them - he always has been one of my favourite painters, and yet I was astounded, when visiting some of Vienna's finest galleries, to see them live, as it were, hanging on the museum-white walls. They seemed to reach out and touch in a way the more celebrated Klimt works didn't - at least for me. Schiele is perhaps most noted for his sexy female studies, and they are indeed studies in the most unflinching sense of the word - not jut because of the graphic poses and reveals but also because he forces the truth, and at the same time are truly romantic, as I would define the word.
There were also several of his other landscape and more abstract works, which were also vivid, and dark and foreboding - and this posting is only serving to remind how much a return trip to Vienna is needed for another fix of Schiele and the countless other lesser known (though equally impressive) artists' works.
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3 comments:
great "painter"...your definition suits him much better, the "truth squeezer"...should go to vienna and see them paintings come alive.
Thank you for the lead on one heck of an artist - it's rare that visual art still manages to move me. I always find that it's the written word, or the sound of something 'musical' that fills my heart with that sort of joy, but I'm still young, with lots to learn, and so much more to experience.
It is such a great thing when you're at a gallery and a particular work just stands out, and sometimes you can't even imagine why. A few months ago, I was at the National Gallery of Victoria (Australia), and there was a painting that just tore through my heart - the rest of the room just disappeared, and the stupid people also there also (thankfully) did the same. I felt that the artist had managed to pull me right INSIDE the picture, and that the colours were so perfect for expressing the longing for a time past, and the mystery that just a few strands of grass and a few stray words can create.
I went to the giftshop to buy a print, and sure enough, there was something magical missing from the repro of it. You can't just photograph something and believe that the photo is worth as much as the image ...
Very nice to see someone posting something about this under-appreciated artist.
Myself, I've always been partial to this painting:
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/schiele/schiele.death-and-girl.jpg
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