Seated figure with black hair Egon Schiele

• From the formative year of 1909 • Schiele finds his artistic voice and demonstrates it powerfully • Through ornamental flattening, he breaks free from the constraints of Art Nouveau 1909 is a formative year for Schiele. He begins to break away from the pictorial conventions of Art Nouveau and sets out in search of his own style. This development will ultimately result in portraits and self-portraits featuring the famous contorted and twisted limbs. Initially, however, his attempts to break free are more tentative. They lead to experiments with style, colour and materials, through which the young man succeeds in consolidating his artistic voice. He depicts our ‘Seated Woman with Black Hair’ in an almost statuette-like manner. Facing us head-on and from a slight low-angle perspective, she sits with her hands resting in her lap. Her body is outlined by a fine line, with the internal detailing reduced to the bare essentials. Beyond the tip of her nose, however, Schiele draws the figure out of the refined line work: he renders the eyes and eyebrows clearly and piercingly on the paper, whilst the hairstyle ultimately culminates as a dominant field of colour. Here we already see the Schiele who, a little later, would use colour as a constitutive element of composition. Colour, which will transform individual details of the motif into ornamental elements of the picture, absorbs all subtleties and depth, thereby abstracting the now flattened subject matter into a visual end in itself. Thus, as early as 1909, Egon Schiele demonstrated that he had mastered the interplay between representation and the represented with virtuosity. | 1890 Tulln/Donau - Wien 1918 | Moderne Kunst | Arbeiten auf Papier | Nummer: 26x2376 | Provenance: Hassfurther, Wien 31.3.1984, Los 124; Sammlung/Nachlass Serge Sabarsky, New York, bei Vorgenanntem erworben; Sammlung/Stiftung Vally Sabarsky, New York.

Estimation:33.000€

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