How does an artist convey an intimate image or experience or inspire the viewer to reflect personally about intimate understandings of themselves? I think about this often when looking at Egon Schiele's "Kneeling Girl in Orange Red Dress"...
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| Kneeling Girl in Orange Red Dress, 1910 |
...a picture that I view often, as it hangs in the 'intimate' space of my bathroom. This picture remains as one of the most powerful portraits that I've ever encountered. I don't know this person, nor am I driven to want to know them, but I can connect with this image intimately. While Schiele is reknowned for depicting women and men engaging in what many understand as intimate sexual acts and for depicting these acts and the bodies engaging (or not engaging) in them in a matter-of-fact way, unglamourous, limbs crudely truncated and bent, skin starkly coloured in shades of white and green and blue and most suggestively- red- while this artist was excised from the art world for decades after his death and reborn as a visionary of the sexually explicit and grotesque, I see his honesty and intimacy not in the positions of bodies or the exposure of genitals, but in the manner Schiele draws his viewer into the thoughts and emotions of his subjects. It is an execution of style that - frankly- I don't think I could explain in words. Please see below for more of what I've struggled to articulate (and to which I've admitted to being inept in doing):
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| Seated Woman with Bent Knee, 1917 |
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| Embrace- Lovers II, 1917 |
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| Kneeling Girl propped on her elbows, 1917 |
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| Nude Self Portrait, 1916 |
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