Читать книгу Egon Schiele - Esther Selsdon - Страница 10

The contour line captures the physical presence and becomes a sculpture-like containment within space. Thereby Schiele dispensed with every spatiotemporal specification. Like a person regarding himself in a mirror, only seeing his face and body, and like a lover who within the body of his love, forgets the world around him, Schiele created his self-portraits before a mirror, as well as some of his female nude drawings. Schiele, Drawing a Nude Model in front of a Mirror illustrates this. The scene is illuminating, the duplication of frontal and rear views of the nude woman are revealed in the reflection, however there, where the mirror is, stands the viewer. He functions as the mirror in which the model regards herself, reassuring herself of her body, and in whose gaze it moves. The intimacy between painter and model is countered in the relationship between viewer and drawing.

The Dancer Moa, 1911.

Pencil, 48 x 31.8 cm.

Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.