Читать книгу Egon Schiele - Esther Selsdon - Страница 17

The viennese at the turn of the century lived with a longing for death and romanticised the “beautiful corpse”. “how ill everything coming into being does seem to be,” wrote trakl, who in 1914 found death on the front. Schiele shared with osen, who had himself locked away in a steinhof insane asylum where he might study the behaviour of the patients, an interest in pathologic pictures of disease. In the clinic of the gynaecologist erwin von graf, he studied and drew sick and pregnant women and pictures of new and stillborn infants. Schiele was fascinated by the devastation of the foul suffering, to which these innocents were exposed. Astonished, he saw unusual changes in the skin in whose sagging vessels thin, watery blood and tainted fluids trickled sluggishly, he marvelled also at light-sensitive green eyes behind red lids, the slimy mouths and the soul in these unsound vessels, reported roesseler. Therein he resembled oskar kokoschka, also known as the “soul slasher” and of whom it was said “painting hand and head, he lay bare in a ghostly manner the spiritual skeleton of her whom he portrayed”. To the colour lithograph of his drama, murder hope of women, he commented: “the man is bloody red, the colour of life, but he lies dead in the lap of a woman, who is white, the colour of death.” Man and woman in the dance of life and death.