Self-Portrait with Lowered Head

On this day in 1890 one of my favorite artists, Egon Schiele, was born.  <3  He was an Austrian painter, a protégé of Gustav Klimt, and noted for the intensity and raw sexuality of his works, including clothed and nude self-portraits. The twisted body shapes and the expressive line that characterize Schiele's paintings and drawings mark the artist as an early exponent of Expressionism.

Schiele’s head is bent, his eyes are turned upward. The whites of his eyes appear like crescent moons in an otherwise dark face. His dark head with sunken cheeks shines forth from the pale background. Above his blue-red lips sits a modest moustache, which Schiele only kept between the late fall of 1911 and the beginning of 1912. This grotesque and eerie self-portrait emerged in connection with the large-format painting The Hermits, part of the Leopold Museum’s collection. From this work, Schiele adopted the posture of the head and the similarly splayed fingers, which, in the double portrait, are placed on the right hip of the left figure. Another self-portrait study from the same year shows the artist wrapped in a white gown, again with the same head posture and spread fingers placed on the hip.

We present today's work thanks to the Leopold Museum in Vienna, which owns the biggest collection of Schiele's works.  : )

P.S. Here are 10 times when Egon Schiele mastered hip hop hand gestures—really funny!  : D