Thursday, July 20, 2006

SOME LESSER-KNOWN EGON SCHIELE PICTURES

Here's (above) a red woman. She's not exactly a woman painted red but red that takes the form of a woman. We are fields of color that have minds.
Here's a woman (above) reduced to just the interesting parts. She's packaged in a rich brown and presented to us. The picture is sexy but you rebel against it because there's something disturbing about the missing limbs.

Here's legs with transparent, silky stockings stretched between them. It's odd to think that a naked figure is even more naked when wearing something. Transparent color like the green shown here is riveting because our minds can't figure out whether to regard it as pure color floating in the air or as a tint of the flesh color. A vagina thrown into the composition combines the mystery of sex with the mystery of color and texture.


The white woman with the colorful crotch is pure Kandinsky but it's easier to see what Kandinsky was getting at here than in his own paintings. Color here is portrayed as a weird, otherworldly attribute that is tamed and enslaved to allow us to perceive reality, but which has a mind of its own which can assert itself and threaten to show us the chaos that underlies things.Here's an elegant line drawing that suddenly erupts in extreme volume. When you see drawings like this you wonder if volume is the fundamental atom of vision, the thing that art is all about.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

There was a great Egon Shiele show at the Neue Gallery in New York in the spring, it was amazing to see his work "in the flesh"...he was an artist that got good real young too..he's one of my all-time favorites!

Anonymous said...

I love the colors he uses- he makes his people with these fragile thin lines and then fills them to the brim with blood-red faces and joints. The warm faces and/or naughty bits against the cool colors- so pretty!

RedDiabla said...

"We are fields of color that have minds"...that's brilliant.

The paintings are fun, too.

Anonymous said...

You know, I believe there’s a recurring motif here, Eddie. Your favorite paintings all seem to have a common thread - a sort of dominant thematic pattern, if you will. But I can't quite put my finger on it...
Maybe if I provided a link to a certain gift that you once presented to me, a central theme will emerge, (and thereby provide us with a window into your innermost soul?)

Well, here it is:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Origin-of-the-World.jpg

Thanks, Eddie!

Anonymous said...

Eddie- you wanna climb back into the womb??

That Origin of the World painting reminds me of art history class- we stared at it for two hours non-stop, no bathroom breaks!!!!!

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Mike: I almost fell off my chair when I saw the "Origin of the World" that you put up! Now tht I've had time to think about it I think a well-framed copy of that belongs over every civilized man's fireplace.

David Germain said...

Speaking of pictures of naked women, check out my picture of Miss Marlo. ;)