Fragmented body and Viennese expressionism · 1890 -1918

Egon Schiele pushes the self-portrait beyond the face: shoulders, fingers, grimaces, nudity and emptiness transform his own body into a theater of modern fragility and affirmation.

Egon Schiele was born in Tulln in 1890 and entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna at the age of sixteen. He quickly broke with conservative teaching, founded the Neukunstgruppe in 1909 and moved away from Gustav Klimt's decorative to construct a drier, broken and expressive line. No subject serves him more than his own body. Between 1910 and 1915, he produced a remarkable series of painted and drawn self-portraits where traditional resemblance gave way to posture, mimicry and fragmentation. Between 1910 and 1915, he produced a remarkable series of painted and drawn self-portraits where traditional resemblance gave way to posture, mimicry and fragmentation. In the 1910 Self-Portrait or the Seated Male Nude, the skinny figure appears cut out by the outline and suspended on the empty background. The 1910 Self-Portrait or the seated Male Nude, the skinny figure appears cut out by the outline and suspended on the empty background. The naked self-portrait with a grimace radicalizes him face, hands and twisting until identity is made an unstable performance. In 1912, the decisive year, the Self-Portrait with Physalis instead balances the violence of the line with a precise composition. The gaze fixes the viewer while the red fruits respond to the dark masses of the body; conceived as a counterpart to Wally's Portrait, the painting combines fragility and confidence. The headlong Self-Portrait takes up the pose of the Hermites and brings out the eyes under the inclined forehead. The double self-portrait, including Prophets, further multiplies the self instead of unifying it. These images are part of Viennese modernity, at a time when psychology, sexuality and crisis the subject calls into question the stable individual. Schiele therefore puts himself on stage, but without flattery: he examines the body as a surface of desire, anxiety, illness and creation. His death in 1918, at the age of twenty-eight, abruptly closed a research carried out with exceptional intensity. The selection "Self-portraits of Egon Schiele" notably compares Self-portrait with Physalis - Egon Schiele and Self-portrait with head down - Egon Schiele. His reading favors space.

Schiele does not look for a definitive face: he experiences how the body can bend, fragment and yet maintain a sovereign gaze.