1912, Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait with Raised Bare Shoulder -- Leopold Museum (Vienna)
From the museum label: The work Self-Portrait with Raised Bare Shoulder, painted on wood, was created in 1912. It is one of a number of emphatic small-scale self-portraits by Egon Schiele which are particularly expressive despite, or rather because of, their restricted format. Rather than being a classical portrait, which would be limited to the head, the shoulder -- as a strangely amorphous eversion -- forces its way into the rendering as representative of the rest of the body. Schiele depicted his connection to his own body both as a fusion and a dissociation. His facial expression, which is a mixture of incredulous astonishment and distressed outcry, seems to reflect this realization. The individual is foreign to itself - or as Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) put it: "The ego is not master in its own house." This addresses a central theme of Viennese Modernism: the individual becoming a dividual -- something that can be divided; the crisis of the subject which no longer comprehends itself as an entity; the crisis whose venue is the body.
1912, Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait with Raised Bare Shoulder -- Leopold Museum (Vienna)
From the museum label: The work Self-Portrait with Raised Bare Shoulder, painted on wood, was created in 1912. It is one of a number of emphatic small-scale self-portraits by Egon Schiele which are particularly expressive despite, or rather because of, their restricted format. Rather than being a classical portrait, which would be limited to the head, the shoulder -- as a strangely amorphous eversion -- forces its way into the rendering as representative of the rest of the body. Schiele depicted his connection to his own body both as a fusion and a dissociation. His facial expression, which is a mixture of incredulous astonishment and distressed outcry, seems to reflect this realization. The individual is foreign to itself - or as Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) put it: "The ego is not master in its own house." This addresses a central theme of Viennese Modernism: the individual becoming a dividual -- something that can be divided; the crisis of the subject which no longer comprehends itself as an entity; the crisis whose venue is the body.