Egon Schiele’s Peculiar Gestures
In search of the origin of the way his models’ hands were shaking in different expressions
Not too late after Schiele started drawing a great number of portraits and self-portraits in search of his unique style back in 1910, his models and objects started to make some curious gestures with their hands. Authors and art historians agree that his expressionist style was emerging and the bodies of his models stretched more and more in order to demonstrate different emotions. They believe that Schiele was looking for ways to show what is insight his models and he was not interested in painting their physical likeness. However, what I was wondering about, all the way whilst writing my thesis on his work was: why exactly those gestures and did they mean anything?
In this very short piece, I will follow chronologically a few events in his life and work that might give us a little more light on this matter. Surely, we do not have a definitive answer but at least we can observe a little bit what types of gestures he is painting and what influence could be the reason behind that.
Early Hands
Hands started to become a significant unique element of Schiele’s portraits somewhat in 1909. During that time he was still influenced by his mentor Gustav Klimt and his portraits were having the scent of Secession, decoration and gold paint. However, the unique line and colour palette of Schiele was also starting to emerge: earthly colours and linear construction of the objects.
In this early stage, the hands he drew were still in the style of Art-Nouveau, influenced by the Viennese Jugendstil. However, we can see that Schiele’s hands were already thin, with long fingers, more stretched than what we can see from the other artists at that time. We don’t find such hands in Klimt’s earlier work to inspire: his models such as Adele Bloch-Bauer and Fritza Riedler are simply holding their soft hands together. Nor we can find similar hands in Oskar Kokoschka’s works, who, in contrast with Schiele, built his forms with expressive colour and not so much with contour. The inspiration seems to come from somewhere else.
Mime, Dance, Puppetry and Mentally Ill Patients
In 1910, Egon Schiele went on a trip with his friend and colleague Erwin Dom Osen and his presumed lover, the exotic dancer Moa Mandu. Osen was a mime artist and as a model, he provided Schiele with many opportunities to explore the different movements and poses of the human body. There is a series of drawings Egon did of his friend that seems to be one of the first pieces where we can find new, peculiar gestures with the model’s hands. Here is one of the first times we can discover the interesting gesture of stretching the fingers, dividing them into two groups. It is also the time when Schiele’s models have long and stretched figures, they are so thin as if we could really see their bones inside.
According to Reinhard Steiner, there are three main reasons for Schiele’s expressionist idiom. First, it was his interest in the exotic figures, and especially in the puppet theatre of Wayang — the theatre of shadows. They really move in peculiar ways and their silhouettes resonate to his distinctive line, too. Secondly, it was the inspiration coming from the late 19th and early 20th Century exotic and modern dance. Their movements, the way they stretch and twist their bodies. And thirdly, his contact with mentally ill patients. The author believes this fact also brings reason to Schiele’s focus on the gestures and facial expressions. For Schiele, all those are ways to express the inner self of his models and it looks like that was the direction he went on at that time.
Schiele and Osen worked on another project together: Osen was commissioned by dr. Adolf Kronfeld to paint patients with mental issues at the psychiatric hospital “Steinhof”. Schiele also became a friend with the doctor, working on what was an interesting subject conducted by a dr. Kronfeld at that time: the pathological expression.
Art historians are mainly connecting the peculiar artistic approach of Schiele to himself and the self-exploration. However, it is quite inevitable that the environment has a strong influence on an artist — the sensitive nature of a person exploring themselves in a specific reality and the historical moment is usually reflecting in their work. No matter how self-absorbed they are.
Writer Gemma Blackshaw has a different approach to the matter of Schiele’s influences in her article “The Pathological Body: Modernist Strategising in Egon Schiele’s Self-Portraiture”:
She links Schiele’s iconography to the interest in pathological anatomy in Vienna’s psychiatric community, and specifically, the impact of Jean-Martin Charcots somewhat neglected photographic journal Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpetriere, which provided the city's doctors and artists with a new visual resource for the image of the body-in-pain. (Research Gate, Abstract)
In this article, we find out new visual material that she sees as a connection between Schiele and some individuals inside the psychiatric hospital. In those photos, we can see some physical anomaly: what is interesting to our research, are some patient’s hands that have much larger index and middle fingers.
As a conclusion
The gestures that Schiele kept for the longer run, were a little bit more specific — he was usually stretching his hand, so his index finger is separated from the group, and sometimes it is like in Osen’s first drawing we saw a bit earlier. We can even see them in the photographs of him, done by Anton Josef Trčka. It is interesting to mention that it is mainly in his self-portraits where we see them, but some of his models also have funny hand gestures.
Whatever the reason was, we may suspect it was a result of his long-term research of the human body, inner-self and self-expression. He was asking many of his models to stay in very odd (for the time being) poses, leaving them stretched and exposed in front of empty space. What better way to emphasize their expressions than his!
This piece is compiled by Alexandra Nikolova (Ål Nik), an art history graduate and a visual practitioner based in Europe.
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Sources:
Reinhard Steiner. Egon Schiele 1890–1918. The midnight soul of the artist Benedikt Taschen. Cologne, 1993
Frank Whitford. Egon Schiele. Thames & Hudson. New York, 1981
Alessandra Comini. Egon Schiele’s Portraits. University of California Press, Berkeley / London / Los Angeles, 1974
Gemma Blackshaw. The Pathological Body: Modernist Strategising in Egon Schiele’s Self-Portraiture. Oxford Art Journal Vol. 30, №3 (2007), pp. 379–401
