This felicitous and striking portrait photograph of Egon Schiele (1890–1918) was created in 1915 by means of double exposure. The artist appears twice: to the left, in a three-quarter view, smiling almost imperceptibly and looking straight ahead, and to the right, with a pensive gaze directed at himself, holding a cigarette in his right hand. It seems as if Schiele were observing himself: with a contemplative and quizzical expression, looking back at the past and thinking of the future. The year 1914, as well as subsequent years, certainly brought many changes, some of them dramatic, which turned Schiele’s world upside down: “What happened before 1914 belongs to another world”, he wrote to his sister Gerti in November of that year (ESDA 109). His artistic work of this time, too, reveals enigmatic double self-portraits, for instance in the paintings
The Self-Seers I, 1910 (lost, Kallir P174),
The Self-Seers II, 1911, and
Prophets, also 1911, which is kept today at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (Kallir P191). In 1910, Schiele wrote: “A self-image. I am everything all at once. – But I will never do everything at the same time.” (ESDA 292).
KJ, 2024
