Windswept, the bare tree extends in the gray facets of the sky. Its whitewashed trunk blends with the background and emphasizes the isolation of the nervous branches that grow through the picture plane as almost abstract lines. A horizontal streak on the lower edge of the picture serves as an abbreviation of the soil. The hills on the far horizon are equally stylized. In his landscape depictions, Egon Schiele (1890–1918) reaches an intensity of expression that rivals that of his portraits and self-portraits. The key to this is his anthropomorphic rendering of nature, which he inscribes with human shapes and emotions. Like
Small Tree in Late Autumn, created shortly before, the painting
Autumn Tree in Stirred Air (Winter Tree), which was bought by Magda Mautner Markhof (1881–1944) a few months after its first presentation at the Hagenbund in 1912, is not a genuine landscape. Rather, the tree in its bareness and isolation embodies the feeling of being exposed and lonely – and the will to survive. In his essay
Egon Schieles Weg und Ziel, which was published in the catalogue for the artist’s posthumous solo exhibition at the Neue Galerie in Vienna in 1923, art historian Kurt Rathe (1886–1952) identified in Schiele’s landscapes “the special atmospheric magic of a moribund nature,” adding that they depict “infinitely sensitive organisms, whose fibrillar nervous system is for instance represented by the grid of a fence, telegraph wires and the wispy branches of leafless trees.”
VG, 2022
