Mother with Two Children II, 1915

This large-scale depiction of a seated mother with two children was created one year after „Blind Mother“. With the exception of her bare face and her feet, the body of the woman is fully shrouded in a green textile, which balances the brownish yellow color of the monochrome background and at the same time approximates the figure to the ground in a disquieting incorporeity. Furthermore, the pale face with its circular eye sockets and its mouth rendered as a black line is stylized to the point of suggesting a skull. The sleeping child in her lap reflects the mother’s underlying expression of absence and death, even though this effect is due to the partially uncompleted coloration. Schiele intentionally chooses the classic composition scheme of a pietà, which is broken only by the child to the mother’s left, shown in an upright, strangely levitating position. With its garment of colored stripes, it represents the innocent and hopeful side of this dismal triangle, all the more depressing in its helplessness. The painting belongs to Schiele’s tradition of disturbing mother-and-child depictions that break with the image of a relationship rooted in love, protective closeness and tender care.

VG, 2022