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Stylized Flowers in Front of Decorative Background, 1908

Leopold Museum,
Vienna
Oil, silver and gold pigments on canvas
65.5×65.5 cm

Artists

  • Egon Schiele

    (Tulln 1890–1918 Vienna)

Unfortunately not on display at the moment
For this painting, created during his time at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, Egon Schiele (1890–1918) chose a square canvas, a format which had been very popular in Jugendstil and which Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), in particular, had preferred for his landscape depictions. Klimt’s artistic style is also echoed in the planar ground of the vegetal motif, which uses silver and gold pigments to create a shimmering contrast to the plant body’s saturated shades of purple and the orange highlights. The leaves are anti-naturalistic, not only with regard to their coloring. Captured in the process of wilting, they are bulging around the stem, achieving a three-dimensional effect that makes the motif stand out even more strongly from the opaque planarity of the pictorial ground. The elevated silhouette of the plant body already foreshadows the figure paintings of 1909/10 in which Schiele breaks with Klimt’s artistic style and exposes the body on a naked surface, as in Seated Male Nude.

VG, 2022

Object data

Artist/author
  • Egon Schiele
Title
Stylized Flowers in Front of Decorative Background
Date
1908
Art movement
Art Nouveau
Category
Painting
Material​/technique
Oil, silver and gold pigments on canvas
Dimensions
65.5×65.5 cm
Signature
Signed and dated lower right: SCHIELE. EGON 1908
Credit line
Leopold Museum, Vienna, Inv. 474
Inventory access
Contributed to the Leopold Museum-Privatstiftung in 1994
Selection of Reference works
  • Rudolf Leopold: Egon Schiele. Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, hrsg. von Elisabeth Leopold, München 2020.
  • Tobias Natter: Egon Schiele, Sämtliche Gemälde 1909-1918, Köln 2017.
  • Wien 1900. Sammlung Leopold, hrsg. von Diethard Leopold/Peter Weinhäupl, Wien u.a. 2009.
  • Jane Kallir: Egon Schiele - The complete works. Expanded edition including a biography and a catalogue raisonné, New York 1998.
  • Otto Kallir: Egon Schiele. Oeuvre Catalogue of the Paintings, New York 1966.
  • Otto Nirenstein: Egon Schiele. Persönlichkeit und Werk, Berlin 1930.
Catalogue raisonne
  • J. Kallir 1990/1998: P146
  • Leopold 1972/2020: 127
  • Natter 2017: 3
  • O. Kallir 1966: 81
  • O. Kallir (Nirenstein) 1930: 44
Keywords
flowersvegetationNature

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Provenance

Provenance research
Leopold Museum i

Auktion Dorotheum Wien (o.D.);
Max Morgenstern, Wien und London (1930-1946); (1)
Hertha Morgenstern, London (1946-1962);
Bob Morton, Preston, Großbritannien (1962-1970);
Dr. Rudolf Leopold, Wien (1970-1994); (2)
Leopold Museum-Privatstiftung, Wien (1994).

  1. Otto Nirenstein, Egon Schiele. Persönlichkeit und Werk, Berlin 1930, S. 55, Nr. 44; Sonja Niederacher, Egon Schiele. Stilisierte Blumen vor dekorativem Hintergrund, Dossier vom 21.12.2009, S. 13
  2. Niederacher, Dossier, S. 14f.

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Search in collection

flowersvegetationNature