Landscape

Details

Kallir D 1807a.

Literature:

Price, Renée (ed.), Egon Schiele. The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections, Munich a.o. 2005, cat. no. D132, with col. illus. p. 298.

Exhibition:

Egon Schiele. 1890-1918, MAN Museo d’arte della Provincia di Nuoro, 2007.

Provenance:

Estate of the artist, with the stamp lower left;

Otto Benesch Collection (1896-1964), Vienna/Cambridge (USA)/New York;

Serge Sabarsky Collection/Asset, New York, acquired in C. 1983;

Collection/Foundation Vally Sabarsky, New York.

Description

– Rare landscape drawing by Egon Schiele

– A few perfect strokes are all he needs to capture his surroundings precisely

– The drawing belonged to the important Schiele collectors Otto Benesch and Serge Sabarsky

It is not the landscapes that first come to mind when we think of the artist Egon Schiele, who was surrounded by scandal during his lifetime. Although about half of his paintings depict landscapes, they can only be found sporadically in his oeuvre of drawings. Schiele’s perfected lines, which are both spontaneous and very precise, characterise not only his famous nudes and portraits, but also his small landscape studies. He captures the gently sloping landscape seemingly effortlessly, with a group of bare trees in the foreground. As with his depictions of people, he does not depict nature in detail, but rather filters out the essence of the landscape formation with just a few strokes. No painting can be attributed to this drawing. The sheet is therefore not a mere sketch, but an independent work by Schiele.

Otto Benesch, from whose collection the drawing comes and who had been familiar with Schiele’s work since his youth, called Schiele “one of the most ingenious draughtsmen of all time. (…) And rightly so: the artistic medium that he first created and with which he first demonstrated his artistic originality, indeed mastery, was the personal line. Schiele also developed the method of emphasising and omitting into high art. More than almost any other graphic artist, Schiele succeeded in communicating both formal situations and emotions with drawing alone – and here often only with outlines. Schiele’s unique special position within Expressionism is beyond question. No other artist has created the line with such virtuosity and expression.” (Rudolf Leopold, in: exhib. cat. Egon Schiele und seine Zeit, Kunsthalle der Hypo Kulturstiftung, Munich 1989/90, p. 47).