Tänzerin mit blauem Rock 1918

Here we have Egon Schiele’s ‘Dancer in a Blue Skirt’, made with gouache and pencil, which captures a fleeting sense of movement and joy through a really pared-down, almost childlike, visual language. The color palette is so simple - yellow, blue, a bit of black - yet the way Schiele applies it gives the piece a rich, textured feel. The blue of the skirt, for example, isn’t flat; it has these beautiful variations, and it’s a really vibrant splash of color against the muted background. Look at how the figure’s limbs are rendered with such direct, honest lines, so different from the heavy texture of the skirt. It’s as if Schiele is exploring the tension between representation and abstraction, figuring out how much information is really needed to communicate the feeling of a dancer in motion. Schiele’s work always reminds me of Paula Modersohn-Becker, both of them pushing the boundaries of expression at the beginning of the 20th century. Both using a limited visual vocabulary to convey great feeling. There’s a raw, uninhibited energy in Schiele’s paintings that makes you think about art not as a finished product but as an open-ended experiment.