Reclining Woman with Green Stockings (Adele Harms) 1917

Curator: Here we have Egon Schiele's "Reclining Woman with Green Stockings (Adele Harms)", a pencil drawing created in 1917. Editor: The angularity, the somewhat unsettling gaze, it's so characteristic of Schiele. There's a raw emotional intensity immediately apparent. Curator: Absolutely. Schiele’s work from this period is very much tied to the social and political anxieties brewing in Vienna, just before the close of World War I. The Expressionist movement sought to depict emotional experience rather than physical reality. Editor: One can certainly read that angst through the contorted pose. Notice how the green stockings act as almost a formal anchor to the entire composition, drawing our eye back to the upper torso and face. The muted palette reinforces that sense of underlying unease. Curator: Right. Consider that Schiele was conscripted into the war, an experience which profoundly shaped his later works, and one can clearly read those historical strains, specifically how they permeated and pressured civilian life at the time. He returned briefly to Vienna only to witness, not long afterwards, the Spanish Flu pandemic decimate the Viennese populace including himself and his pregnant wife, Edith. Editor: Even divorced from that context, I think the drawing stands on its own in its masterful use of line and the expressionistic portrayal of the figure. See how Schiele employs a tense economy in mark making which underscores that fraught emotion, further enhanced through contrasting values. Curator: But without recognizing this was 1917, in Vienna, on the cusp of momentous tragedy both collective and individual, can one fully grasp the deeper resonances imbued in this image? And consider the political role of nudes such as this, often shown at the time in the salon to provoke public reaction? Editor: I grant you context matters greatly in understanding all artworks. But Schiele's manipulation of form, his ability to use distortion to convey an emotional state, speaks across time. Curator: A society undergoing tremendous societal flux finds a way into even the simplest nude, a window through which we view an anxious public consciousness. Editor: Precisely, a dialogue between the formal and the contextual creates rich, meaningful art history.