View from the Drawing Classroom, Klosterneuburg 1905

Egon Schiele made this painting, View from the Drawing Classroom, Klosterneuburg, using oil paint on canvas. Just imagine Schiele in that drawing classroom looking out at the roofs of all the buildings. He’s using lots of greens, reds, blues, and browns. You can see he worked at it, scrubbing the paint into some areas, like the clouds, and leaving it thin in others. You can tell he really wanted to capture the volume of those clouds, that heavy sky pressing down. I wonder if he was thinking about some of the early modernists and the way they captured buildings, like, say, Cezanne? It makes me wonder if he was trying to bring the outside in, capturing the atmosphere from the classroom. He repeats some of the same shapes over and over. I can almost feel his desire to capture the view outside. There’s something great about how the history of painting keeps going, artists borrowing and responding to each other across time, adding their own spin.