Eduard Kosmack 1910

Egon Schiele painted this portrait of Eduard Kosmack, sometime around 1910, with oil on canvas. Look at the way he’s pieced together, almost like a jigsaw, with these broken planes of muted colour. You can really sense Schiele’s process here, a kind of construction or building up of the image. I'm drawn to how the paint seems thinly applied, almost translucent in places, allowing the texture of the canvas to peek through. Notice the way Schiele articulates the figure's hands, a jumble of awkward angles. The hands lead me to think about how the body holds itself in space. In this painting, Schiele anticipates artists like Francis Bacon, with his ability to capture the vulnerability of the human form. What's so compelling about this painting is precisely its ambiguity, the way it invites us to project our own feelings onto the canvas.