Death and the Maiden
Egon Schiele (1890 to 1918) · 1915
A girl in a thin dress clings to a man in a dark monk-like robe, her arms locked around his back, her cheek pressed to his chest. He holds her too, but his eyes stare past her into nothing, and his face is a mask of pale skin over bone. Around them the sheet twists over a landscape of brown rock. The man is Death, and the man is also Schiele himself; the girl has the red hair of Wally Neuzil, the model and companion who had lived with him for four years and whom he had just left in order to marry a respectable middle class woman.
The painting is at once an old allegory and a private confession. Death and the maiden was a favourite theme of German art since the Renaissance, and Schiele knew it from prints and from Schubert. But look at the poses: the figures are kneeling on a cliff edge, unstable, as if about to fall. The girl's hands are painted with the knuckles white. The colours are deliberately dirty, ochre, olive and rust, with only the red hair and the pink of her dress warm against them. Schiele has drawn the contours with a hard dark line and then let the paint hang loose inside them.
Wally was told the news of the marriage in a cafe, with Schiele proposing they continue to take a holiday together every summer; she refused, trained as a nurse, and died of scarlet fever in a military hospital in Dalmatia in nineteen hundred and seventeen. The painting was bought for the collection after Schiele's death and is now among the most visited works in the Belvedere. Notice the small white cloth under the girl's knee, painted like a shroud.
Did You Know? Schiele broke with Wally Neuzil in a cafe by proposing a yearly summer holiday together after his marriage; she refused, and this painting is his farewell.
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