The Embrace
Egon Schiele (1890 to 1918) · 1917
Two naked bodies lie tangled on a crumpled white sheet, seen from above. The man's back is turned to you, his arm wrapped around the woman's shoulders, and her face is hidden against his neck. Only her hand, the fingers pressed into his back, tells you how tightly she is holding on. The sheet spreads out under them like a raft on a dark sea of yellow and brown. Schiele painted this in nineteen hundred and seventeen, in the last full year of his life, and it is one of the few of his pictures where a couple is simply together, without terror.
Compare the brushwork with the tortured, jagged line of Schiele's earlier work and you will see how much had changed. The bodies are modelled in broad, warm strokes; the muscles of the man's back are almost classical. The sheet is painted in thick white ridges that catch the light in the gallery. Schiele had married Edith Harms in nineteen hundred and fifteen and served in the army as a clerk, and the paintings of these years are calmer and larger, as if he were learning to see whole people rather than fragments.
The picture was acquired by the Austrian state and has been in the Belvedere collection since. Schiele died of the Spanish flu in October nineteen hundred and eighteen, three days after his pregnant wife, at the age of twenty eight, so this tenderness was never allowed to develop. The Belvedere has enhanced the painting with an augmented reality feature that shows x-ray and infrared images on your phone, revealing how Schiele adjusted the position of the arms as he worked.
Did You Know? Schiele finished this painting a year before he and his wife Edith died within three days of each other in the influenza epidemic of nineteen eighteen.
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