dc.description.abstract | The early twentieth-century Austrian painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918) is famous for his very different and unique style of painting. During his short career as a painter, he devoted himself to creating portraits incessantly. Schiele portrayed different classes, ethnic groups, and self-portraits by absorbing and digesting different artistic styles, contemporary trends, new medical knowledge, and new technologies. He used this as a cornerstone to weave his artistic concepts. He developed double self-portraits and double portraits with skillful compositions, the concept of doppelgänger, and religious sensation emphasizing his thoughts on viewing, allowing viewers to distinguish the difference between “daraufsehen” (look at) and “hineinsehen” (look into) through viewing. In so doing, his works reflect the inner vision of the creator and invite the viewer to generate many possibilities for viewing.
The first chapter focuses on the portraits in the four exhibitions at the beginning of the twentieth century, sorting out the historical, social and cultural background of the development of Vienna’s portrait paintings from the first half of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. It discusses how the patrons, painters, and artists who faced the social changes and chose to express the subjectivities through portraits. This phenomenon had continued until the early twentieth century when the new generation of artists, including Schiele, shaped the modern subject through portraits. The second chapter firstly focuses on Schiele′s personal life experience and artistic development before 1910, exploring topics such as Schiele′s relationship with his family, his discovery of new things at school, his acquaintance with those who inspired his art, and his preference for drawing and watercolor as experimental mediums for various expressions. Secondly, Schiele chose to accumulate different face and body images by depicting portraits of famous Viennese personalities, patrons, pregnant women, babies, and teenagers, exploring the tensions between the inner emotions and outer recognition of sitters, gradually forming his own artistic style. The third chapter first discusses Schiele’s many experiments in the genre of self-portraiture, playing the dual roles of both the creator and the subject of the self-portraits. He boldly breaks through his visual vocabulary and develops the double self-portraits. Then the chapter focuses on the Schiele’s Self-Seer series, in the light of Schiele′s explanation of the two viewing modes of this series, “look at” and “look into.” I analyze the gradual completion of the Self-Seer series from the sketches and demonstrate the importance of “look into” which is a way to transcend the outside and be able to recognize the inner vision. In the fourth chapter, I focus on the concept of “doppelgänger” which has evolved from the age of mythology to turn of the twentieth-century Vienna, outlining the context of doppelgänger. Then I compare and analyze the interpretation of Schiele′s double self-portraits under the psychoanalytic theory and the new meaning of doppelgänger in painting different from literature. This concept echoes Schiele′s embodiment of inner vision and his thoughts on portraits. The fifth chapter focuses on Schiele’s double portraits Hermit and Agony made in 1912, discussing and analyzing how he used the different elements of the Christian iconography, thereby affecting the viewer′s viewing experience, by looking into multiple religious elements feel their sacredness and internality in order to reflect what Schiele calls the “sensation of religion.” | en_US |