Video: Egon Schiele's "Death and the Maiden"

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Egon Schiele's "Death and the Maiden" illustrates humanity's relationship with death. Learn about this painting with tips from an art historian in this free fine art video.

- Egon Schiele's "Portrait of the Artist's Wife"
- Edvard Munch Paintings in Vienna

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Video Transcript

Schiele is a kind of a painter where we can see the specialties of the Vienna cessation, one kind of, the decadence which also said about the Vienna cessation. And Schiele and the interest in things which are going to die or such topics. What we can see on the painting is a bent woman figure with a black, in a black blanket. And how the death is, how to say, fusions in her, a kind of a union of the woman and the death. And what we can also recognize the personal characteristics of Schiele's style, such as the figures on the painting are completely isolated from the background and also the brush strokes are also different, the style of the brush strokes, the background is put in a space without any perspective, without any real space. So it's a bit amorphous, opaque, and so the surface, it's intangible. So the figures are rather floating in the air, and that's why it gives the most of his painting a kind of immortality out of space, out of a real life. And so although he's dealing with death and mortality, that's why I think it's not, it has a kind of a message to the viewer that Schiele is, want to express human existence and the human feelings to death.

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Egon Schiele's "Death and the Maiden"

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