Video: Egon Schiele's "Portrait of the Artist's Wife"

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Egon Schiele painted "Portrait of the Artist's Wife" as a symbol of the times rather than a simple portrait. Learn about this painting with tips from an art historian in this free fine art video.

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andretchaikows1 Dec 15, 2008
Thanks again to Ms. Fekete for this interesting video. Greatly appreciated and in excellent English. Dave
andretchaikows1 Dec 15, 2008
Thanks again to Ms. Fekete for this interesting video. Greatly appreciated and in excellent English. Dave

Video Transcript

So the next painting from again Schiele is a painting of his wife in 1980. It's, she's sitting in a chair but the background also, as spacious as it was, on the other painting, what is really, how to say, touching on the painting, that his wife died of Spanish flu that year, and she was pregnant, and she died three days after that. Because of the wide clothes it's not so recognizable that she's pregnant, but she is. And the face of her, it's a bit impersonal because Schiele's style of painting portraits, the faces were rather not specific because he showed the eyes like spots, little black spots, and so on, so it's also about a kind of a tendency in cessation, a kind of a contact symbolism that they want to show not only a person, rather a symbol of something, a woman, the manhood, and so on. And that's why I think that the painting's made like this, where had he this message rather not to make a portrait of his wife.

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Egon Schiele's "Portrait of the Artist's Wife"

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