Geknickte Leiter 1918

This painting, "Geknickte Leiter" or "Bent Ladder," by Egon Schiele, makes me wonder about the ladder of art history itself. A black, wonky ladder sits at a diagonal on the right, and a kind of orange mist on the left is enclosed in a black border. Imagine Schiele’s thought process here. I think he’s thinking about the relationship between representation and abstraction. In the corner, the bent ladder is wonky but recognizable. It's been applied so boldly, in black, and he's somehow made it askew. The ladder appears to lead nowhere, becoming instead a set of abstract marks on the page. Maybe Schiele is wryly alluding to the avant-garde artists who came before him. Like them, he’s experimenting with form, surface, and line, but at the same time, poking fun at the whole enterprise. Art is, after all, just a bunch of ladders leaning on each other!