Stein on the Danube 1913

Here we have Egon Schiele’s “Stein on the Danube,” probably made with oil and maybe gouache or watercolor—something quick and dirty. I love his scumbled, broken marks! It's like he's wrestling with the image as it appears. The town rises up, kind of tilting towards us, with the river in the foreground. He doesn’t seem too concerned about depicting reality, but the way the paint’s applied—kind of clotted and smeared—gives you a tactile sense of the place. Look at the mountain in the background, how he's scratched in these striations. It almost looks like corrugated cardboard, and that’s so perfect for this. It’s almost topographic, the way he renders the land. Schiele was contemporary to Gustav Klimt, who he admired. But whereas Klimt was all surface decoration, Schiele’s work has a more psychological aspect, which is what makes him interesting to me. His townscapes are like distorted portraits.