View from the Drawing Classroom, Klosterneuburg 1905

Egon Schiele painted "View from the Drawing Classroom, Klosterneuburg" with oil on canvas. It's a kind of searching, provisional painting. The forms are not quite resolved, they bleed into each other in a way which emphasizes the act of seeing, and the business of painting. There's this great white cloud right up at the top, a big, puffy brushstroke. It’s pure painting, unadulterated joy, almost abstract. Then you notice the town. The buildings are all jostling for space, rendered in thin washes of earth tones, yellows, and blues, with a muted, slightly melancholic feel. Looking at the roofs, it seems like Schiele is trying to capture not just how they look but the feeling of the place, its weight, its history. You can almost smell the dampness of the stone and the age of the buildings. I see a kinship here with someone like Paula Modersohn-Becker, who was also trying to find a new language for painting, rooted in feeling and experience. And like her, Schiele reminds us that painting is not just about depicting the world but about understanding it.