Houses With Laundry 1914

Egon Schiele built this town scene with dirty yellows, oranges, and browns with just enough blue, green, red and white to turn it into music. Imagine Schiele outside, squinting with one eye. Layering the paint – building those geometric houses one on top of the other. He must have been thinking about the way light reflects and bounces off surfaces, each plane of the buildings fractured by feeling. The laundry strung between the houses is like a rainbow of color, a party line between neighbors in the sky. It’s like he is sketching and painting all at once. Those parallel lines suggesting water at the top and the bottom pull the painting apart, but the houses hold it together. It reminds me a little of Klimt and maybe even Cezanne. Artists are always having conversations with one another, even after they are gone. With this painting, Schiele turns the seen world into something felt.