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Egon Schiele's Treescapes. Work and world: unframing the autonomous landscape
Author(s) -
Smith Kimberly A.
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8365.00207
Subject(s) - framing (construction) , painting , contemplation , pleasure , aesthetics , object (grammar) , context (archaeology) , art , autonomy , suspect , visual arts , sociology , philosophy , epistemology , history , psychology , linguistics , law , political science , archaeology , criminology , neuroscience
An Austrian Expressionist known primarily for his portraits and self‐portraits, Egon Schiele was also a prolific landscape painter. Focusing on the Kantian notions of autonomy and disinterested pleasure, this article considers a series of treescapes painted between 1911 and 1913 in which Schiele systematically undermines the processes of framing which make possible not only the modern landscape but the work of art as an object of aesthetic contemplation. Challenging the frame's capacity to delineate neatly between work and world, these images refuse the retreat into aestheticization demanded of the independent landscape and insist instead on the fluidity of the relationship between painting and beholder. Conforming therefore to a Nietzschean notion of passionate spectatorship, the treescapes should also be considered in the context of Vienna's notorious Sprachkrisis , which posited the failure of language to express the unsayable. The essay proposes that Schiele's disintegration of the frame's integrity by calling attention to its usually invisible mechanisms may be seen as an attempt to establish an image‐based system of communication when language has become suspect as a viable means of interchange.