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Lot Essay
Bildnis einer Frau mit schwarzem Haar (Portrait of a Woman with Black Hair) is one of a small group of formally powerful gouaches painted in the spring of 1914 in which the boundaries between Schiele's painting and graphic styles become blurred.
Following on from this pronounced tendency in his work towards the latter part of 1913, in his first studies of 1914, Schiele experimented with a new intensity of brushwork, texture and sense of surface in a series of portraits of very striking but unknown models. The model for this work, though clearly not the same person, recalls another unknown model with thick long black hair that Schiele had been fascinated with in 1911 and who, ultimately, had led to the creation of an important and now lost oil painting of her.
In Bildnis einer Frau mit schwarzem Haar, Schiele, using a mixture of gouache, watercolour and black crayon, has captured a similar smouldering intensity with this raven-black haired woman whose provocatively seductive gaze stares directly out from the page. Rarely for Schiele, the complete form of this woman has been delineated almost entirely without line. With a magnificent command and assuredness Schiele has built her form in a painterly way from a combination of intensely dark angular brushwork applied onto thick paint with a dry brush contrasted directly with the bleak emptiness of the blank page. This almost blocking technique of dense opaque form opposing nothing, in such a way that it creates a sense of fullness and volume from the emptiness of the page, is one that closely echoes that of the masters of the Japanese woodcut who Schiele greatly admired. Employed here in this work, it has the affect of transforming a study into a seemingly complete portrait in its own right.
Following on from this pronounced tendency in his work towards the latter part of 1913, in his first studies of 1914, Schiele experimented with a new intensity of brushwork, texture and sense of surface in a series of portraits of very striking but unknown models. The model for this work, though clearly not the same person, recalls another unknown model with thick long black hair that Schiele had been fascinated with in 1911 and who, ultimately, had led to the creation of an important and now lost oil painting of her.
In Bildnis einer Frau mit schwarzem Haar, Schiele, using a mixture of gouache, watercolour and black crayon, has captured a similar smouldering intensity with this raven-black haired woman whose provocatively seductive gaze stares directly out from the page. Rarely for Schiele, the complete form of this woman has been delineated almost entirely without line. With a magnificent command and assuredness Schiele has built her form in a painterly way from a combination of intensely dark angular brushwork applied onto thick paint with a dry brush contrasted directly with the bleak emptiness of the blank page. This almost blocking technique of dense opaque form opposing nothing, in such a way that it creates a sense of fullness and volume from the emptiness of the page, is one that closely echoes that of the masters of the Japanese woodcut who Schiele greatly admired. Employed here in this work, it has the affect of transforming a study into a seemingly complete portrait in its own right.