The title of the work is the Hug also known as "Couple of lovers II". The author is the Austrian painter Egon Schiele, the year of construction is 1917, in the middle of the Great War. The painting is kept at the Oesterreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna and is an oil on canvas measuring 100 x 170 cm.
Schiele's embrace is a painting of great expressive power that I have had the privilege of seeing several times live in Vienna, where it is kept and also in various temporary exhibitions.
The embrace is a painting that does not leave you indifferent and that carries within itself a charisma, a strength, an energy out of the ordinary. The viewer is magnetized, hypnotized by the painting that stages the extraordinary encounter between two people who love each other. And the strength of their love, the energy released by their passion is all there, captured by Schiele on the canvas.
The work is of important dimensions, 170 x 100 cm, and shows us an embracing couple seen from above. The two bodies, defined by a very clear contour line, are therefore painted life-size if not slightly larger than life and clearly detach, with their emaciated complexion, compared to the sheet on which they are stretched.
Schiele therefore defines three distinct moments of the composition. The bodies that are in fact central, then the white sheet and finally the backdrop.
The two lovers are evidently lying on a sheet, but Schiele abstracts them from the context. We do not have precise spatial references such as the edge or the headboard of a bed.
We perceive a double feeling that runs along the picture. One is linked to passion, love, eros, desire, the other linked to restlessness, detachment, torment. It is around this double tension that the unique and explosive strength of this work arises.
The words of Schiele himself, who a few years earlier in 1912 he had used to describe one of his now lost paintings, are enlightening in this regard:
“A light must spring from the picture, bodies have their own light which they consume while living; they burn, they are not illuminated ”.
They are really intense and clarifying words. If we go back to observe these bodies we realize that they emanate their own light which is the energy that flows through them. These are pulsating bodies where blood flows but also emotions, drives. These bodies, as Schiele says, are burning, they are consuming themselves living the moment of passion and then of detachment.
This is why Schiele's embrace is one of the most powerful images of love that has ever been painted, because it captures its total dimension, the immense underlying energies.
The two lovers burn and consume each other living the moment with maximum intensity and emanating a light that is vital, sacred, telluric light, the light of love.
As we have seen through the embrace and other works presented in the video, Schiele combines an extraordinary aesthetic sense with an exasperated expressionism. Through the elegance of the lines, the chromatic balance, the immense talent in drawing and composition, he manages to reveal the sometimes excruciating drive and emotional world that lies behind his protagonists.
Let me know what you think of Schiele's embrace and the painter himself with a comment!
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22 июл 2024
