The first time I saw the Reclining Woman with Green Stockings she was a poster hanging on a dorm room wall. Today, I saw the actual green brushstrokes made by Egon Schiele at the Galerie St. Entienne. And thanks to Jane Kallir’s new beautiful book, Egon Schiele’s Women, I learned her name: Adele.
1917. Reclining Woman with Green Stockings in Egon Schiele’s Women
A hundred years ago the Austrian Expressionist painter Egon Schiele along with his mentor Gustav Klimt were stripping their female nudes for the first time of the conventional religious or literary roles expected to cloak women in art–lest they be considered obscene. Not to endow him with too much of a feminist impulse–he was still a product of his bourgeoisie class that married ‘virgins’ and screwed whores–however, Schiele’s portraits presented females as sexually liberated enough to be active participants in their own pleasure.
1914. Nude with Green Turban in Egon Shiele’s Women
Schiele painted females as a Girl Undressing as a Seated Female Nude with Black Stockings as Girlfriends as a Nude with Green Turban or as Wally in Red Blouse with Raised Knees. His inspirations lined the gallery walls in all of their bruised-fruit gorgeousness as adolescents and women in their own skin.
1913. Wally in Red Blouse with Raised Knees in Egon Schiele’s Women
Amy Deneson 