Vienna

Egon Schiele

The Embrace

1917

Oil on canvas, 100 × 170 cm. Belvedere, Vienna

Two nude lovers hold each other on a crumpled white sheet, filling a long horizontal canvas. The Belvedere reads the bodies as carriers of feeling rather than portraits of particular people.

• Those feelings, in the museum's reading, include desire, tenderness, fear of parting and despair.
• Look at the man's long, curved back and the woman's hair spread across the sheet.
• Reddish-brown contours run around each limb; blue lines edge the sheet's quick, angular folds.
• Contour locks the two bodies into one tight knot, set off by an acid yellow-green ground, so the drawing itself holds the couple together.
• Some sources add the title Lovers II; the Belvedere uses only the shorter name.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · PD-Art