The Sisters Karoline and Pauline Fey

1905

Oil on canvas, 175 × 150 cm. Belvedere, Vienna

A double portrait of two sisters in white dresses, seated side by side. The Belvedere credits its painter as the earliest of the young Expressionists to abandon decorative outline and ornament.

Look at the faces: pale and masklike, with neither sister turning toward the other.
The dresses are brushed in fast, open strokes that leave the fabric half dissolved.
The formal pose turns uneasy: the sisters rise, in the Belvedere's words, like phantoms out of a loose, dark, brushy ground, with only a curved chair arm and a red seat back to anchor them.
The Belvedere dates it to winter 1905, three years before his death.
It was lent to the Leopold Museum's Gerstl retrospective in Vienna in 2019.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · PD-Art