(piano music playing) Steven: We're in the
Leopold Museum in Vienna and we're looking at Egon
Schiele's The Hermits. It's a large, almost
perfectly square canvas. Beth: This dates from 1912
when Schiele was only 22. He was an incredibly precocious painter. Steven: I would say so.
It's a really bleak image. You have two figures that
are so closely entwined, they almost seem to have merged. They're on this barest
reference of a ground and then in back of
them, there's a kind of fractured atmosphere that
almost reminds you of a stained glass window. Beth: It's hard to call it an atmosphere because it's mostly golds and browns. It almost evokes a medieval altar piece and from that grounds
that you just referred to, sprouts two wilted, very small flowers right next to the artist's signature. Steven: Well, that
signature is interesting. The artist has scratched
his name in, not once, but three times, suggesting
that there are almost three authors to this painting. We're not sure about the
identity of the two figures nor are we even sure
that they're meant to be specific figures. Beth: The figure on the
left does look like Schiele, in the way that we often see
him posing in photographs. Steven: And some art
historians have suggested that the figure to the right,
the older bearded figure might be Gustav Klimt, but for me
it's a very Christ-like figure, a very much of a kind of father figure. Beth: The bearded figure
doesn't really have eyes, so there's a way in which
he looks skull-like to me and perhaps dead or sleeping. And the eyes of the other figure
are so prominent and alert. Steven: You know, there's
a long tradition of painting the blind as seers,
as people who actually have a kind of extraordinary vision. Beth: A kind of inner vision. Steven: That's right. Beth: This painting is
certainly meant not to be naturalistic, but to rather be a kind of poetic representation
of an inner vision or a summing up of Schiele's experiences. In fact, that's how he
described it in a letter. Steven: There's a sense that he
is fracturing the visual world. Not only is the atmosphere fractured,
the figures feel fractured. Beth: It's interesting
that there are two heads, only two hands and one foot
and that foot is really planted in the ground or
what seems to be a ground and so it seems like a root from
which these two figures emerge. Steven: It's true. Beth: Schiele is really
calling attention to the materiality of the paint. There's a real sense of the
activity of the artist here. Steven: It's true, that
culminates in a kind of agitation and becomes almost a
kind of psychic state. Beth: What we see in
the early 20th century, is this interest in expressionism, right, an interest in representing
those inner states and experiences and interest
in anxiety and tension. Steven: You know, it's so
interesting because here we are, looking at this Austrian
artist, this member of the Austrian avant-garde in
the early 20th century and this moment of deep anxiety,
but one who is going back to the byzantine tradition in some ways. You could be gone by saying
look at the way in which the background almost
functions as a gold field. It reminds me of byzantine
icons and the way in which those medieval paintings
were attempts to deal with anxiety and fear, in a sense
that being brought here to the modern world, to
our own modern anxieties. Beth; The title is Hermits and
so these art religious figures who've retreated into the
desert or into the wilderness into some kind of private
space for meditation and so there is a joining of the
religious and the psychic here. Steven: But in the early 20th
century, for the group of artists that Schiele was working with,
the idea of the religious could be a cultural religion. Beth: Or the artist as
prophet in the modern era. (piano music playing)