Self-Portrait with Physalis

Painted in 1912 when Egon Schiele was twenty-two, this self-portrait shows him leaning back with his head tilted and his blood-red lips slightly parted, the sharpness of the gaze heightened by an almost complete absence of background. At his shoulder a branch of red Chinese lantern fruits (Physalis) cuts diagonally across the plane — a cryptic emblem of youth, eros, and mortality. Spare, calligraphically angular, and psychologically charged, the picture marks the moment Schiele decisively defined his own Expressionist vocabulary out of the shadow of his teacher Klimt.