Kneeling Female in Orange Dress

This painting of the Kneeling Female in Orange Dress was produced by Egon Schiele in 1910, at a time when the artist was still young and developing a unique style of his own.

The painting features a woman squatting on her legs with what you might even call a seductive look to her face. In fact the original drawing had also been adapted to be used for a statue of the same woman, which would have given a whole new dominion to the figure in the picture. The artist Schiele only had a short life but in his early work he favoured a more Eastern/Asian form of art, which can be seen in his works. In fact almost all of Egon Schiele's work featured the use of twisted body shapes with varying forms of facial expression, which marked him as an exponent of expressionism. Infant it could be said that Schiele delighted in exploring both the human form and human sexuality with in his works. Like many artists Schiele didn't just stay with painting people he also undertook landscapes, although the landscapes didn't really feature Schiele's unique and daring style.

The painting Kneeling Female in Orange Dress is one of Schiele's more classic works, as some of his more daring work was viewed as being grotesque, pornographic and even disturbing. With some work featuring elements of death and discovery which have both been decried as forms of artistic exploration. At the time Egon Schiele's fascination with bodily distortions, explicit eroticism and anguish made him unpopular with the peoples of that period, which is ironic as its these same explicit features that have made his work so mesmerising and sought after today and only goes to illustrate that an artist is never truly appreciated in their own time. He would later spend time in prison as a result of his controversial artistic style, but today the public hold him in much higher regard and society does not experience quite the same levels of shock when viewing his highly charged portraits such as this.

Some technical aspects to note around Kneeling Female in Orange Dress would be the very dark lines which the artist uses to outline form. This feels similar to the techniques of a draughtsman, and of course Schiele had always been highly talented within that discipline as well. Having created bold outlines he would then fill the inside forms with bright colour to produce the main part of the artwork, in this case opting for orange tones that have perhaps a little touch of pink as well. This gives a feminine touch to this young woman, although her pose is twisted and not how a female model would typically be captured in the early 20th century. It was, however, entirely typical of Schiele and perhaps inspired by the work of another Austrian painter, Gustav Klimt.