Still Life with Flowers

Schiele painted this work in 1917, a period in which his Expressionist line was at its most assured and his output had broadened beyond the tortured figure studies that defined his earlier notoriety. By this point he had survived a brief imprisonment in 1912 and was finding wider critical acceptance in Vienna; his work was selected for the 1917 Vienna Secession exhibition, and the following year's show would make him a celebrated figure. The late still lifes, including this one, reflect Schiele's growing engagement with the formal problems that preoccupied his contemporaries: how to construct spatial depth without conventional perspective, how to charge ordinary objects with psychological weight. Where Cezanne approached the still life as a problem of geometric structure under cool analytical light, Schiele brought to it the same coiled psychic pressure he applied to his figure work, using colour and compressed space rather than anatomy to generate tension. Expressionism, in Schiele's hands, was never a matter of distorting form for its own sake; it was the application of emotional intensity to whatever subject lay in front of him, and these late still lifes show how thoroughly that intensity could survive the displacement from the human body onto berries and ceramic objects.