The restoration will serve a scholarly purpose, too. Technical analysis — including X-rays to examine what’s under the townscape — will study the human figures that dot the canvas to determine if they were originally sketched in by the artist or painted in directly. Experts will also analyze the pigment to figure out what kind of paints to use in the restoration.
Born in Austria in 1890, Schiele had a difficult childhood. After studying at the Vienna Academy, he went on to develop his own very individual style. Today, he is considered one of the masters of Expressionism and is known for his highly erotic and disturbing drawings of sometimes underage nudes, which in 1912 led him to spend 24 days in prison for indecency.
But about a third of his output as an artist consisted of landscapes, and this is an important one.
“It’s a really beautiful painting, and definitely representative of the direction that Schiele was heading in in the last two years of his life,” said Jane Kallir, the author of the Egon Schiele catalogue raisonné, accessible online at egonschieleonline.org.
While Schiele’s earlier landscapes are “very flat, very two-dimensional” and thinly painted, in this case the paint is “more thickly applied and built up in very expressive layers,” Ms. Kallir noted. That produced a three-dimensionality and a townscape that recedes into the distance.
These are “qualities that you don’t see in Schiele’s earlier landscape painting.”
The other big difference, Ms. Kallir pointed out, was that here, the townscape includes human figures, “whereas in the earlier work, not only are there no figures, but he actually called a lot of these paintings ‘The Dead City.’”
It was a title he repeatedly used in reference to the ancient medieval city of Krumau, his mother’s birthplace, which is represented in many other Schiele townscapes besides “Town Among Greenery.” He “liked the idea of these old, desolate walls surviving the lives of their human inhabitants,” she said.
