Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr College Dissertations and Theses 2015 Egon Schiele’s Double Self Portraiture Lori Anne Felton Bryn Mawr College,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.brynmawr.edu/dissertations Custom Citation Felton, Lori Anne. “Egon Schiele’s Double Self Portraiture” PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 2015. This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. https://repository.brynmawr.edu/dissertations/133 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. EGON SCHIELE’S DOUBLE SELF-PORTRAITURE By LORI ANNE FELTON October 9, 2015 Submitted to the Faculty of Bryn Mawr College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History of Art ABSTRACT With few visual precedents, Egon Schiele (1890-1918) was the first artist to systematically explore double self-portraiture’s potential to convey multiple meanings, by painting, drawing and collaboratively photographing thirteen works in the genre. In this dissertation, I argue that these works reflect Schiele’s interest in establishing a deep engagement with the viewer. I consider Schiele’s double self-portraiture in two distinct categories: as an original, intended group from 1910 and 1911 that, borrowing from two of the works’ titles, I call the Self-Seers, and as a sequence of unique, experimental works after 1913. While the Self-Seers paintings exhibit Schiele’s concern with the act of viewing, his subsequent works suggest double self-portraiture’s potential to be multivalent, engaging with the opposite qualities such as inner and outer, the spiritual and the mundane, and death and life in a highly experimental, yet strategic manner.