Winter Trees by Egon Schiele (Interpretation and Analysis)

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Winter Trees
Source: WikiArt
As the weather continues to get colder, I want to share another winter landscape with you. This piece is entitled Winter Trees, and, as the title suggests, it depicts barren trees standing in a desolate field with a cloudy sky in the background.

While it is a simple scene on its face, it is the use of color and style within the painting that makes it interesting. Winter Trees was produced by one of the most innovative painters of his time: Egon Schiele.

While I have never been a huge fan of Schiele’s art, it is impossible to deny that his style is completely unique and instantly recognizable. His brushstrokes are loose and painterly, and he uses bold lines to create twisting and distorted shapes. His subjects tend to be bold and unapologetically raw, and contemporary commentators often criticized him for the explicit eroticism of his art.

While Winter Trees is a simpler and more subdued piece than many of Schiele’s paintings, it is still possible to see his characteristic twisting shapes and lines in the trees that dominate the landscape. Schiele’s use of color is also unique. In most of his painting, he uses a mottled mix of colors to create depth and to create flesh tones. He uses this technique in this painting to create the ground, which is a rainbow of different earth tones and occasional dabs of blue. While the trees are the ostensible focus of the painting, it is truly the ground that draws the viewer’s eyes, a beautiful but also unsettling mosaic.

In retrospect, the story of Egon Schiele is rather sad. Schiele, his wife, and their unborn child all died in 1918 during the Spanish flu pandemic. Schiele was only twenty-eight years old. After his death, his art was declared “degenerate” by the Nazis, which led to many of his paintings being lost, stolen, or destroyed. Despite all of this, Schiele is remembered today as one of the leaders of the Expressionist movement and as a visionary of modern art.

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