Egon Schiele

Private Collection (acquired from the artist circa 1910)
Private Collection (by descent from the above and sold: Sotheby's, London, November 30, 1988, lot 445)
Acquired at the above sale by A. Alfred Taubman

Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele: The Complete Works, New York, 1990, no. 740, illustrated p. 431
Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele: The Complete Works, New York, 1998, no. 740, illustrated p. 431

Executed on buff colored wove paper, not laid down. The sheet is fixed to the mat on the verso of the upper corners. Artist pinholes in each of the corners. Some minor creases and small tears to the extreme perimeter of the sheet, noticeably towards center left edge, the right lower edge and the left upper edge. There is a flattened crease running vertically through the center of the composition, another fainter crease to the right of this. Otherwise, apart from some light discoloration, this work is in good condition.
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In Ringplatz-KrumMau the artist depicts a stretch of the ringplatz in the small city of KrumMau. The artist arrived in the city in the May of 1910 and remained there for most of the summer, returning again for a shorter stay in October. In contrast to his paintings from these visits, the present work captures a compelling depth of detail, from elements of neoclassical architecture to the crest that sits above one of the doorways. This precision is balanced by his delicately expressive use of color, employing washes of yellow, pink and blue to capture his subject. Schiele often drew en plein air when depicting buildings or landscapes and these images are imbued with a striking immediacy. In Ringplatz-KrumMau Schiele achieves this through the combination of the dark, emphatically drawn pencil lines and the specificity of detailing, representing here a cart pulled up outside and windows flung open to air the rooms.

KrumMau was a subject that Schiele would return to repeatedly throughout his life; Jane Kallir described its importance within the artist’s oeuvre: “Schiele's favourite landscape subject...was the town of KrumMau (today Cesky Krumlov), to which he referred most frequently as the 'dead city' (but also as the 'old city' and the 'city on the blue river'). KrumMau, his mother's birthplace, was indisputably an old city, a medieval time capsule whose winding streets and crumbling buildings embodied for Schiele an eternity of human decay and persistence” (Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele, New York, 1994, p. 96).