Egon Schiele, 'Dead Mother', 1910

 

My eye is drawn to the hand. Those long, bony fingers are so characteristic of Schiele but here they are particularly skeletal and deathly – the veins seem to have been injected with poison. And they are a warning right in the foreground of the painting that keeps the viewer at bay as an outsider to this incredibly intimate relationship between mother and child, and sets the tone of death and mortality which hangs over the whole image. The mother cradles her child in a womb-like shroud, alluding to childbirth and the death of the mother explained in the title. She seems desperate to feel that bodily connection with her child, highlighted by the emphasis on her craned neck as she tries to connect to the baby. There is a clear link between the mother’s bent neck and the child’s bent neck, again emphasising their longing to be with each other. However, the darkness around the child is almost like ropes, with flecks of white in the painting making it look as though the darkness is wound around the baby, stopping it from escaping. The child also wants that connection with its mother, seen by the hand reaching up and trying to pierce the ropes of darkness, but the more you look at those flecks of white, the more the painting surface seems fluid and anxious and the image turns into one of loss rather than closeness. Their pattern creates a circle, like the circle of life which is clearly represented not only through the circle of the womb that the child seems to be trapped in, but also through the connection to birth and the death or near-death like state that the mother now finds herself in.

The composition of the painting means that the action is happening very close to the surface of the canvas. The figures dissolve into darkness, apart from the face and hands of the mother and child, and the amniotic sac-like depiction of the small, flesh coloured area surrounding the child. The strong linear strokes on the mother’s face suggest wrinkles, dark circles around her eyes and her gaunt, prominent bone structure but also emphasise surface, flattening her features and adding to the depiction of the mother as worn, tired and being consumed by the darkness of grief and mourning. All this leads me to start seeing the painting in a different light: as a representation of different stages in the same woman’s life – the ‘baby’ is now youth – warmly lit and softly coloured, eyelashes, pink lips, rounded and the ‘aged’ woman is clinging onto it helplessly and hopelessly. Is it even her hand, or the hand of death that creeps into the bottom left?