Vienna's most beautiful dancer painted by Egon Schiele

Icon of turn-of-the-century Viennese culture seen through the eye of the great Egon Schiele

The woman seen on this beautiful guache:

is the dancer Moa Mandu. She herself was an icon of turn-of-the-century Viennese culture, and she served as Schiele’s model for numerous portraits. With her life partner Erwin Osen, an actor and mime and one of Egon Schiele’s close friends, she shared a fascination with forms of bodily expression, as well as with the extreme distortion of facial expressions and gestures.

Schiele found the extravagant duo entrancing. Although he was primarily a linear artist, Schiele was inspired by Moa Mandu’s daring sense of style to create some of his most painterly work. When Osen, who was an outrageous, out-going cabaret performer, posed for Schiele, it must have seemed to the artist as if his intense, suppressed emotions had found their external form. He was to use the vocabulary of movement he picked up from the mime in most of his later works, many of them self-portraits.

This image of Moa numbers among the most painterly portraits of the dancer, and is also one of those which are most perfect in terms of composition and the use of colour. The ornamental architecture of the subject’s clothing in combination with her more naturalistic face still harkens back to Schiele’s great role model, Gustav Klimt.

Below you will find a photo of Moa and Erwin. For me it is always interesting to compare photographic and painted portraits, and consider how you can feel the artist’s soul in the painted version.