Wally in Red Blouse with Raised Knees
Oct 2022
Violet Cooper
Winner of the 2022 Remake Editors’ Award
Wally in Red Blouse with Raised Knees,
Egon Schiele, 1913
Egon Schiele was born in Tulln, Lower Austria in 1890. When Schiele was 14 years old, his father died of syphilis and four years later, at 18 years old, he had his first exhibition in Klosterneuburg. In 1913, Egon Schiele painted Wally in Red Blouse with Raised Knees. It is made from watercolor, gouache, and pencil on paper. It belongs to the Neue Galerie in New York, which shows exclusively German and Austrian art. Wally was his lover. I am standing in front of Wally now, looking at her while others pass in blurs behind me. She is lying on her back with one arm crossed over her chest, gently grasping her throat, and the other under her orange head of hair. She is wearing a red blouse, as the title says, with white bloomers, orange stockings, and brown slippers. She has “raised knees.” She is not particularly beautiful, but she is staring right at you. She has an angular, downturned nose and large, pointed brown eyes: the face of a bird of prey. Her lips and cheeks are rouged to match her blouse. She is an object of desire, transfixed by her lover. Yet there is something quietly cunning about her, like she knows something that you do not. A well-kept secret hidden under the diaphanous red bosom of her blouse. Perhaps it is the way she stares, eyes fixed and unflinching on the viewer. Or is it how she rests her hand languidly over her pale neck, like a swan in repose? Perhaps it is that she is fully clothed, which most of Schiele’s female models are not. I don’t think it matters that her knees are raised. It is her eyes and her red blouse and the hand limply, carelessly even, wrapped across her neck. It is a slow drawing in, a quiet seduction. Wally was only 17 when she met Egon Schiele, and 19 when he drew this portrait of her. In 1915, four years after he met her and two years after he painted her, Schiele became engaged to another woman, Edith Harms. When Wally heard of his engagement, she left him and never saw him again. Two years later, on December 25th in 1917, Wally died of scarlet fever. The following year, Egon Schiele, his wife, and his unborn child died of the Spanish influenza. These were the ends of their lives: Schiele only 28 and Wally only 23. Perhaps that explains her quiet cunning, her persistent inscrutability. Perhaps Wally knew that she would leave Schiele and never see him again. I step back, and look at Wally again, lounging in her red blouse with her vibrant orange hair, her knees raised and her hand draped across her neck. As I stare at Wally, I think of how she is immortalized in this painting, to be continually deconstructed and digested by the pedestrians of this city. I think of how I am 18, and how she was only 19 when Schiele painted her. How so swiftly she was 17, then 23, then dead. How her life ended before it had even begun, and that her existence now is only marked by her presence in Schiele’s paintings. I wonder if she truly loved Egon Schiele, and if he loved her in return. I wonder what she felt while Schiele painted her. I wonder what thoughts and aspirations circled her mind like a carousel, as they do in all of our minds. I look at Wally and marvel at how there can be both only one year of age and an entire century between us. I think we may not be too different after all, that we could have laid down together in bloomers and stockings with rouge on our cheeks and our knees raised for Schiele. Perhaps we would have been laughing, sharing our fleeting secret admissions with one another as we laid there listlessly and kicked our feet up in the air. Before I turn toward the other pieces in the exhibit, I glance at Wally once more. I look at Wally with her sharp brown eyes, bright red blouse, her hand resting limply on her neck, and that serious, unflinching expression, and for a moment, I think I see into her. And for a moment, I think I see her returning my gaze.
Violet Cooper is from Westport, CT and studies in the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.