Round Table

Round Table of 1918 belongs to Schiele's final period and represents his increasing engagement with still life and interior subjects as complement to his better-known figurative work. The subject of a table — loaded or bare, domestic and social — invites reading as both formal exercise and symbolic proposition. In 1918, Vienna was experiencing the final crisis of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the war's catastrophic toll was evident in material deprivation and social disruption. An image of a table, that most fundamental domestic object, takes on different resonance in this context. Schiele had by late 1918 achieved considerable commercial success and social stability, but the Spanish flu pandemic that swept the world in autumn 1918 would kill his pregnant wife Edith on 28 October and himself three days later on 31 October. The Round Table thus belongs to the last weeks of a creative life that ended with shocking abruptness at twenty-eight, at the moment of its greatest maturity and recognition.

Oil on canvas shows Schiele's late concern with formal composition: the circular table form creates a centripetal spatial organisation unusual in his predominantly figural work. The handling integrates his characteristically linear contour with a more developed interest in tonal modulation.