The Artist's Room in Neulengbach (My Living Room)

The Artist's Room in Neulengbach (My Living Room), painted in 1911, offers an extraordinary document of Schiele's domestic environment in the Lower Austrian town of Neulengbach, where he rented a studio and kept a small household. The painting was made in the year before his arrest, at a moment when Schiele was fully immersed in Neulengbach's community while also conducting the unconventional domestic arrangements — living with his model Wally Neuzil, hosting local children in his studio — that would shortly lead to charges against him. Interior space in Schiele's work often functions as psychological self-portrait: the room is an extension of his mental world, its objects charged with significance. The titled objects, the precise spatial inventory, and the particular quality of light are presented with an almost forensic attention. Vienna Museum's custody of this panel preserves a record of the actual physical space that was raided and from which Schiele was taken to prison in 1912. Few works in his oeuvre have this quality of innocent documentation preceding catastrophe.

Painted on panel with a relatively restrained palette of ochres, dusty blues, and earth tones, the work uses a slightly elevated viewpoint to map the room's spatial layout. Schiele's typically spare background approach here gives way to a populated, inventoried interior.