L'Étreinte

Schiele painted this in 1917, in the last full year of the First World War, in a Vienna worn down by shortages. He was in his late twenties and had married Edith Harms two years earlier, and his work had softened since then, away from the raw, edgy figures of his youth. Here he shows a man and a woman lying together on rumpled white sheets, their arms locked around each other, the bodies pressed so close they almost read as one form. It is tender rather than provocative. In the autumn of 1918 the influenza sweeping post-war Europe reached them. Edith, six months pregnant, died at the end of October, and Schiele died three days after her, aged 28.