Les Ermites

Egon Schiele was 22 when he painted this in 1912, and the two robed figures fused into one dark column are him and his mentor, the older painter Gustav Klimt. Klimt was famous in Vienna for wearing long black caftans in his studio, and Schiele had taken to wearing them too, so the shared robe is almost a confession of how much he owed the older man. Schiele wrote to a collector that the grey behind them was not a sky but a grieving world, and that the two bodies had grown up alone in it, out of the soil. The faces are pale and closed, the flowers at their feet already wilting. He meant the whole thing, he said, to stand for the decay of all things.