A morte e a donzela

In the spring of 1915 Schiele made a hard, calculated choice. He dropped Wally Neuzil, the young woman who had modelled for him and lived with him for four years, and married Edith Harms, from a respectable Viennese family next door. This picture reads as his farewell to Wally. She kneels, clinging to a gaunt man in dark rags who stands in for death itself, the two locked together on a bare, cracked landscape while the war that had just swallowed Europe pressed in around them. Schiele would be called up soon after. He married Edith that June, and within three years both he and Edith were dead in the influenza pandemic that ended the war, he at 28.