Selbstdarstellung in grünem Hemd mit geschlossenen Augen, executed in 1914, is an outstanding example of Egon Schiele’s ability to create electrifying self-portraiture. The breath-taking acuity of Schiele’s line heightens the tension created between the skin’s delicate pallor and the dazzling emerald smock, and highlights the ingenuity of Schiele’s gouache technique. The artist’s predominant mode of self-portraiture prior to 1915 was to construct a mythical persona, whose shielded eyes and hermitically austere clothing signified the figure's prophetic powers of self-awareness (figs. 1 & 2). The tightly wrung hands are archetypical of his use of gesture as a visual rendition of complex emotional and artistic attitudes.

The present work shares many of the characteristics that Schiele had already begun to use the previous year. In particular the simple costume of brilliantly coloured robes and smocks helped to enhance the ‘prophetical’ postures made by his gaunt doppelgängers (fig. 4), the rich colours helping to remove traces of conventional religious piety. The emaciated, skull-like features and etiolated fingers express the spiritual hunger and suffering of the ‘Artist’, and are further extensions of the allegorical sentiments expressed by his shielded eyes. Commenting on the importance of this subject, Vivien Gaston wrote: ‘Egon Schiele’s sensational self-portraits explore a new vision of the relation between mind, body, and emotion. In attitudes of dance-like eloquence, he mobilises his whole body, expressing sexual vitality, vulnerability, suffering and malaise’ (V. Gaston, Vienna: Art & Design - Klimt, Schiele, Hoffmann, Loos (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2011, p. 146). 

Discussing the remarkable metaphorical images Schiele executed of himself, Jane Kallir writes: ‘Schiele’s allegorical self-representations were not intended to be autobiographical statements, but it is nonetheless obvious that blindness, for an artist, was an unfortunate choice of theme. As a ‘self-seer,’ Schiele had formerly been extraordinarily attuned to his own internal responses, but at times blind to the outside world. In order to make more meaningful contact with others, would the artist have to lose touch with himself?’ (J. Kallir, Egon Schiele, Drawings and Watercolours, New York, 2003, p. 279). Schiele’s obsessive creation of self-portraits culminated in the monumental Entschwebung (Die Blinden II) and in the lost work Begegnung (fig. 3). These grand allegorical paintings used the format of self-depiction established in fully worked gouaches such as Selbstdarstellung in grünem Hemd mit geschlossenen Augen.

Alessandra Comini suggests that in 1914 Schiele had an additional, rather extraordinary, use for self-portraiture. During his early courtship of his neighbours, the Harms sisters - Adele and Edith – the artist produced a number of strongly coloured, daringly posed self-portraits. Comini recounts that these two well brought up girls would watch Schiele as he worked through their windows across the Hietzinger Hauptstrasse and ‘when Schiele discovered their attention, he responded with outlandish pantomimes and began drawing large pictures of himself wearing nothing but his short, sleeveless painting jerkin. He would hold the brightly coloured drawings out of his window to tease and shock the girls’ (A. Comini, Egon Schiele Portraits, Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1974, pp. 136-137). The renewed vigour with which Schiele produced this stream of self-portraits stemmed from the need to promote himself, as well as his art, to the sisters. Therefore he created bold, highly stylised images that were unmistakable representations of himself as well as personifications of the ‘self-seer’.