CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/9/2017

Even magic is doomed to pass: Egon Schiele

“Everything seems to lie under a cloak of hopelessness and melancholy,” the late Austrian art collector and Leopold Museum director Rudolf Leopold wrote of Egon Schiele’s 1913 oil painting, Setting Sun. “Even the magic of the sky and the rocky islands is doomed to pass. Bluish veils have descended over the sun, whose light shines through only in two narrow bands. The question arises whether the light and warmth-giving sun might not sink into the sea never to rise again? This borderline situation is convincingly evoked here.”