Schiele, Hermits 中文翻译：户文聿山夕 译文校对：斯凯 翻译仅供参考 | 视频不得商用
英文稿：
Steven:We're in the Leopold Museum in Vienna
and we're looking at Egon Schiele's The Hermits.
It's a large, almost perfectly square canvas.
Beth:This dates from 1912 when Schiele was only 22.
He was an incredibly precocious painter.
Steven:I would say so. It's a really bleak image.
You have two figures that are so closely entwined,
they almost seem to have merged.
They're on this barest reference of a ground
and then in back of them, there's a kind of
fractured atmosphere that almost reminds you of a
stained glass window.
Beth:It's hard to call it an atmosphere
because it's mostly golds and browns.
It almost evokes a medieval altar piece
and from that grounds that you just referred to,
sprouts two wilted, very small flowers
right next to the artist's signature.
Steven:Well, that signature is interesting.
The artist has scratched his name in, not once, but
three times, suggesting that there are almost three
authors to this painting.
We're not sure about the identity of the two figures
nor are we even sure that they're meant to be
specific figures.
Beth:The figure on the left does look like Schiele,
in the way that we often see him posing in photographs.
Steven:And some art historians have suggested
that the figure to the right, the older bearded figure
might be Gustav Klimt, but for me it's a very Christ-like figure,
a very much of a kind of father figure.
Beth:The bearded figure doesn't really have eyes,
so there's a way in which he looks skull-like to me
and perhaps dead or sleeping.
And the eyes of the other figure are so prominent and alert.
Steven:You know, there's a long tradition of
painting the blind as seers, as people who actually have
a kind of extraordinary vision.
Beth:A kind of inner vision.
Steven:That's right.
Beth:This painting is certainly meant not to be
naturalistic, but to rather be a kind of
poetic representation of an inner vision or a
summing up of Schiele's experiences.
In fact, that's how he described it in a letter.
Steven:There's a sense that he is fracturing the visual world.
Not only is the atmosphere fractured, the figures feel fractured.
Beth:It's interesting that there are two heads,
only two hands and one foot and that foot is really
planted in the ground or what seems to be a ground
and so it seems like a root from which these two figures emerge.
Steven:It's true.
Beth:Schiele is really calling attention to the
materiality of the paint.
There's a real sense of the activity of the artist here.
Steven:It's true, that culminates in a kind of agitation
and becomes almost a kind of psychic state.
Beth:What we see in the early 20th century,
is this interest in expressionism, right,
an interest in representing those inner states
and experiences and interest in anxiety and tension.
Steven:You know, it's so interesting because here we are,
looking at this Austrian artist, this member of the
Austrian avant-garde in the early 20th century
and this moment of deep anxiety, but one who is going back
to the byzantine tradition in some ways.
You could be gone by saying look at the way in which
the background almost functions as a gold field.
It reminds me of byzantine icons and the way in which
those medieval paintings were attempts to deal with
anxiety and fear, in a sense that being brought here
to the modern world, to our own modern anxieties.
Beth; The title is Hermits and so these art religious figures
who've retreated into the desert or into the wilderness
into some kind of private space for meditation
and so there is a joining of the religious and the psychic here.
Steven:But in the early 20th century, for the group of artists
that Schiele was working with, the idea of the religious
could be a cultural religion.
Beth:Or the artist as prophet in the modern era.
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