Dead Mother
1910
Egon Schiele turns the tender image of a mother and child into something deeply unsettling. Wrapped in a vortex of black hair or clothing, a sleeping infant is cradled by a figure whose face looks more like a skull than a human. That massive, claw-like hand at the bottom is a dead giveaway of Schiele’s style—he believed hands revealed the soul's anxiety. Painted in 1910 during his Expressionist peak, this piece strips away the sentimentality of motherhood to expose the raw, fragile reality of life and death.
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