Egon Schiele:
Transfiguration (The Blind) (Entschwebung (Die Blinden)), 1915
Oil, opaque color on canvas
201.2 × 171.6
©Leopold Museum, Vienna
(Kallir P288)

Schiele painted Transfiguration (The Blind) in the early months of 1915, at a moment when his personal life and the wider world were both tightening into a state of charged anticipation. His marriage to Edith Harms was approaching, military service was imminent, and Vienna lived under the tremor of wartime uncertainty. His art responded to this pressure: the sharp, electric line of his earlier expressionism softened into something more contemplative, more spiritually attuned. This monumental canvas stands precisely at that threshold.

When the painting was first shown that August 1915 at Guido Arnot’s gallery on the Kärntnerring, it drew interest but remained unsold—much like his earlier Hermits (1912). Its inwardness, its ambiguity, its refusal to offer a single fixed meaning made it difficult for contemporary viewers to grasp. Only later would it be recognized as one of his most profound self‑interrogations.

The composition is dominated by a double self‑portrait that rises the full height of the canvas. Schiele appears twice, wrapped in a short, monk‑like garment that recalls the ascetic figures of his earlier self‑depictions. Behind him, the landscape is reduced to a symbolic shorthand: scattered blossoms, small tufts of grass, and a horizon pressed close to the upper edge. The ground beneath the figures fractures into irregular patches, held together by lines that hover between contour and fissure. It is a terrain that feels both fragile and luminous, mediating between the instability of the earth and the solidity of the bodies emerging from it.

The lower figure stands firmly, feet still rooted in the soil, eyes wide open and directed outward with deliberate intensity. He is the self that remains in the world—alert, embodied, watchful. Above him, the second figure seems to drift free of gravity. The eyelids, flushed red, are drawn tight over clouded eyes; the face has thinned; the fingertips barely meet. This upper self feels suspended between presence and departure, as though already crossing into a realm beyond the visible. Schiele had long been fascinated by doubling and self‑division, and here the device becomes a psychological hinge: the earthly self below, the visionary self above.

The German title Entschwebung (Die Blinden)—evoking a gentle drifting upward of “the blind”—deepens this sense of passage. Schiele isn’t invoking religious doctrine so much as borrowing the language of spiritual transformation. The monk‑like garment, the upward drift, the softened line: all of it suggests a man imagining what it means to shed one version of himself and step into another.

The palette glows with muted golds, ochres, and earthen reds, giving the monumental composition an unexpected warmth. Despite its scale, the painting feels intimate. The two figures lean toward one another with a quiet sympathy, as though acknowledging the fragile moment between holding on and letting go. In this, the work anticipates the gentler, more contemplative paintings of Schiele’s final years.

Transfiguration (The Blind) (Entschwebung (Die Blinden)) is one of Schiele’s most enigmatic self‑stagings—an image of a man poised between worlds, still rooted in the earth yet already imagining the other side. It carries the emotional temperature of 1915: anxiety, hope, vulnerability, and the desire to transform. More than a self‑portrait, it is a meditation on becoming, painted at the very moment when Schiele himself was stepping into an unknown future.

Factual elements in this entry draw on the Leopold Museum’s curatorial note.