I don’t know when I developed my fascination for the human form when it’s been contorted or twisted, for whatever reason or by whatever force.
Maybe it was at the Rodin Museum on an icy late-December day in Paris, where I saw this:
It depicts the fate of Ugolino the Count of Gherardesca, who while immured in Pisa’s Muda Tower, was driven mad by hunger and ended up eating his own children to survive. I remember standing there, frozen to the bone, but unable to escape the tragedy. (Nice story, but pure fiction. When Ugolino’s bones were exhumed and examined for DNA traces of cannibalism, none were found.) Of the Burgers Of Calais, we will not speak:
In warmer climes (Vienna, also in December but indoors), I saw a couple of paintings by Austrian Egon Schiele, who after WWI was unable to see any kind of future for mankind, and his artistic vision was distorted thereby in his depictions of people:
That’s The Lovers’ Embrace, and one has to have pity on them — which was his intention. Even his own wife Edith wasn’t spared:
…nor his mistress, Wally [sic] :
And so to the modern day, where others — perhaps sharing Schiele’s attitude, or maybe just having their own mordant view of the human form, have produced works such as this:
I don’t know who the artists are, but their work fascinates me still.
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