Moa

Moa was a dancer and a friend of Schiele’s. She performed in cabarets with her dance partner Erwin Osen, a theater painter who also had close connections with Schiele. Both modeled repeatedly for Schiele between 1910 and 1911. In Schiele’s watercolor, Moa is completely enveloped in exotic and richly colored textiles. The garment’s austere and geometrical design completely conceals her body. Her face is framed by black hair and her eyes are boldly expressive. The intentional contrast between the realistically rendered face and the decoratively abstracted drapery demonstrates an expressive dimension that the young Schiele had just introduced to his visual vocabulary. The depiction illustrates how far Schiele had come from Klimt’s example. Schiele transformed the Klimtian robed figures and invented something entirely new, permanently abandoning Klimt’s “seductive illusion” and morphing Jugendstil into Expressionism.