![Egon Schiele - His Häuser mit bunter Wäsche (Vorstadt II) / Houses with Laundry (Suburb II) [1914] by Gandalf's Gallery](http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3700/12900818694_fd32f56957.jpg)
Egon Schiele - His Häuser mit bunter Wäsche (Vorstadt II) / Houses with Laundry (Suburb II) [1914], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.
There was a world auction record for Egon Schiele at Sotheby’s on June 22, 2011. His Häuser mit bunter Wäsche (Vorstadt II) / Houses with Laundry (Suburb II) made £24,681,250, almost double the previous auction record for the Austrian artist.
Painted in 1914, Häuser mit bunter Wäsche (Vorstadt II) is one of Schiele's most impressive and important townscapes. Combining the river in the foreground and fields in the background with the colourful houses and drying laundry stretching along the middle of the composition, it unites the natural and the man-made in a harmonious and vivid composition. The geometry and linearity of brightly coloured houses and laundry lines create a shimmering, highly decorative effect that represented a legacy of Schiele's mentor Gustav Klimt. Set against a strongly delineated, neutrally coloured landscape, they create an atmospheric composition which is, as is the case with Schiele's most accomplished landscapes, reflective of the artist's state of mind. It is this combination of the decorative and the symbolic that makes Häuser mit bunter Wäsche (Vorstadt II) one of the finest paintings of Schiele's œuvre.
[Private Collection - Oil on canvas, 99 x 119 cm]