Egon Schiele

Egon Leo Adolf Schiele was born on June 12, 1890, in Tulln an der Donau, a small town on the Danube west of Vienna, where his father Adolf served as the local railway stationmaster ^[1]. The family lived in the station building itself, and trains ran through the boy's earliest drawings. Relatives later recalled that he sketched obsessively as a child, filling notebooks with locomotives and landscapes while showing little interest in conventional schoolwork ^[2].

The household was marked by illness and loss. Adolf Schiele suffered from syphilis, and his mental deterioration darkened the family's final years together. He burned the family's railway shares in a fit of derangement and died in 1905, when Egon was fourteen ^[1]. The death left the family in reduced circumstances and placed the boy under the guardianship of his uncle, Leopold Czihaczek, a railway official who disapproved of an artistic career but eventually relented in the face of the teenager's obvious gift.

Schiele's relationship with his mother, Marie, remained strained throughout his life. He felt she never mourned his father adequately and never understood his work, a grievance he aired in letters. His younger sister Gertrude, known as Gerti, became his frequent early model and one of his closest companions ^[2].

In 1906, at sixteen, Schiele was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, the same institution that rejected Adolf Hitler the following year. He quickly grew frustrated with the academy's rigid, conservative instruction under the painter Christian Griepenkerl, whose hostility to modern tendencies was notorious ^[1]. The decisive encounter of these years came in 1907, when Schiele sought out Gustav Klimt, then the most celebrated artist in Vienna. Klimt took an unusual interest in the young man, buying his drawings, exchanging works with him, arranging models, and introducing him to patrons and to the Wiener Werkstätte, the applied arts workshop associated with the Vienna Secession ^[3].

By 1909 Schiele had had enough of the academy. He left with a group of fellow dissidents and founded the Neukunstgruppe, the New Art Group, which exhibited together in Vienna that year ^[2]. That same year Klimt invited him to show at the Vienna Kunstschau, placing the nineteen year old alongside work by Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh. The exposure was formative: within two years Schiele had shed the decorative Klimt influence visible in his early canvases and arrived at something entirely his own.

The style that emerged around 1910 startled contemporaries. Schiele drew and painted emaciated, twisted bodies with jagged contours, splayed fingers, and unsparing attention to flesh. His self portraits, of which he made dozens, presented the artist grimacing, naked, or dismembered by the picture's edge ^[4]. Nothing in Viennese art had prepared audiences for this level of exposure, and the question of who was Egon Schiele, prodigy or provocateur, divided the city's critics almost immediately.

Seeking cheap rent and quiet, Schiele left Vienna in 1911 for Krumau in southern Bohemia (now Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic), his mother's birthplace. He arrived with Walburga Neuzil, called Wally, a seventeen year old who had modeled for Klimt and who became Schiele's companion and most important model for the next four years ^[3]. The townspeople objected to the unmarried couple and to Schiele's habit of employing local adolescents as models, and the pair were driven out. They resettled in Neulengbach, a small town west of Vienna, where the pattern repeated.

In April 1912 events turned serious. A teenage girl who had run away from home took shelter with Schiele and Wally, and the artist was arrested on accusations of abduction and seduction of a minor. Those charges collapsed at trial, but the court convicted him of exhibiting erotic drawings in a place accessible to children. He spent twenty four days in custody in Neulengbach and St. Pölten, during which the judge burned one of his drawings in the courtroom ^[4]. Schiele recorded the ordeal in a sequence of prison self portraits and embittered notations, casting himself as a persecuted artist.

The episode has shadowed the Egon Schiele biography ever since, and modern scholarship continues to weigh his practice of drawing nude and semi nude minors against the norms and laws of his own era ^[5]. What is not disputed is that the arrest hardened his self image and did little to slow his career. Within a year his work was traveling to exhibitions in Cologne, Munich, and beyond.

Schiele's output between 1912 and 1918 established the achievements on which his reputation rests. He was, above all, one of the great draftsmen of the twentieth century. His line, fast, unhesitating, and rarely corrected, could fix a body's weight and psychology in a few strokes, and works on paper in gouache, watercolor, and crayon make up the bulk of his roughly three thousand surviving drawings ^[2]. Alongside them stand some three hundred paintings, including allegorical canvases such as Death and the Maiden (1915), townscapes of Krumau's stacked houses, and stark portraits of collectors, doctors, and fellow artists ^[6].

He became a central figure of Austrian Expressionism, the movement that replaced the ornamental surfaces of the Secession with psychological intensity. Where Klimt wrapped his sitters in gold and pattern, Schiele stripped his subjects bare, often literally, and set them against empty grounds that isolated every gesture ^[4]. His radical use of the self portrait, more than a hundred of them, treated his own body as an experimental subject in a way that anticipated performance oriented art decades later.

Recognition arrived steadily. The Munich dealer Hans Goltz handled his work, the journal Die Aktion in Berlin devoted a special issue to him in 1916, and collectors including Heinrich Böhler and the industrialist August Lederer bought consistently ^[3]. The climax came in March 1918, when the Vienna Secession gave Schiele pride of place at its 49th exhibition. He showed around fifty works, designed the poster himself, and sold well at raised prices. With Klimt dead a month earlier, critics openly described the 27 year old as the leading artist in Austria ^[1].

In 1914 Schiele began courting Edith Harms, one of two middle class sisters who lived across the street from his Vienna studio. He married Edith on June 17, 1915, four days before reporting for military service in the First World War ^[1]. The marriage ended his relationship with Wally Neuzil, whom he reportedly hoped to keep on as a model; she refused, joined the Red Cross as a nurse, and died of scarlet fever in Dalmatia in 1917. Schiele reworked his painting Death and the Maiden, in which he and Wally cling to each other, in the aftermath of the separation ^[6].

His war was comparatively gentle. Deemed unfit for front line combat, Schiele served as a clerk, guarded Russian prisoners of war, whom he drew, and from 1917 worked at an army supply depot in Vienna, a posting that allowed him to paint, exhibit, and live with Edith ^[3]. Fellow officers admired his work, and superiors quietly protected his time.

Contemporaries described Schiele as intensely serious about his vocation, convinced of his own significance, and given to aphoristic pronouncements about art in letters and manifestos. His portraits of Edith, gentler and more solidly modeled than his earlier work, suggest the marriage steadied him, and paintings from 1917 and 1918 show a new fullness of form that some scholars read as the start of a more classical phase cut short by his death ^[4].

The final year of Schiele's life was his most successful. After the triumph of the March 1918 Secession exhibition, portrait commissions multiplied, prices rose, and he moved to a larger studio in the Hietzing district of Vienna. He sketched Klimt on his deathbed in February and inherited, in the eyes of many, his mentor's position at the head of Viennese art ^[1]. He drew up ambitious plans, including designs for an artists' community and a mausoleum like exhibition space.

None of it came to pass. In the autumn of 1918 the influenza pandemic that killed tens of millions worldwide swept through a Vienna weakened by four years of wartime shortage. Edith Schiele, six months pregnant with the couple's first child, died on October 28. Egon, already infected, spent his last days sketching her. He died three days later, on October 31, 1918, at the age of 28 ^[2].

Among the last works on his easel was the unfinished canvas known as The Family, showing a crouching man, a woman, and a child, a composition often read as a hope for the domestic future that never arrived ^[6]. He was buried in the Ober Sankt Veit cemetery in Vienna.

Schiele's posthumous rise was slow, then overwhelming. Dismissed by the Nazi regime as degenerate, his work survived largely through Austrian private collections, above all that of the Viennese ophthalmologist Rudolf Leopold, whose holdings became the core of the Leopold Museum, opened in Vienna in 2001 and now home to the largest Schiele collection in the world ^[7]. The catalogue raisonné compiled by Jane Kallir documents the full range of his paintings and works on paper and remains the standard reference ^[2].

At auction he ranks among the most expensive artists of his era. His 1914 townscape Häuser mit bunter Wäsche (Vorstadt II) sold at Sotheby's in London in June 2011 for 24.7 million pounds, about 40 million dollars, a record for the artist at the time ^[8]. Restitution cases have kept his name in the news as well: the long legal battle over Portrait of Wally, seized in New York in 1998 after a loan from the Leopold collection, ended in 2010 with a 19 million dollar settlement paid to the heirs of the Jewish dealer Lea Bondi Jaray ^[9].

Among Egon Schiele facts, the brevity of the career remains the most arresting: essentially one decade of mature work, ended at 28, that redirected figurative art. His influence runs through later painters of the body from Francis Bacon to Jenny Saville, and major exhibitions in Vienna, London, Paris, and New York continue to draw large audiences to his unsettling, unmistakable line ^[4]. Few artists have made self scrutiny look so modern.