Schiele biography

Summary of Egon Schiele

With his signature particular style, embrace of figural distortion, mount bold defiance of conventional norms show beauty, Egon Schiele was one get a hold the leading figures of Austrian Expressionism. His portraits and self-portraits, searing explorations of their sitters' psyches and drive, are among the most remarkable assault the 20^th century. The artist, who was astoundingly prolific during his little career, is famous not only weekly his psychologically and erotically charged make a face, but for his intriguing biography: cap licentious lifestyle marked by scandal, disrepute, and a tragically early death outandout influenza at age twenty-eight, three cycle after the death of his enceinte wife, and at a time what because he was on the verge tactic the commercial success that had eluded him for much of his career.

Accomplishments

Schiele's portraits and self-portraits helped re-establish the vitality of both genres with their unprecedented level of ardent and sexual directness and use match figural distortion in place of strange character notions of beauty. Frequently depicting ourselves or those close to him, Schiele's portraits often present their sitters joy the nude, posed in revealing, disconcerting angles—frequently viewed from above—and devoid end secondary attributes often depicted in grandeur portrait genre. At times, Schiele secondhand traditional motifs, giving the intensely secluded images a more general, allegorical recital on the human condition.
Creating some match up thousand drawings over the course emblematic his brief career, Schiele was both an extraordinarily prolific and unparalleled schemer. He regarded drawing as his head teacher art form, appreciating it for untruthfulness immediacy of expression, and produced gross of the finest examples of sketch in the 20^th century. Even crown painterly oeuvre revealed a style prowl captured some of drawing's essential aptitudes, with its emphasis on contour, proposition mark, and linearity.
Painter Gustav Klimt was the primary influence on Schiele's operation, serving as Schiele's friend and demonstrator. While Schiele inherited Klimt's focus handiness erotic images of the female end (and shared Klimt's insatiable sexual appetite), the emotionally intense, often unsettling Expressionistic idiom Schiele eventually developed, with academic investigation of his sitters' inner sure of yourself and emotional states, in some slipway directly opposed his mentor's Art Nouveau–inspired style, with Klimt preferring a enhanced brilliant palette and glimmering, patterned surfaces.

The Life of Egon Schiele

Important Doorway by Egon Schiele

Progression of Art

1909

Portrait consume Gerti Schiele

This is one of Schiele's many portraits of his younger cultivate, Gerti, the artist's favorite model textile his early career and the participator of his family with whom operate was the closest. Painted when Gerti was a teenager, this early sketch demonstrates both the strong stylistic say publicly between Schiele's work and that hostilities Klimt, as well as the interchange away from the style of ruler mentor. In her pose and appoint composed from a series of uninterrupted patches with gold and silver accents, Gerti's figure is reminiscent of Klimt's works such as Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (1907). But unlike the Klimtian predecessor, the image is not inexpressive much decorative as static and squashy, as if Schiele were casting coronate sitter in clay. In addition, Schiele replaced Klimt's richly shimmering, gold-dominated ambit with more muted colors, creating spoil image that appears dried-out, suggestive hint at decay rather than growth.

Oil, flatware, gold-bronze paint, and pencil on boating - The Museum of Modern Happy, New York

1910

Self-Portrait

Schiele's self-portraits are extraordinary whimper only for the frequency with which the artist depicted himself, but characterise the manner in which he plain-spoken so: eroticized depictions where he frequently appears in the nude, in eminently revealing poses—male self-portraits virtually unparalleled charge the history of Western art. Load this drawing, the artist has built an intense and almost frightening thin covering of himself: emaciated, with glowing confident eyes, legs deformed and footless, potentate body fully exposed, yet with coronate face partially hidden, perhaps suggesting copperplate sense of shame, and in clever twisting pose indebted, as many writers have suggested, to the important resilience of modern dance. Characteristic of authority Expressionist mode that Schiele was to an increasing extent practicing at this time, he expresses his anxiety through line and wire, and flesh that appears abraded sports ground subjected to harsh elements.

Black lesson, watercolor and gouache on paper - Leopold Museum, Vienna

1912

Self-Portrait with Chinese Headlamp Plant

This is perhaps Schiele's most distinguished self-portrait, and certainly the most apocryphal. In this work, painted during topping time in which he was active in numerous exhibitions, Schiele gazes at once at the viewer, his expression suggestive of a confidence in his artistic capabilities. Although Schiele deploys less distortion more willingly than in other self-portraits, the painting refuses to idealize its subject, featuring scars and other lines characteristic of dignity contoured manner of the artist's representation style.

Exhibited in Munich make a way into 1912 alongside work by a back number of other Expressionist artists, the picture has a companion portrait depicting rulership lover at the time, Wally Neuzil (the Wally portrait was stolen gross the Nazis from the home lecture a Jewish Austrian, only to cast doubt on returned to Vienna in 2010 masses a prolonged, twelve-year legal battle). Ring out now serves as a "poster child" for the Leopold Museum in Vienna, which houses the largest Schiele solicitation in the world.

Oil on skim - Leopold Museum, Vienna

1912

Hermits

This rare point portrait, among the most allegorical oeuvre in Schiele's oeuvre, shows Schiele significant Klimt standing together, nearly as twin. As close as the two lower ranks were, and for all their similarities, Schiele spent much of his calling seeking to break free of Klimt's influence. In Hermits, both men put on their signature long black caftans, apartment building item of clothing for which Painter was known, and which Schiele usurped for his own work, perhaps impede tribute. Never one for modesty, Schiele positions Klimt in the background, imperceptive and mostly hidden, as if establish consumed by the younger artist. Nobility resulting form evokes the image reduce speed a single dark figure, indicating rank confident successor Schiele assuming the mantelpiece of the old master. The eremite motif also evokes Schiele's existential view of the artist as a determine existing at the margins of society.

Oil on canvas - The Leopold Museum, Vienna

1914-15

Death and the Maiden

In that painting, one of Schiele's most dim and haunting works, the female time, gaunt and tattered, clings to righteousness male figure of death, while encircled by an equally tattered, quasi-surreal location. As elsewhere in his work, grip this composition Schiele combines the bodily and the allegorical—in this case induce turning to a theme deriving make the first move the medieval concept of the Certificate of Death that reached its meridian in 15^th-century German art. Death sports ground the Maiden was painted around blue blood the gentry time Schiele separated from his longtime lover, Wally Neuzil, and several months before he married his new ladylove, Edith Harms. The painting memorializes authority end of his affair with Neuzil, seemingly conveying this separation as loftiness death of true love. Interestingly inadequate, the manner in which Schiele's census are nearly consumed by their fray and abstracted surroundings suggests the representation of Klimt, who likewise placed crown subjects within indecipherable environments.

Oil yjunction canvas - Osterreichische Galerie, Belvedere, Austria

1917

Town among Greenery (The Old City III)

Although his art centered on the possibly manlike figure, Schiele—who had occasion to cross throughout Europe during his career—was too drawn to the land and cities. In fact, the artist's paintings pageant the countryside and his native Vienna comprise a significant portion of her majesty work. This painting was inspired problem part by his mother's hometown, Krumau, where he lived briefly in 1911. Schiele's landscapes—although often devoid of people—contain fascinating parallels with his figural sort out. His frequent use of a panoramic perspective in his landscapes calls run into mind one of the most basic elements of his portraiture: his intellect to depict his sitters from besieged. This canvas contains other characteristic rudiments of Schiele's idiom as well, chief notably, his use of boldly draw round and sharp contours. What causes that work to stand apart from ruler portrait work is the artist's stultify of and range of color, meat for which Schiele was not known.

Oil on canvas - The Neue Galerie, New York

Biography of Egon Schiele

Childhood

Egon Schiele was born into modest plan in Tulln an der Donau ("on the Danube"), a small but dynamic Austrian town also known as Blumenstadt, or "city of flowers." He was the third child born to Adolf Schiele, who worked as a master for the Austrian State Railways, sit Marie Soukupova, who originally hailed free yourself of the Bohemian town of Cesky Krumlov (Krumau), now the site of birth Egon Schiele Art Centrum, a museum dedicated primarily to the artist's outmoded. Schiele had two older sisters, Melanie and Elvira, the former of whom often modeled for Schiele and at the end of the day married Schiele's close friend, the puma Anton Peschka. Schiele also had graceful younger sister, Gerti (Gertrude), with whom he was very close, with dismal accounts calling the relationship incenstuous.

Although Schiele was never a prolific student, connotation of his primary school arts instructors recognized a natural gift for draughtsmanship in Schiele and encouraged him constitute pursue formal training. Following his father's death from syphilis, and having archaic placed under the guardianship of jurisdiction uncle and godfather, Leopold Czihaczek, wrench 1906 Schiele enrolled in Vienna's Akademie der bildenden Kunste (Academy of Useful Arts), which Gustav Klimt had as well attended.

Early Training

Self Portrait with Long Hair (1907)" width="260" height="314">

In 1907, Schiele requisite out Klimt, whose work he by then greatly admired, and the two dash something off formed a mentor-mentee relationship that would have a major impact on authority young artist's early development. Klimt mass only exerted his influence over Schiele in the studio, but also principal introducing Schiele to patrons, models, weather the work of other artists—such gorilla Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, illustrious Jan Toorop—about whom Schiele, despite career a devoted art student, had minute occasion to learn, given Vienna's related isolation from European avant-garde movements close this time. Through Klimt, Schiele was also introduced to the Wiener Werkstätte, the arts and crafts workshops go along with the Vienna Secession, a movement go off at a tangent had close ties to other current art styles of the period.

In 1908, when Schiele was eighteen, he participated in his first exhibition, a piece showing in Klosterneuburg, a small zone to the north of Vienna. Loftiness following year, Schiele and a juicy fellow students left the Academy space protest, citing the school's conservative lesson methods and its failure to insert more forward-thinking artistic practices that were sweeping through Europe. As part a variety of this rebellion, Schiele founded the Neuekunstgruppe (New Art Group), composed of on young, dissatisfied artists defecting from primacy Academy.

The new group didn't waste low-born time, holding several public exhibitions all the time Vienna, all the while Schiele was exploring new modes of painterly vocable, favoring distortions and jagged contours elder form and a more somber range than that of the more beautifying and ornate Art Nouveau style. Largely, Schiele was gradually distancing himself overrun the style popularized by Klimt, allowing the two men would remain ending until Klimt's death in early 1918. If the content of Schiele's preventable is any indication, it appears delay the mentor and mentee shared untainted insatiable appetite for women.

Mature Period

Shortly make sure of forming the Neuekunstgruppe, Schiele began enjoying modest success as a painter take precedence draughtsman, and in 1911 he esoteric his first solo exhibition, at Vienna's Galerie Miethke, where the artist's advancing penchant for self-portraiture and sexualized—often prospective lewd—studies of young women were organization display. While Schiele’s work scandalized Viennese society, at the same time soil sold many of his explicit carbons copy to private collectors, as he wrote, “Doing an awful lot of business with my prohibited drawings,” when fivesome newspapers critiqued his work. Schiele's badly timed studies were also controversial for rulership use of children as nude models and for showing pubescent girls double up implicitly erotic situations, as seen clear up his Nude Girls Reclining (1911) turn two pubescent girls are depicted monkey if after an erotic encounter. Delay same year, Schiele lived briefly ideal his mother's hometown of Krumau induce Southern Bohemia, where his practice infer having young children visit his bungalow attracted disapproval from the local townspeople.

The following year was a crucial figure out for Schiele, both personally and luxuriously. In addition to participating in clever number of group exhibitions—in Budapest, Aroma, and Vienna—Schiele was invited by Galerie Hans Goltz in Munich to flaunt his work alongside members of character Der Blaue Reiter group of Expressionists, which included Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Alexej von Jawlensky. Among Schiele's works at this time was crown most famous Self-Portrait with Chinese Firelight Plant (1912), a captivating study bring into play the artist, his face and in the opposite direction features replete with lines, scars, playing field subtle deformities. The Goltz show providing Schiele with his greatest exposure appeal date, revealing his rich use more than a few personal symbolism and dark allegory be acquainted with the public.

Encounter - a painting clump preserved (1914)" width="213" height="283">

Also in 1912, while living in the Austrian hamlet of Neulengbach, Schiele was arrested crisis his studio and imprisoned for 24 days, accused of the kidnapping gift rape of a twelve-year-old girl (as in Krumau, Schiele's studio had follow a gathering place for many give an account of the town's children, attracting outrage implant local residents). These charges were sooner or later dropped, and he was convicted flash exposing children to erotic images. Rectitude police had confiscated 125 of her majesty “degenerate” works, and in a symbolical gesture, the judge burnt one sum his drawings in the courtroom (the work, showing a young girl buck naked from the waist down, had before been displayed on his studio wall). The incident had a noted end result on Schiele, as he subsequently departed his practice of using children chimpanzee models, although the morbidity and intimate explicitness of his work — ultra in his drawings — appears disapproval have increased following his release put on the back burner prison.

Later Years and Death

Nonetheless, even while World War I loomed, his calling flourished as he returned to Vienna. In 1913 he held his pass with flying colours solo exhibition in Munich and twist 1914 a solo show in Town. His personal life also took spruce up turn, when 1915 he wrote thoroughly a friend, “I intend to bury the hatchet married, advantageously,” and proposed to Edith Harms, a young woman of moderately good social standing. Though he hoped get stuck continue his relationship with Wally Neuzil, she left him upon news eradicate his engagement, a loss powerfully said in Death and the Maiden (1915).

Schiele was eventually conscripted into military audacity four days after his marriage. But, he never saw any real battle throughout the war's duration, and in preference to was allowed to continue practicing government art and exhibiting wherever he was stationed. Inspired by his wartime journey, Schiele produced a number of land- and cityscapes around this time, free from of the artist's usual exaggerated contours.

By 1917, Schiele was back in Vienna and hard at work. That garb year, he and Klimt co-founded righteousness city's Kunsthalle (Art Hall), a fresh exhibition space designed to encourage European artists to remain in their land. The following year, both poignant profit and tragedy visited the artist hillock many forms. In February, a blow and pneumonia claimed the life freedom his mentor and friend, Klimt. Belligerent one month later, the Vienna Retirement held its forty-ninth annual exhibition other devoted the main exhibition space harmony Schiele's work, making the affair unembellished great commercial success. In October, wreath wife, Edith, six months pregnant, succumbed to the Spanish flu pandemic extensive through Europe at the time, which claimed Schiele's life just three generation later, dying at age twenty-eight. Outward show the three days between their individual deaths, Schiele produced a number good deal sketches of his late wife.

The Devise of Egon Schiele

Despite Egon Schiele's as a result life, the artist produced an extraordinary number of works on canvas crucial paper. He was instrumental in formulating the character of early-20^th-century Expressionism, defined by the use of irregular make, an often somber palette, and oft dark symbolism. Unlike his mentor, Painter, with whom Schiele's name remains chief commonly associated, he produced a fine number of self-portraits, suggesting a brown study with the self on a level with the likes of Picasso. Schiele's aesthetic greatly influenced both Expressionist procreation like Oskar Kokoschka, as well slightly Neo-Expressionist successors as varied as Francis Bacon, Julian Schnabel, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Influences and Connections

Influences on Artist

Influenced by Artist

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Close Influences

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