Egon Schiele

Biography of Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele was born in Toller in 1890. His complicated ancestry mirrors that of his country "Austria-Hungary" at his birth, as his mother is a Czech Catholic and his father a German Protestant...

He entered the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1906 (he was the youngest student in his class at the time) and there he notably met Gustav KLIMT. Throughout their lives, the two artists held each other in very high esteem. But while KLIMT sought (and succeeded fully) to blend decoration and painting, Egon Schiele was first and foremost a draftsman.

Almost his entire body of work is executed in pencil, watercolor, and gouache. It is in the power of the line that Schiele asserts himself, and it is in portraiture that his genius is best expressed.
Obsessed with his own face and body (he created numerous self-portraits), Schiele sought in bodily postures and skin tone to highlight the fragility of human life.

Fascinated by prostitutes, many of whom were his models, he executed portraits where sexual fantasies, the illumination of what old age would wither on young bodies, or simply the solitude of the human being seem to be his only concerns.
Moreover, just like in MUNCH's work, love and death are closely linked in Schiele's oeuvre.

He married Edith Harms in 1915, and his work then underwent the beginning of a change. Less stark, his work also became less pessimistic. But this "mutation" would never reach its fullness since Egon Schiele and his wife both died in 1918 from the terrible Spanish Flu epidemic that was ravaging Europe at the time.

A major figure of Expressionism, he is the link between KLIMT (who, although an Expressionist, still belongs to the school of "monumental" art) and those who followed, notably Oskar KOKOSCHKA, who went even further than Schiele (and especially in a way less shocking to the bourgeoisie of the early century) in the pursuit of an art that resonates with the sound of an absolute line, that of a line that becomes speech!

(c) Natacha PELLETIER for PASSION ESTAMPES