Modern Age
Egon Schiele (1890–1918)
Austrian Vienna Secession painter.
Egon Schiele was an Austrian painter whose brief but intensely productive career redefined the possibilities of the human figure in modern art. Born in Tulln, Lower Austria, he entered the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts at sixteen but quickly rebelled against its conservative curriculum, drawn instead to the radical decorative innovations of Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession. By 1909 he had developed his singular style: raw, angular, emotionally charged depictions of the body—often nude, contorted, and psychologically exposed—rendered with a line so taut and expressive it seemed to strip away social pretense entirely.
Schiele's work courted scandal from the outset. His frank treatment of sexuality and psychological vulnerability led to his brief imprisonment in 1912 on charges of seducing a minor and displaying erotic drawings where minors could see them; a judge burned one drawing in court. Yet his art was never merely provocative—it was a sustained investigation into the fragility, desire, and isolation of the self. He painted prostitutes, children, pregnant women, his lovers Wally Neuzil and later his wife Edith Harms, and above all himself, returning obsessively to the self-portrait as a site of existential interrogation. His landscapes—principally the medieval rooftops and riverbanks of Krumau (Český Krumlov)—distill architecture into haunted, almost animate presences.
Schiele's career accelerated after 1915. He married Edith Harms in 1915, was conscripted but kept from combat, and by 1918 had achieved significant recognition, including a prominent showing at the Vienna Secession's 49th exhibition. That autumn, however, the global influenza pandemic claimed Edith, six months pregnant, and Schiele himself died three days later, on October 31, 1918, at the age of twenty-eight. He left behind some 340 paintings and nearly 3,000 works on paper—a body of work that remains one of the most unflinching explorations of embodiment and inner life in early modernism.
The words the record keeps using: anguished, confrontational, raw, spectral, erotic, psychologically exposed, melancholic, unflinching.
At a glance
- Lived 1890–1918
- Origin Austrian
- Worked in Vienna
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Vienna Secession
- Mediums Ink on paper, Oil on panel, Oil on canvas, Watercolor
- Techniques Oil glazing, Alla prima (wet-in-wet), Linear perspective
Works in the archive
- Self-Portrait with Physalis, 1912 (Leopold Museum, Vienna)
One of Schiele's most haunting self-portraits, showing the artist bare-chested against a void, his emaciated torso twisted to confront the viewer with unflinching directness. He holds a branch of Chinese lantern… - Portrait of Wally Neuzil, 1912 (Leopold Museum, Vienna)
A vivid, psychologically intense portrait of Wally Neuzil, Schiele's lover and model from 1911 to 1915. She appears against a flat, indeterminate ground, wearing a dark red dress with a white collar. Her face is angular… - Death and the Maiden (Death and the Woman), 1915 (Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna)
A monumental allegory of love and loss, widely interpreted as marking the end of Schiele's relationship with his lover Wally Neuzil. A man clad in dark robes (the artist as death) embraces a kneeling woman in a pale… - Krumau – Crescent of Houses (The Small City V), 1915 (Israel Museum, Jerusalem)
A sweeping view of the medieval Bohemian town of Krumau (Český Krumlov), ancestral home of Schiele's mother. The tightly packed houses curve along the bend of the Vltava River, their red and ochre roofs and pale facades… - The Family, 1918 (Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna)
Schiele's final major painting, left unfinished at his death. A monumental allegorical group: the artist crouches naked in the center, flanked by a kneeling nude woman (his wife Edith) and a swaddled infant. The three…
What was said
I believe that everything is alive, that we humans are only a degree of animation among many.
Art cannot be modern; art is primordially eternal.
To restrict the artist is a crime; it is murdering germinating life.
Lineage
Learned from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
What would Egon make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Egon Schiele", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Egon · Keep a life moment the way Egon would · Pictures made after Egon