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Egon Schiele lived in Vienna during its last years as capital of the declining Habsburg Empire. Rejected by his family and hounded by society for his interest in young girls, he expressed through his art a deep and bewildering loneliness and an obsession with sexuality, death and decay. Schiele died at the age of twenty-eight, yet he left behind him a body of work that sustains a huge public reputation - and myth. This profusely illustrated book delves into both the controversial sexual themes and neglected aspects of Schiele''s art, notably his formal experiments and his later expressionist portraits and allegorical paintings - works that reveal much about the importance of his short career.
List of contents
1. The Beautiful Danube: Born in Tulln on the Danube, Egon Schiele decides to become a painter. Having earned his diploma at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, he meets Gustav Klimt - 2. Me, Me, Me: From 1910 on, one of Schiele's recurrent motifs is the self-portrait, and he devotes himself to a 'pantomime of the self' that is unique of its kind - 3. From Paradise to Prison: Schiele produces a number of erotic drawings, and at the same time paints symbolic compositions on the theme of death - 4. Resurrection: The artist paints large allegorical canvases such as Hermits, where he shows himself with Klimt, and Cardinal and Nun, a satirical vision of the sins of the flesh 5. A Recognized Artist: No longer the 'terror of the bourgeois', by the time of his death Schiele is a pillar of artistic life in Vienna
About the author
Jean-Louis Gaillemin, founder of Beaux-Arts magazine
and L’Objet d’art, is an honorary lecturer at the Université
Paris-Sorbonne, specializing in architecture and decor.
