The many-faceted oeuvre of the Austrian painter captivates with its passion and its drastic directness.In this explosive exhibition of his works, Egon Schiele's new view of the human being comes across no less clearly than his sensitive treatment of landscape and nature. The extraordinary quality of the selected works is what makes them convincing: they show Schiele as an artist who understood brilliantly how to employ painterly techniques in drawing.

This book provides an overview of Egon Schiele's devdopment from his earliest days at the Vienna Academy to his untimely death in 1918.Born in 1890, Schiele sloughed off the tradition of Viennese Art Nouveau and became the founder of Austrian Early Expressionism. Between 1910 and 1918 he created an muvre in which, for the first time in the history of art, the body in its explicit nakedness became the symbol of the human being's existential loneliness and homelessness. Nor in his self-portraits,did Egon Schiele shy away from drastic uglification and obscene self-stigmatization. They are the expression of a social alienation, which becomes particularly evident in those works Schiele painted and drew while in prison.These provide harrowing testimony to an artist who felt he was misunderstood.

Preface

Biography

Leitmotifs and design principles

in the works of Egon Schiele

Catalogue

My journey with Egon Schiele

Heinrich Benesch

Appendix

Works in the exhibition

Bibliography

Exhibitions

Photograph credits