Egon Schiele 1890-1918.

Born in Tulin on the Twelfth of June, 1890, Austrian expressionist artist Egon Schiele, was in conflict with art critics and society for most of his brief life.

After attending school in Krems and Klosterneuburg, he enrolled in the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna in 1906 where studied painting and drawing but soon found himself frustrated by the school’s conservatism.

In 1907, he met Gustav Klimt, who encouraged him and influenced his work.

Schiele left the Akademie in 1909 and founded the Neukunstgruppe with other dissatisfied students. At Klimt’s invitation, Schiele exhibited at the 1909 Vienna Kunstschau, where he encountered the work of Edvard Munch, Jan Toroop, Vincent van Gogh, and others.
























On the occasion of the first exhibition of the Neukunstgruppe in 1909 at the Piska Salon, Vienna, Schiele met the art critic and writer Arthur Roessler, who befriended him and wrote admiringly of his work. The following year, as his style continued to mature, he began a long friendship with the collector Heinrich Benesch resulting in a number of portrait commissions from the Viennese intelligentsia.

Following the original Neukunstgruppe show, Schiele participated in various group exhibitions; in Prague in 1910, Budapest in 1912, Cologne in 1912; and in several Secession shows in Munich, beginning in 1911.

Seeking isolation, Schiele left Vienna in 1911 to live in several small villages. During this time, he concentrated increasingly on self-portraits and allegories of life, death, and sex. He also produced explicit watercolors of the human form which were perceived as erotic, and presumably dangerous to society.

One commentator suggests that his treatment of the nude reflects a lonely, tormented spirit, haunted rather than fulfilled by sexuality.















In 1912, Egon Schiele was arrested for “immorality” and “seduction”; spending twenty-four days in prison during which time he created a number of poignant watercolors and drawings.

In 1913, the Galerie Hans Goltz, Munich, mounted Schiele’s first solo show.

A solo exhibition of his work took place in Paris in 1914.

The following year, Schiele - recently married to Edith Harms - was drafted into the Austrian army.

He painted prolifically and continued to exhibit during his military service. His solo show at the Vienna Secession of 1918 brought him critical acclaim and financial success.

He died several months later in Vienna, at the age of twenty-eight, on the thirty-first of October, 1918, a victim of the influenza epidemic which had claimed his wife three days earlier.