Egon Schiele Portfolio

About Egon Schiele

Nationality	Austrian
Education	Akademie der Bildenden Künste
Known for	Painting, drawing, printmaking
Notable work	Seated Woman with Bent Knees Cardinal and Nun Death and the Maiden The Family
Movement	Expressionism
Signature

His work is noted for its intensity and its raw sexuality, and for the many self-portraits the artist produced, including nude self-portraits. The twisted body shapes and the expressive line that characterize Schiele's paintings and drawings mark the artist as an early exponent of Expressionism. Gustav Klimt, a figurative painter of the early 20th century, was a mentor to Schiele.

Style

Some critics such as Jane Kallir have commented upon Schiele's work as being grotesque, erotic, pornographic, or disturbing, focusing on sex, death, and discovery. He focused on portraits of others as well as himself. In his later years, while he still worked often with nudes, they were done in a more realist fashion.[13] From a young age, Schiele drew with 'manic fluency'.[22] Art critic Martin Gayford wrote in The Spectator: 'He [Schiele] found his distinctive style very early. His entire oeuvre is that of a young man; most of the work in the first of the two rooms of this densely packed little exhibition dates from 1910 to 1911, when Schiele (1890–1918) was just 20. That helps to explain some tendencies: a half-disgusted preoccupation with sexuality and a similarly queasy fascination with examining his naked self. The male figures mainly seem to have been modelled by the artist, though it is hard to be certain since the head is often not included.'[22] Kallir and scholar Gerald Izenberg regard Schiele as fluid in sexuality and gender. Kallir says Schiele was "struggling with his own sexual feelings and gender norms" during a historical period of shifting gender expectations, the early women's movement, and criminalization of homosexuality. Some critics in the 21st century read his artwork as queer.[23][24] A less known fact about Schiele's career is that, during his studies at the School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna, he explored sculpture and created a number of small-scale clay and plaster sculptures.[25]

Biography

Early life

Schiele was born in 1890 in Tulln, Lower Austria. His father, Adolf Schiele, the station master of the Tulln station in the Austrian State Railways, was born in 1851 in Vienna to Karl Ludwig Schiele, a German from Ballenstedt and Aloisia Schimak; Egon Schiele's mother Marie, née Soukup, was born in 1861 in Český Krumlov (Krumau) to Franz Soukup, a Czech father from Mirkovice, and Aloisia Poferl, a German Bohemian mother from Český Krumlov.[1][2] As a child, Schiele was fascinated by trains, and would spend many hours drawing them, to the point where his father felt obliged to destroy his sketchbooks. When he was 11 years old, Schiele moved to the nearby city of Krems (and later to Klosterneuburg) to attend secondary school. To those around him, Schiele was regarded as a strange child. Shy and reserved, he did poorly at school except in athletics and drawing,[3] and was usually in classes made up of younger pupils. He also displayed incestuous tendencies towards his younger sister Gertrude (who was known as Gerti), and his father, well aware of Egon's behaviour, was once forced to break down the door of a locked room that Egon and Gerti were in to see what they were doing (only to discover them developing film). When he was sixteen he took the twelve-year-old Gerti by train to Trieste without permission and spent a night in a hotel room with her.

Academy of Fine Arts

When Schiele was 14 years old, his father died from syphilis, and he became a ward of his maternal uncle, Leopold Czihaczek, also a railway official.[2] Although he wanted Schiele to follow in his footsteps, and was distressed at his lack of interest in academia, he recognised Schiele's talent for drawing and unenthusiastically allowed him a tutor, the artist Ludwig Karl Strauch. In 1906 Schiele applied at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) in Vienna, where Gustav Klimt had once studied. Within his first year there, Schiele was sent, at the insistence of several faculty members, to the more traditional Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna in 1906. His main teacher at the academy was Christian Griepenkerl, a painter whose strict doctrine and ultra-conservative style frustrated and dissatisfied Schiele and his fellow students so much that he left three years later.

Klimt and first exhibitions

In 1907, Schiele sought out Gustav Klimt, who generously mentored younger artists. Klimt took a particular interest in the young Schiele, buying his drawings, offering to exchange them for some of his own, arranging models for him and introducing him to potential patrons. He also introduced Schiele to the Wiener Werkstätte, the arts and crafts workshop connected with the Secession. Schiele's earliest works between 1907 and 1909 contain strong similarities with those of Klimt,[5] as well as influences from Art Nouveau.[6] In 1908 Schiele had his first exhibition, in Klosterneuburg. Schiele left the academy in 1909, after completing his third year, and founded the Neukunstgruppe ("New Art Group") with other dissatisfied students. In his early years, Schiele was strongly influenced by Klimt and Kokoschka. Although imitations of their styles, particularly with the former, are noticeably visible in Schiele's first works, he soon evolved his own distinctive style.

Klimt invited Schiele to exhibit some of his work at the 1909 Vienna Kunstschau, where he encountered the work of Edvard Munch, Jan Toorop, and Vincent van Gogh among others. Once free of the constraints of the academy's conventions, Schiele began to explore not only the human form, but also human sexuality. Schiele's work was already daring, but it went a bold step further with the inclusion of Klimt's decorative eroticism and with what some may like to call figurative distortions, that included elongations, deformities, and sexual openness. Schiele's self-portraits helped re-establish the energy of both genres[clarification needed] with their unique level of emotional and sexual honesty and use of figural distortion in place of conventional ideals of beauty. He also painted tributes to Van Gogh's Sunflowers as well as landscapes and still lifes.[7] In 1910, Schiele began experimenting with nudes and within a year a definitive style featuring emaciated, sickly-coloured figures, often with strong sexual overtones. Schiele also began painting and drawing children.[8] Schiele's self portrait, Kneeling Nude with Raised Hands (1910), is considered among the most significant nude art pieces made during the 20th century.[by whom?] Schiele's radical and developed approach towards the naked human form challenged both scholars[who?] and progressives alike. This unconventional piece and style went against strict academia and created an uproar with its contorted lines and heavy display of figurative expression.[citation needed] At the time, many[who?] found the explicitness of his works disturbing.