Egon Schiele

Personal

Vocation

Notable

Austrian Expressionist painter, draftsman, and printmaker noted for the eroticism of his figurative works. As a student at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (1907–09), Schiele was strongly influenced by the Jugendstil movement, the German Art Nouveau. He met Gustav Klimt, leader of the Vienna Sezession group, and the linearity and subtlety of Schiele’s work owe much to Klimt’s decorative elegance. Schiele, however, emphasized expression over decoration, heightening the emotive power of line with a feverish tension. He concentrated from the beginning on the human figure, and his candid, agitated treatment of erotic themes caused a sensation. In 1909 he helped found the Neukunstgruppe (New Art Group) in Vienna. From 1911 onward he exhibited throughout Europe, and a special room was devoted to his work at a 1918 Sezessionist exhibit in Vienna, shortly before his death on 31 October 1918 from Spanish influenza. Schiele has been the subject of a biographical film, Excess & Punishment (aka Egon Schiele Exzess und Bestrafung), a 1980 film originating in Germany with a European cast that explores Schiele's artistic demons leading up to his early death. Mario Vargas Llosa uses the work of Schiele as a conduit to seduce and morally exploit a main character in his 1997 novel The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. Link to Wikipedia biography