Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele: The Body Without Apology

A judge once held one of his drawings — a young girl, undressed above the waist — over a candle flame and burned it in front of him. Egon Schiele was twenty-one, already Vienna's most unsettling young painter, and he had just served twenty-one days in custody on suspicion of seducing a minor before the kidnapping charge collapsed and he was convicted instead of a lesser offense: exhibiting erotic drawings where children might see them. He was dead by twenty-eight, but in the seven years between that cell and the flu that killed him, Schiele produced one of the most psychologically exposed bodies of work in twentieth-century art.

A Household Built on Illness

Egon Leo Adolf Ludwig Schiele was born on June 12, 1890, in Tulln, Lower Austria, the son of a railway stationmaster, Adolf Schiele, and Marie Soukup, who came from Český Krumlov in Bohemia. According to family accounts, Adolf had contracted syphilis before his marriage and passed it to his wife; one daughter, Elvira, died of it as a child, and Adolf's own mind and body deteriorated into violent outbursts that shaped Egon's early years. At school in Krems and then Klosterneuburg he was, by his classmates' account, shy and awkward, failing most subjects while excelling at athletics and drawing. In 1906 he entered Vienna's Kunstgewerbeschule and then transferred to the Academy of Fine Arts, where the conservative pedagogy of instructor Christian Griepenkerl frustrated him so completely that he abandoned formal study after three years.

Klimt's Discovery

In 1907 Schiele sought out Gustav Klimt, Vienna's most celebrated painter, who took an immediate and generous interest: buying Schiele's drawings, trading works with him, arranging models, and introducing him to the Wiener Werkstätte and to potential patrons. Schiele's work from 1907 to 1909 shows Klimt's decorative, Art Nouveau-inflected influence directly. But at the 1909 Vienna Kunstschau, where Klimt exhibited Schiele's pictures alongside work by Edvard Munch, Jan Toorop and Vincent van Gogh, something shifted. Schiele co-founded a breakaway group, the Neukunstgruppe, with fellow dissatisfied academy students, and by 1910 he had begun the run of nude studies that would define him — figures rendered in raw, often jarring color, bodies emaciated and angular, drawn from unconventional, sometimes overhead angles that gave the sitter's exposure an almost clinical intensity. Klimt's ornament gave way to something closer to psychological diagnosis; the art historian Jane Kallir has described the results as "grotesque, erotic, pornographic, or disturbing," organized around sex, death and self-scrutiny, executed with what contemporaries called a manic fluency of line.

Wally, Krumau, and the Cell

In 1911 Schiele took up with Wally Neuzil, seventeen, who had previously modeled for and possibly been involved with Klimt. She moved in with him and became his primary model and companion for the next four years. Seeking cheaper rent and an escape from Vienna's disapproval, the pair relocated to Krumau, his mother's birthplace in southern Bohemia — where locals ran them out of town over their unmarried cohabitation and rumors about the teenage girls Schiele used as models — and then to Neulengbach, west of the capital. It was in Neulengbach, in April 1912, that police arrested Schiele on suspicion of kidnapping and seducing a girl of thirteen and seized more than a hundred drawings they judged pornographic. The kidnapping charge did not hold, but a court convicted him of displaying erotic drawings where children could see them; the judge burned one such drawing in the courtroom, and Schiele spent twenty-four days total in custody, sketching his cell in the meantime. Kallir has since pushed back hard on the historical framing, stating plainly, "Egon Schiele was not a sex offender," and situating the prosecution inside a moral panic of the period rather than evidence of predation — a distinction any honest account of Schiele has to hold alongside the images themselves, which remain genuinely difficult.

Marriage, War, and the Vienna Secession

In 1914, Schiele noticed sisters Edith and Adéle Harms, daughters of a Protestant, middle-class locksmith, living across the street from his studio in Hietzing. He married Edith on June 17, 1915 — deliberately, the anniversary of his own parents' wedding — while apparently expecting to keep Wally as well; when Wally understood otherwise, she left immediately and the two never spoke again, a rupture Schiele processed directly into the 1915 painting *Death and the Maiden*, which uses her likeness. Three days after the wedding he was conscripted; a weak heart and good penmanship eventually got him reassigned as a clerk, first at a prisoner-of-war camp near Mühlingen, where a sympathetic commanding officer gave him studio space to paint the Russian officers held there, then to a low-demand supply post in Vienna from January 1917 that let him work with new intensity. His wartime nudes grew fuller-figured and more deliberately doll-like, and in 1918 he was given the central position at the 49th Vienna Secession exhibition — fifty works on display, his own poster designed as a Last Supper with himself seated where Christ belongs. It made him, finally, commercially and critically secure.

Death in Three Days

The security lasted months. In autumn 1918 the Spanish flu reached Vienna; Edith, six months pregnant, died of it on October 28. Schiele, already infected, was moved to his in-laws' house, where visitors — fearing contagion — could only communicate with him through a mirror propped at the threshold of his room. He drew a few sketches of his dead wife in the days between her death and his own. He died on October 31, 1918, at twenty-eight.

Why Egon Is Called a Genius

The case for Schiele rests on a specific, unusual skill: an almost forensic control of contour line, deployed to make the human body look more exposed, more psychologically legible, than a camera or a conventionally rendered nude ever could. He drew roughly three thousand works on paper because drawing, not paint, was where that immediacy lived, and the angularity that looks like distortion at first glance is, on closer study, exact — figures bent and foreshortened with real anatomical intelligence, not carelessness. Later artists who inherited his directness, from Francis Bacon to Jean-Michel Basquiat, are cited by historians as evidence of how far that innovation traveled. But the honest reckoning has to include what makes Schiele hard rather than simply admirable: adolescent models, a genuine criminal conviction whatever its context, and a body of work whose power is inseparable from its violation of boundaries his own era, and arguably any era, would find troubling. Calling him a genius is a claim about eye and hand — an unmatched fluency at rendering psychological exposure through line — not a verdict on his conduct, and the two should not be allowed to blur into each other.

Legacy

The Leopold Museum in Vienna now holds the largest Schiele collection anywhere, more than two hundred works, and his paintings have become recurring subjects of Nazi-era restitution litigation — *Portrait of Wally* alone was the subject of a decade-long U.S. legal battle settled in 2010 for $19 million. A single Schiele landscape sold for $40.1 million at Sotheby's in 2011. What endures past the market, though, is the line itself: a way of drawing a body that refuses to look away from what it shows, inherited by a century of expressionists who came after him.

Achievements

• Notable work: Seated Woman with Bent Knees
• Movement: Expressionism