After
Egon Schiele (1890–1918) freed himself from the shadow of his mentor and role model
Gustav Klimt, he had just ten years to inscribe his signature style into the
annals of modernity before the Spanish flu claimed his life. Being a child prodigy quite aware of his own genius and a
passionate provocateur, this didn’t prove to be too big a challenge.
His
haggard, overstretched figures,
extreme depiction of sexuality and
self-portraits, in which he staged himself with emaciated facial expressions
bordering between brilliance and madness, had none of the decorative quality of Klimt’s hymns of love, sexuality and yearning devotion. Instead, Schiele’s work spoke of a
brutal honesty, one that would upset and irreversibly change Viennese society.
Although his works were later defamed as “degenerate” and for a time were almost forgotten altogether, they
influenced generations of artists—from
Günter Brus and
Francis Bacon to
Tracey Emin. Today, his then misunderstood oeuvre continues to fetch exorbitant prices on the international art market.
This monograph, first published in an XL edition, is now available in a slightly abridged, more compact edition to celebrate TASCHEN’s
40th anniversary and features
the paintings and
drawings that
retrace the fertile last decade of Schiele’s life. These works are accompanied by essays introducing his life and oeuvre, situating the Austrian master in the context of European Expressionism and charting his extraordinary legacy.
