Egon Schiele

By Simon Wilson

Book Overview

A Beautiful Monograph Highlighting the Expressionist Painter's Passionate, Cutting Edge Career. Austrian painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918) was a passionate man--for life, for death, and most notably, for sex. Through the mediums of drawing and painting he was able to indulge himself fully in these obsessions. Schiele's free artistic spirit shook the cultural constraints of his day and gave rise to his famous nude self-portraits and paintings of female nudes. Despite criticism throughout his brief career, Schiele emerged as a major figure in the history of modern art and the development of the Expressionist movement. EGON SCHIELE, by art historian and curator Simon Wilson, is a beautifully illustrated monograph on the artist and his work. This affordable book documents the breadth of Schiele's career within his short 28-year lifespan, from erotic nudes to peaceful landscapes, with a series of 78 illustrations and accompanying text that retain the power to shock and endear audiences one hundred years later. Schiele's notorious nude figures reflect the context of his era and how he was viewed--scandalous. He was living in a Freudian-influenced Vienna, a time when sex and human reality intertwined and the taboo topic of eroticism became more of a public, scientific discussion. His artistic approach reflects this societal shift and Schiele's vision gave expression to powerful feelings and anguished honesty, as seen in the controversial paintings of women on women in Two Girls Lying Entwined and in erotic self-portraits like Eros. And even when dogged by critics and plagued by accusations of pornography, once even thrown in jail for forcefully employing young girls as models, Schiele continued to approach his vocation as an artist with uncompromising intensity. In this recently revised book, Wilson examines Schiele's unique vision as an artist, as well as his less controversial work as a landscape and portrait painter. EGON SCHIELE puts his life and work in the context of this time, demonstrating how the painter's style of expression gave form to the anxieties and insecurities that beset Western culture at the turn of the century. Today, his emotional, powerful and expressive images reveal the way Schiele defied convention, as well as illuminate his bold career based on the relationship between humanity, sex and life--a career that continues to elicit response from worldwide audiences to this day.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801494680
• ISBN13: 9780801494680
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Getting a lot in 80 pages.

This book is an ideal size for my art collection. Big books are heavy, and knowing that I can find every picture that is still known of a particular artist takes some of the excitement out of seeing what is on the next page. Some of the early pages, and even worse, plates 62 and 63, have pictures in black and white, which isn't the way I expect to see them, because I know they have been robbed of the original color. The list of plates numbers 73, which is a fair number for 80 pages. The Contents lists 8 topics, all of which are interesting enough, and "The Artist and Society" was particularly a problem for Egon Schiele. I think the most is packed into those seven pages, which includes pictures of Lovers 1911, Self-Portrait 1912, Agony 1912, Nude Black-Haired Girl Standing 1910, Prisoner! 24 April 1912, Cardinal and Nun 1912, Hindering the Artist is a Crime, It Is Murdering Life in the Bud! 23 April 1912, For my Art and for My Loved Ones I will Gladly Endure to the End! 25 April 1912, and Fighter 1913. I relate most strongly to the (in prison)autobiographical portraits, and I'm disappointed that Self-Portrait with Hand to Cheek 1918 is not in color on page 27, but the explanation on the following page is good, even if it mentions his critics: "Alessandra Comini has put forward the convincing explanation that, whatever else it may mean, the gesture is a punning reference to the artist's name: in German the verb schielen means to squint, and apparently a number of hostile critics used this correspondence to make sarcastic jokes about Schiele's eyesight." (p. 28) Plate 72 is a late portrait which I have seen in an art museum, exhibited with other paintings. The paint covers the canvas and it is signed, Egon Schiele 1918, the year of Schiele's death, but the final comment of this book is "This, the most painterly of all his late works, is a final, monumental statement of Schiele's vision of the artist. It was left unfinished at his death." It is not clear from the picture what more he might have done, and he previously had left things out. If he was going to finish anything, I think he should have given the Black-Haired Girl Standing in 1910 a right elbow.