Egon Schiele

Sema portfolio, 1912, "Male Nude I" Lithograph print 21/215

1912

Defiantly iconoclastic in life and art, Egon Schiele is esteemed for his masterful draftsmanship and precocious insight into the human condition.

Part of the first wave of Austrian modernism, Schiele was swept away by the Viennese fascination with the tension between Life and Death (known in the works of Freud and his later interpreters as Eros and Thanatos). Life, identified with attraction, love, sexuality, and reproduction, and Death, represented by distortion, disease, repulsion, and hysteria, often appeared in the same composition, thereby suggesting the frightening life cycle of the human mind and body.

Young throughout his career, Schiele universalized his childhood traumas, thriving libido, insecurities, fears, and longings. His contorted line, jarring contrasts, and flat areas of color, demonstrate an early alliance with Expressionist philosophy and artists who were relentlessly frustrated by conventionality in all its forms. 

Schiele’s work embodied man’s disorientation and confusion in a seemingly absurd world, a world plagued by disease and war. It continues to be astonishingly relevant today, not just because it helped define modernism but also because it revealed the dark and immutable aspects of the human condition. As Schiele said, “Art is primordially eternal.”

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(Biography provided by Galerie Fledermaus)