An artist associated with scandal and existential pain, EGON SCHIELE interpreted the sufferings of his time in a brief but passionate artistic career.
Born in 1890 in Tulln, a city on the Danube near Vienna, he moved to the Habsburg capital in 1906 and entered the academy of fine arts. Here in contact with artists of the Secession, his rebellious talent exploded and manifested itself immediately with great autonomy and originality. Deeply fascinated by the personality of Gustav Klimt, Egon reinterpreted his reassuring and ornamental style by laying bare the contradictions of modern man. As the world of bourgeois certainties around him collapsed, the artist filled his works with growing emotional content, subverting the traditional canons of beauty and revealing a painful and torn humanity. His study did not want to redefine a better universe or represent reality as it is, but became the distorting mirror of the individual and his inner struggle.
In 1915 Egon seemed to abandon the excesses that had characterized his life and married Edith Harms, a young bourgeois. While war broke out around him, he sought a little relief from his suffering, a reassuring refuge for appeasing his anxiety for living. He dedicated some of the most delicate and serene paintings to Edith herself. He thus found his full artistic maturity in the years closer to his death. The compositional tension gave way to a new flexible and colouristic balance which supported a more peaceful vision, slightly tinged with melancholy. The last great unfinished oil painting, The Family, was dedicated to this new state of mind. The desire for parenthood, of creation through couplehood is reflected in it.
Egon Leon Adolf Schiele, better known as Egon Schiele (Tulln, June 12 1890 – Vienna, October 31 1918), Austrian painter and engraver.