Egon Schiele Prints

About Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele was born in June 1890 at Tulln on the Danube, where his father was the stationmaster, and entered the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1906 at sixteen, the youngest student in his year. He found its teaching under Christian Griepenkerl stifling and left after three years, founding the Neukunstgruppe with fellow students in 1909. Gustav Klimt had taken him up in 1907, buying his drawings, trading his own for them and introducing him to patrons and to the Wiener Werkstätte. Schiele's line, angular and nervous where Klimt's was ornamental, made him the leading draughtsman of Austrian Expressionism. He worked in Vienna and briefly in Krumau and Neulengbach, where in 1912 he was jailed for twenty-four days over the drawings in his studio. Self-Portrait with Physalis, painted that year and now in the Leopold Museum in Vienna, is the best known of the dozens of self-portraits in which he studied his own face and hands. In March 1918 his fifty works at the 49th Secession exhibition were a critical and commercial success; in October his pregnant wife Edith died of the Spanish flu and he followed her three days later, aged twenty-eight. The intensity of that line is what hangs on a wall: a face, a contour, nothing spare.