The raw, radical, intense yet delicate portraiture of Egon Schiele

June 12, On This Day

In an artistic stint that has been called “short, intense, and amazingly productive”, Austrian Expressionist painter Egon Schiele is said to have become one of the best portrait artists of the modern era and a key contributor to the Vienna Secession movement.

Born on this day 132 years ago, on June 12, 1890, Schiele unfortunately succumbed to influenza at just the age of 28 in 1918 — but before that he created over 300 oil paintings and several thousand works on paper.

In most of his works, color was usually limited to shades of brown, with only certain areas of the body tinted red. His art was noted for its intensity and its raw sexuality. Schiele was also a prolific painter of self-portraits, described as “searing and psychologically complex”. The contemplation of his own existence was at the center of his artistic interest.

Schiele was obsessed by his own face and body, as he was by those of his models, who were often very young. His radical and developed approach towards the naked human form challenged both scholars and progressives alike, it is said.

In fact, some of Schiele’s landscape paintings reveal the same tension as his nudes; others display a quieter realism.

The Encyclopedia Of Visual Artists write: “The uncompromising nature of his oil painting attracted fierce opposition and earned the artist three weeks in prison (April-May 1912), which had a profound effect on him.”

In the autumn of 1918, the Spanish flu pandemic that claimed more than 20,000,000 lives in Europe reached Vienna — shortly thereafter, Schiele passed on, just 3 days after his pregnant wife Edith died of the same fate.

Egon Schiele had among his admirers many Jewish art collectors whose collections were looted under the Nazis: in Germany from 1933, in Austria from the Anschluss of 1938, and in France from the German occupation of 1940. As a result, numerous restitution cases in the 21st century involve artworks by Schiele.

The Encyclopedia sums up: “He saw the human figure or spirit as an animal rather than a moral human and insisted on absolute freedom for creative individuality and self-determination.”