Egon Schiele: Love And Death

by Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele, John Leighton (Foreword)

Although Egon Schiele died of the Spanish flu in 1918 at the age of twenty-eight, he left behind a substantial, though controversial, oeuvre that will forever mark him as one of Austria's most talented Expressionists. Influenced at first by Gustav Klimt, Schiele soon developed a style of his own, abandoning decorative ornamentation in favor of a highly expressive style. His work, which relates to fundamental aspects of human life--eroticism, sexuality, and death--created a scandal in early 20th-century Vienna, and the artist was denounced by critics and government authorities. In addition to his starkly realistic nudes, he also executed profoundly sensitive portraits in which he explored the inner essence of his subjects. In this volume Jane Kallir, author of numerous books on Egon Schiele, including the catalogue raisonne of his entire oeuvre, offers a fascinating survey of the artist's life and work. The majority of the works presented here--paintings, colored drawings, and photographs--are from the comprehensive Schiele collection of the Albertina Museum in Vienna.

Genres: Art

160 pages, Hardcover

First published May 15, 2005

Reviews

[Kamakana · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you like this review, i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com

020219: this is sort of the opposite of ad reinhardt, in that his work is pure abstraction, pure intellect, and schiele, if pure in any way, is pure visceral emotion. i love this contrast. there are some bio details corrected here, but mostly i am reminded how young he is, how free he is, how very much artist of his time. i look at his early work ca. 1910-16, his watercolors, portraits, expressive, naive, vibrant. even his allegorical structures, from klimt etc., have the same kind innocence no longer there in his later more humanist proficient elaborate and often unfinished work ca. 1916-19...

[dina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Egon Schiele is an Austrian painter, who lived only from 1890 to 1918. I loved many of Schiele's drawings, despite the Klimt influence. He is father died of syphilis when Egon was 15, leaving the youngster with some mixed feelings about sexuality. The biographer tells the artist's life story in a compelling way, without being overly familiar, and places it in context of surrounding German and Austrian art. To answer your burning question, he did not die of syphilis. It was the Spanish flu epidemic.

[Andrea Engle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Filled with emotionally-charged color plates ... includes a brief, tho' detailed biography ... one wonders what Schiele would have achieved if only he had lived longer ... catalogue of an exhibit at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, based on the vast holdings of the Albertina in Vienna ...