The painter Egon Schiele was born on this day in 1890 in Tulln, Austria.
Schiele’s father was the manager of the railway station in Tulln and the family lived in an apartment above the platform. Egon spent much of his childhood obsessively sketching the trains. Some of these sketches survive, but most were burned by his father, who gradually lapsed into insanity due to syphilis and who died when Egon was 14. In 1909 Schiele was accepted as a student at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. (Another applicant that year, Adolf Hitler, was rejected.)
His genius was undeniable, but Schiele chafed under the conservative artistic teachings of the Academy. He created a series of ambitious drawings that were radically different from his school exercises and boldly introduced himself to Gustav Klimt, a popular Viennese painter who Schiele especially admired. “Do I have talent?” he asked Klimt. “Much too much,” was Klimt’s response, and the older painter introduced Schiele to the Viennese art world, referred models to him, and arranged his first commissions and exhibitions.
Schiele was certainly profoundly influenced by Klimt’s art nouveau style and sexual imagery, and early in his career he was seen as a lightweight Klimt imitator. But Schiele soon settled on a highly personal style in which Klimt’s penchant for draughtsmanship and beautifully decorative and erotic portraiture was replaced by a complete focus on bold lines at the expense of colorization and ornamentation and the depiction of isolated human figures, often caught in the throes of extremely raw sexual tension and posed in grotesquely vulnerable postures. Klimt kept his robust sex life discreet and never painted a self portrait, but Schiele created hundreds of self portraits and was determined, as a citizen of Freud’s Vienna, to go much further than his mentor in exploring the dark side of lust. “Have adults forgotten how corrupted, that is, how sexually driven and exposed they themselves were as children?,” Schiele once wrote. “I have not forgotten, for I suffered excruciatingly from it.”
Schiele’s work was widely condemned as pornographic, but wealthy clients began to purchase his erotic sketches and paintings. At the same time Schiele continued to cement his reputation as a serious artist as the star of exhibitions staged by the Vienna Secessionists, a group of artists who promoted modern art. Schiele lived openly with his mistress and model, and the pair decided to get away from Vienna and move to the country. Schiele’s notorious lifestyle and the nature of the art he was producing caused a firestorm of public disapproval in his new home, the village of Nuelengbach, and Schiele was arrested for “immorality” and “seduction.” After a month in jail, Schiele was released, but not after the judge burned one of his drawings during a public court proceeding.
The start of the First World War found Schiele back in Vienna and newly married to Edith Harms, a bourgeois girl who was probably in no way prepared for life with her maverick husband. Schiele was drafted into the Austrian army, but he was given a clerkship and allowed to live at home. Schiele’s creative output during the war years was phenomenal. Perhaps due to an improving marriage and domestic stability, Schiele began to move away from his voyeuristic sexual psychodramas to paint tender portraits of Edith, large allegorical and religious scenes, and a remarkable series of landscapes.
Gustav Klimt died in February, 1918, a victim of the worldwide flu epidemic, which killed 40 million people. Schiele sketched his mentor on his deathbed. The following month brought professional and personal triumphs for Schiele. The 49th Secessionist exhibit included 25 of his paintings, and Schiele was deluged with recognition, money, commissions, and a new studio. His wife became pregnant with their first child.
Schiele had been spared the dangers of the battlefield in the war, but he would not be saved from the epidemic that was decimating Europe. On October 26th, 1918, his wife came down with influenza. Schiele refused to isolate himself and Edith died in his arms two days later. Schiele’s own lifeless body was discovered in his studio by a friend on October 31st. He was twenty-eight years old.