Egon Schiele: Intense and Productive

Egon Schiele - Self-Portrait - 1911 - Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on paper - 20 1/4 x 13 3/4 in. (51.4 x 34.9 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (click photo for larger image)Austrian Expressionist artist Egon Schiele (1890-1918) experienced both a life and career that were “short, intense, and amazingly productive. Before succumbing to influenza in 1918 at the age of twenty-eight, he created over three hundred oil paintings and several thousand works on paper. The human figure provided Schiele with his most potent subject matter for both paintings and drawings.” (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Shiele’s portraits often featured nudes that were unapologetic, contorted, and emotionally charged. During his brief career, he carved himself a distinct niche in 20th-century art with his beguiling, sinuous figurative approach. This work helped re-establish the vitality of the portraiture genre with its unprecedented level of emotional and sexual directness and use of figural distortion in place of conventional notions of beauty. Frequently depicting himself or those close to him, Schiele's portraits often present his sitters in the nude, posed in revealing, unsettling angles—frequently viewed from above—and devoid of secondary attributes often depicted in the portrait genre.

It is not surprising that fellow Austrian artist Gustav Klimt exerted the most powerful influence on Shiele. given the eroticism and figural approaches found in Klimt’s work. “Schiele's aesthetic greatly influenced both Expressionist contemporaries like Oskar Kokoschka, as well as Neo-Expressionist successors as varied at Francis Bacon, Julian Schnabel, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.” (The Art Story)

You can read more about all of these artists right HERE on What About Art?