Egon Schiele was a critical representative of Austrian Expressionism. Although the artist had a very short life and career – Schiele died at age 28 – his oeuvre was extensive.
Within the ten years of his artistic career, Schiele painted about 330 oil paintings and finished thousands of drawings. His work is known for its intensity and raw sexuality. An artist with a clearly defined style, Egon Schiele mainly produced self-portraits and a large number of figurative paintings.
1. Egon Schiele Lost His Father at the Age of 14
Egon Schiele was born in 1890 in Tulln, Austria. His father, Adolf Schiele, was the station master of the Tulln station. As a child, Egon was obsessed with trains and filled sketchbooks with drawings of trains – until his father had enough of all the drawings and destroyed his son’s work.
When Adolf Schiele died of syphilis, Egon was only 14 years old. The artist is said to have never really recovered from the loss. Years later, he described his pain in a letter to his brother: “I don’t know whether there is anyone else at all who remembers my noble father with such sadness.” In the letter, he also explained: “I don’t know who can understand why I visit those places where my father used to be and where I can feel the pain … Why do I paint graves and many similar things? Because this continues to live in me.”
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2. He Became a Protégé of Gustav Klimt
At the age of 16, Schiele moved to Vienna to study at the Academy of Fine Arts. One year later, the young art student got to know the artist Gustav Klimt, who he admired and who would become his most important mentor throughout his career.
Klimt invited Egon Schiele to exhibit his work at the Vienna Kunstschau in 1909. There, Schiele also encountered the work of artists like Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh, which proved highly inspiring for the young artist.
3. His Early Works Were Inspired by Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka
In his early years, Schiele was influenced by Gustav Klimt and also by another Austrian expressionist: Oskar Kokoschka. Some elements of these artists’ styles can be found in many of Schiele’s early works, as observed in the examples below:
This first piece, Portrait of Gerti Schiele (1909) by Egon Schiele is composed of oil, silver, gold-bronze paint, and pencil on canvas. This piece demonstrates the distinctive style of the Art Nouveau movement and was created in Vienna, Austria. The figure depicted in this painting is elegant and refined, and the subject is Gerti Schiele, Egon Schiele’s youngest sister after whom he created many artworks. This work is now housed in New York City’s Museum of Modern Art and is considered a piece with remarkable composition in Schiele’s catalog.
Standing Girl in a Plaid Garment (1909) is another Egon Schiele piece in which one can see his early influences. Egon Schiele’s largest known drawing, this piece is composed of brown wrapping paper and its dimensions are 1.6 meters x 72.7 centimeters. Today, this artwork is considered to be highly erotic and characteristic of twentieth-century Viennese art, reflecting the sentiments of Schiele’s contemporaries such as Sigmund Freud.
After Schiele left the Academy of Fine Arts in 1909, he evolved his style more with his new freedom. During this time, Egon Schiele developed a style dominated by nudity, eroticism, and what is often called figurative distortions.
4. He Was Involved in a Love Triangle With Klimt and Wally Neuzil
Gustav Klimt introduced the 20 years younger Egon Schiele to a lot of other artists, many gallerists, and to his models. One of them was Wally Neuzil, who is rumored to have been also Klimt’s mistress. Despite her relationship with Klimt, in 1911, Wally Neuzil and Egon Schiele moved to Krumau in the Czech Republic.
The two had an affair that lasted four years until Wally obviously had enough of that in 1916 and moved back to her older lover, Gustav Klimt. Klimt was known to have younger female lovers, such as his other muse, Emilie Flöge, and painted striking female portraits throughout his own artistic career.
Egon Schiele alludes to this love triangle in his painting The Hermits (1912), which shows Schiele and Klimt, dressed all in black and standing entwined. The red elements in the painting are said to reflect Wally Neuzil’s red hair.
5. He Once Spent 24 Days in Prison
After Wally Neuzil went back to Vienna, Egon Schiele was driven out of town in Krumau by his neighbors. The local people felt offended by Schiele’s lifestyle and were tired of seeing a naked model posing in front of the artist’s house.
Egon Schiele decided to move on to the village of Neulengbach, Austria. However, the inhabitants of this little Austrian village did not like the artist’s open lifestyle either. Schiele’s studio there was rumored to have been a place where many delinquent juveniles hung out.
In April 1912, Schiele himself was arrested for seducing a young girl. In his studio, the police found hundreds of drawings, a lot of them considered pornographic. Until his trial began, Schiele was imprisoned for 24 days. In the trial, the charges of seduction and abduction were dropped – but the judge found him guilty of exhibiting erotic drawings in front of young children.
6. He Died Three Days After His Pregnant Wife
After being imprisoned, he moved back to Vienna, where his friend Gustav Klimt helped him to re-socialize in the art scene. In the following years, Schiele got more and more international attention.
In 1918 his work was exhibited at the Vienna Secession’s 49th annual exhibition. However, with the end of World War I, the Spanish flu spread all over the world. Neither Schiele nor his wife Edith could escape becoming infected, and they both fell ill.
On October 28, 1918, Edith Schiele died while six months pregnant. Egon Schiele died only three days later, on October 31, 1918, at the age of 28.
7. There Have Been Disputes Over Schiele’s Work In Recent Years
In 2023, more than a hundred years after Egon Schiele’s death, there were major disputes between the Office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and three U.S. museums that owned and displayed Schiele’s works: The Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh, and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College. Because these works belonged to Jewish collector and cabaret performer Fritz Grünbaum, whose collection was seized by the Nazis during World War II, his descendants began trying to recover roughly a dozen Schiele works that had been improperly acquired.
One of the Schiele pieces in question was a 1916 work titled Russian War Prisoner, which was in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Despite Grünbaum’s descendants’ pleas, the museum maintains that it is a ‘good-faith possessor’ of the work and did not acquire it through illegal means. In 2024, a judge rejected a motion submitted by the collector’s family, allowing the piece to (at least temporarily) continue its residence in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection.
Originally published: September 5, 2019. Last updated: July 7, 2024.
