SCHIELE LANDSCAPES at the
 Vienna LEOPOLD MUSEUM

17 September 2004 - 31 January 2005
 

For the first time in the world, the Vienna Leopold Museum is presenting a comprehensive exhibition of Egon Schiele's extraordinary pictures of houses and townscapes, starting 17 September 2004 until 31 January 2006. The artist is famous most of all for his expressionist nudes and erotic portraits of women, but he was also a trailblazer in landscape painting. It is a little known fact that half his paintings are of landscapes and houses.

The exhibition is showing around 90 oil paintings, sketches and gouaches, of which 80 are by Egon Schiele. The director of the museum and collector Rudolf Leopold is curator of the exhibition and thus takes up the challenge of throwing light on this much neglected facet of Egon Schiele's oeuvre. Selected loans from international museums and private collectors supplement the exhibition. Besides works by Schiele, present-day photographs of the depicted motifs are on show; in some cases photograph, sketch and work are juxtaposed for comparison.

The exhibited works were completed between 1911 and 1915, a period when Egon Schiele was at the zenith of his creative powers. Schiele's visionary nature and his dream pictures of dead towns are more than just high points in the artist's work; they are also epoch-making in the genre of expressionist landscape painting. The special feature of these pictures of nature, landscapes and townscapes lies in their transcendence of topographical reporting by infusing aesthetic form with symbolic content: houses become faces, landscapes become moods – landscapes of the mind.
 

Egon Schiele, “Versinkende Sonne”, 1913

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Egon Schiele, Der Häuserbogen (“Inselstadt”), 1915

Egon Schiele, Hauswand am Fluss, 1915

Egon Schiele, Gelbe Stadt