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- Drawings Selected Watercolours and Drawings from the LEOPOLD MUSEUM Within Egon Schiele's oeuvre, drawings and watercolours occupy a position of key importance. In contrast to the works on paper by Gustav Klimt and most of the era's other artists, the great majority of Schiele's graphic works represent independently-realised pictorial compositions. The designs for his paintings were primarily worked out in small sketchbooks. The pictorial device that Schiele first made his own, and with which he proved his mastery, was the personal line, whereby he developed the strategies of accentuating and omitting to a high art. Like no other artist of his day, Schiele succeeded in using drawing alone – and here often nothing more than an outline – to communicate not only formal situations and their spatiality, but also emotions. And yet, Schiele was not only gifted in the art of drawing: He was also a colourist of great significance, and one does not do justice to his painting by merely relegating it to the function of filling in graphically defined spaces. Its emotional quality and its constructive function should not be overlooked. Schiele's unique position as a graphic artist within the ranks of the Expressionists is beyond question. None of them demonstrated such virtuosity and expressivity in the use of line: cuttingly hard or caressing, constructive or fragile, brittle and nervous as if tensely scrawled, imitative or tempestuously expansive. One must look far back in art history to find artists who demonstrated comparable genius in their graphic work. Without exaggeration, the names Holbein and Dürer come to mind. Thus, it should come as no surprise that two former directors of Austria's world-famous Albertina Graphic Collection made the following statements concerning Egon Schiele: Otto Benesch referred to him as one of the greatest graphic artist of all time, and Konrad Oberhuber accorded Schiele a special position in contemporary Austrian art, comparable to that of Michelangelo in the Renaissance. Rudolf Leopold |
 Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait, 1910. |
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