Dark, raw, and fractured, like fragments of a crumbling world—the paint application in Egon Schiele’s late oil paintings creates the impression of suffering, disintegrating bodies. His brushwork is powerful, offering a brutally honest glimpse into the deepest layers of human existence, oscillating between analytical truth-seeking and symbolist exaltation.

Few artists of his time placed themselves at the center of their work as frequently and explicitly as Schiele. His own body, often exposed, is subjected to painful torsions and contortions—pleas for help and strange exaltation alternate in rapid succession. The viewer is confronted, unflinchingly, with the physical dimension of psychological self-reflection. It is as if Egon Schiele were pushing the introspective gaze upon his own existence to an extreme of expressive dissection. As if he were translating the insights of the founding father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, into painting: fear, pain, and a foreboding of death are reflected in dark, pastose layers of paint, expressive brushwork, and visionary compositions.

At the age of fourteen, Egon Schiele was regarded as a child prodigy within his family. His drawing talent was especially admired by his aunt Marie and his uncle Leopold Czihaczek. Regular visits to his relatives’ elegant apartment in Leopoldstadt’s Zirkusgasse reinforced the young Schiele’s precocious artistic ambitions. He was determined to succeed as a painter, and in fact, it was the financial support of his uncle by marriage that enabled him, at sixteen, to enter the Academy as the youngest student of his cohort. Just a year earlier, the early death of his father had plunged the family into economic crisis: suffering from a syphilis-induced paranoid episode, Adolf Schiele had thrown the family’s financial securities into the fireplace in a fit of madness. At fifteen, Egon saw his hopes for an artistic career threatened. Three years after enrolling at the Academy, he broke with his teacher, rejecting his approach as too conservative, backward-looking, and eclectic. He left his studies prematurely.

Meanwhile, his drawings—executed with an inimitably confident line—shattered every taboo with their scandalous explicitness: emaciated adolescent bodies, exposed pregnant women, homoerotic love, masturbation, pain, pleasure, birth, and death. With green-violet, vermilion, and bluish hues, Schiele proved himself an avant-garde artist par excellence. 

The eternal cycle of becoming and perishing runs like a red thread through his œuvre. The simultaneity of death and life is evident in all phases of his work. In his final creative years, the young artist increasingly provoked through his painterly approach: applying oil paint more thickly and corporeally onto rough, sometimes unprimed canvas, modifying and overpainting details, leaving compositional changes visible. More and more often, he left elements unfinished, merely sketched. The effect is immediate and brutal. This self-assured, ambitious, and determined young artist—who would die at only twenty-eight—had become a merciless chronicler of a world in decline.

With the outbreak of the First World War, the latent atmosphere of oppressive stagnation erupted into an inferno. The old empire was disintegrating irreversibly. The war hysteria of many contemporaries clashed with the fading warnings of a few. Exaltation and despair collided with ruthless force. The world order of the Danube Monarchy would vanish within a few short years. What remained were disillusionment, poverty, and suffering.

Article by Markus Hübl