Egon Schiele: The Egoist

Egon Schiele (18901918) was one of the most popular and influential painters to emerge from turn-of-the-century Vienna. Before his premature death at 28, he managed to be thrown in prison on a morals charge and also to create a strongly erotic body of work, both deeply expressive drawings and sublimely beautiful paintings. This enfant terrible of pre-WWI Vienna worked in the shadows of Klimt and Freud, but he found his own voice, and his own nude body was his best model. Egon Schiele delves into both his controversial sexual themes and neglected aspects of Schiele's art, notably his formal experiments and his later expressionistic portraits and allegorical paintings — works that reveal much about the importance of his short career.