The Austrian artist Egon Schiele was solely 28 when he died in 1918, however he left behind about 400 work and round 3,000 works on paper—greater than many artists produce in a lifetime twice as lengthy. The artwork world has tried to make sense of this prolific output by parsing a scant decade of exercise into distinct intervals.
Throughout Schiele’s nice rediscovery after the Second World Struggle, explains the New York scholar and curator Jane Kallir, it was his earlier radical work, particularly the unusual and sinuous self-portraits, that critics. In the meantime, the artist’s later and “extra conventionally stunning” work tended to get much less consideration, she says. That can change this month, when a brand new present on the Leopold Museum in Vienna highlights the artist’s First World Struggle years.
Altering Instances: Egon Schiele’s Final Years, 1914-18 options round 130 works, together with the artist’s final portray, Portrait of the Painter Albert Paris von Gütersloh (1918) on mortgage from the Minneapolis Institute of Artwork and his best-known picture of the interval, the pencil-and-gouache Seated Lady with Bent Knees (1917) from Prague’s Nationwide Gallery.
Schiele’s Decaying Mill (Mountain Mill) (1916) Photograph: Landessammlungen Nö
A significant turning level got here for the artist in 1915. That 12 months he broke for good together with his early muse, Wally Neuzil, and married the extra middle-class Edith Harms. The Prague portrait of a seated lady indicators a shift away from aggressively erotic depictions of girls to feminine figures in possession of their sexuality, Kallir says.
It was additionally the 12 months he lastly joined the military, and his wartime expertise marks many works within the present, together with a ferocious 1916 panorama, Decaying Mill (Mountain Mill), whose turbulence was meant to replicate his world’s wider turmoil. A not too long ago attributed watercolour portrait, the doll-like Russian Soldier (1916) that exhibits what could also be a Russian prisoner of warfare, will go on public show for the primary time.
Russian Soldier (1916) is a not too long ago attributed watercolour by Schiele, painted two years earlier than he died Photograph: Johannes Stoll; Belvedere Vienna
Kallir, who’s the creator of Schiele’s catalogue raisonné, says the Gütersloh portrait, with its wild brushwork and fiery palette, signifies “the place Schiele might need gone, had he lived”. However the present ends, because it should, subsumed by demise.
Gustav Klimt—who was not solely the younger Schiele’s mentor, however his patron—died following a bout of influenza in February 1918. Then that autumn, Harms, who was six months pregnant, died of the flu, and Schiele, who was additionally unwell, adopted a matter of days later. The ultimate works within the present embody the unusual, skeletal drawing Head of the Lifeless Gustav Klimt and Schiele’s figment-like sketch of his spouse, made on her deathbed. And—lastly—Schiele’s personal demise masks, which Kallir describes as “the final self-portrait”.
• Altering Instances: Egon Schiele’s Final Years, 1914-18, Leopold Museum, Vienna, 28 March-13 July
