The Austrian artist Egon Schiele was only 28 when he died in 1918, but he left behind about 400 paintings and around 3,000 works on paper—more than many artists produce in a lifetime twice as long. The art world has tried to make sense of this prolific output by parsing a scant decade of activity into distinct periods.
During Schiele’s great rediscovery after the Second World War, explains the New York scholar and curator Jane Kallir, it was his earlier radical work, especially the strange and sinuous self-portraits, that interested critics. Meanwhile, the artist’s later and “more conventionally beautiful” work tended to get less attention, she says. That will change this month, when a new show at the Leopold Museum in Vienna highlights the artist’s First World War years.
Changing Times: Egon Schiele’s Last Years, 1914-18 features around 130 works, including the artist’s very last painting, Portrait of the Painter Albert Paris von Gütersloh (1918) on loan from the Minneapolis Institute of Art and his best-known image of the period, the pencil-and-gouache Seated Woman with Bent Knees (1917) from Prague’s National Gallery.
Schiele's Decaying Mill (Mountain Mill) (1916) Photo: Landessammlungen Nö
A major turning point came for the artist in 1915. That year he broke for good with his early muse, Wally Neuzil, and married the more middle-class Edith Harms. The Prague portrait of a seated woman signals a shift away from aggressively erotic depictions of women to female figures in possession of their sexuality, Kallir says.
It was also the year he finally joined the army, and his wartime experience marks many works in the show, including a ferocious 1916 landscape, Decaying Mill (Mountain Mill), whose turbulence was meant to reflect his world’s wider turmoil. A recently attributed watercolour portrait, the doll-like Russian Soldier (1916) that shows what may be a Russian prisoner of war, will go on public display for the first time.
Russian Soldier (1916) is a recently attributed watercolour by Schiele, painted two years before he died Photo: Johannes Stoll; Belvedere Vienna
Kallir, who is the author of Schiele’s catalogue raisonné, says the Gütersloh portrait, with its wild brushwork and fiery palette, indicates “where Schiele might have gone, had he lived”. But the show ends, as it must, subsumed by death.
Gustav Klimt—who was not only the young Schiele’s mentor, but 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 also ill, followed a matter of days later. The final works in the show include the strange, skeletal drawing Head of the Dead Gustav Klimt and Schiele’s figment-like sketch of his wife, made on her deathbed. And—finally—Schiele’s own death mask, which Kallir describes as “the last self-portrait”.
• Changing Times: Egon Schiele’s Last Years, 1914-18, Leopold Museum, Vienna, 28 March-13 July
