Egon Schiele was born in 1890 in Tulln an der Donau, a small town near Vienna, and in a career of barely a decade produced some of the most viscerally powerful figurative art of the twentieth century. A precocious talent, he entered the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts at sixteen, where he quickly fell under the influence of Gustav Klimt, who recognized his genius and became his mentor. But where Klimt’s eroticism was decorative and golden, Schiele’s was raw, angular, and confrontational.
Schiele’s figures — often himself, depicted in contorted, sexually explicit poses — are rendered with a wiry, aggressive line that seems to flay the skin from the body, exposing nerve and bone. His self-portraits are unsparing acts of psychological exposure: the body twisted, the eyes staring, the hands clawing at empty space. Death and the Maiden (1915) and The Embrace (1917) show lovers entangled in embraces that are simultaneously tender and anguished, eros and thanatos inseparable. He was briefly imprisoned in 1912 on charges related to the display of erotic drawings — the judge burned one of his works in the courtroom.
Schiele died in the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918, three days after his pregnant wife Edith, at the age of twenty-eight. His influence on figurative Expressionism — from Kokoschka through Bacon to Lucian Freud and Jenny Saville — has been immense, and his tortured self-portraits remain among the most unforgettable images of the inner life.