Egon Schiele he was an artist with an unconventional and narcissistic personality. Most of his works are characterized by a dark and visionary aspect, obsessively focused on mainly erotic themes. He favored young models without shame and preferably with a thin body, typical of teenagers. His first model was his sister Gerti (Gertrude). In a portrait of 1909 she depicts her inspired by the works of Klimt. The second model, Wally Neuzil, of whom she made several erotic drawings. One of the most important paintings, which manifests the love relationship between the two lovers, is entitled "Death and girl". It is a tragic embrace in which the painter highlighted the passionate farewell between the two lovers. His was a sentimental passion that was almost always brief and morbidly led to exasperation that he himself led in the end to escape an intimate and overbearing violence that he would not have been able to control.
Egon Schiele, Austrian painter and draftsman, was born on June 12, 1890 near Vienna and died on October 31, 1918 in the same city. His father, born in Vienna, was station master of the State Railways, Schiele's mother, born Soukupova in 1861 in Krumlov, came from a family of peasants and artisans from southern Bohemia. Egon had two sisters, Mélanie and Gertrude, the eldest, Elvira, who died in 1893. Perhaps his tormented, almost misogynistic personality is to be found in his relationship with his mother, a maternal and loving figure towards his children, as opposed to a loving woman, a necessarily erotica.
From childhood, Egon Schiele showed an interest in drawing, which he practiced tirelessly. His education took place first at the elementary school in Tullan, then at the university in Krems and at the high school in Klosterneuburg. From 1905, the year of his father's death, he began to paint his first paintings, including self-portraits. The death of his father clouds his youth, already difficult for an introverted and at the same time intolerant character, it will give him a dark and tortured vision of the world. His uncle will become his guardian, who will try, unsuccessfully, to guide the boy towards a career in the railways, at the École Polytechnique Supérieure. His mother, despite her conflicted relationship with her son, and with the support of his drawing teacher, Schiele entered the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1906, acquiring general painting techniques from Professor Christian Griepenkerl, a conservative academic painter . But their relationship between the two turns out to be rather stormy: Schiele, no longer able to support the academic tutelage of his teachers, leaves the Academy, followed by friends who share the same convictions. He then founded the Seukunstgruppe (Group for the New Art), thus making himself noticed by Arthur Roessler, art critic of the Journal Ouvrier, who will support him in the future. Among the members of this group is Anton Peschka, whose friendship will mark Schiele's life: each will support each other to promote their first works, and Peschka will marry in 1914 one of Egon's sisters, Gertrude. Schiele discovers a different art in Vienna during an exhibition of artists of the second movement of Sezession (Secession in French), closer to Art Nouveau. At the age of 17, in 1907 he met Gustav Klimt, then 45 years old, in whom he recognized his model and spiritual master. The admiration is mutual between the two artists.
1909 saw Schiele's first participation in a public exhibition in Klosterneuburg. In the same year he exhibited his works at the International Exhibition of Fine Arts in Vienna.
If in his beginnings Schiele remained close to Jugendstil (name given to the Secession movement in Germany by the magazine Jugend), he gradually distanced himself. He made numerous portraits of friends and self-portraits, which were exhibited in numerous Austrian and German galleries: at the Budapest Exhibition House, with the "Groupe du Nouvel Art", at Glozt in Munich, with artists of the "Cavalier Bleu" and at the exhibition “Groupe Particulier” of Cologne. But only a small part of the critics recognizes his talent, the other part judges his works excessive, the result of a lost mind. In 1911 he joined the "Sema" group in Munich, which already included Klee and Coubine. The same year he met a young woman with a well-known reputation, Wally Neuzil, former model of Klimt, who became his model and his partner. Both moved to the provinces, to Krumlov, near the Vltava, in southern Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). However, the inhabitants of Krumlov, while accepting him, find it difficult to relate to him, too often haughty and unpleasant, also due to the customs he defined as too free for the environment where the value of the family was consecrated. And this is how the artist is forced to leave the city to settle in Vienna. The artist's reception was certainly no longer open: Schiele's profusion of drawings of an erotic nature, combined with suspicions of embezzlement of young teenagers against him, led to his arrest in 1912.
He was obsessed with semi-dressed or naked teenage models and this fact, later, caused him many problems, as he was even arrested due to a false complaint for corruption of a minor that earned him twenty-four days in prison, for having insulted morals publish. But his was not a provocation, but rather something intimate and personal that he could no longer hold back. Some of his paintings, mostly nudes, were confiscated by the county court. In 1913, Schiele decided to leave his partner Wally Neuziel and moved to Carinthia and then to Trieste. His obsession with young, almost childish models leads him to constant disagreements with the people who try instead to help him, recognizing in Egon a morbidity towards a manic and increasingly growing eroticism. Schiele's fame gradually increased outside Austria. In 1913 and 1914 he participated in numerous international exhibitions: Budapest, Cologne, Dresden, Munich, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Brussels, Paris and Rome. He is exhibited for the first time in the Secession pavilion. Between 1913 and 1916 he published his works and poems in the Berlin weekly Die Aktion. In 1916, a special issue entitled Cahier d'Egon Schiele was published, with his drawings and woodcuts.
In 1914, the artist met the two sisters who lived opposite his studio in Heitzingerstrasse, Adèle and Edith Harms. At the intervention of some characters who recognize his talent, he is exempted from armed service and does his war service in the administration. Thus he can continue to paint and exhibit in Austria, Germany and Scandinavia. Four days before his war service, he married Edith Harms, three years his senior, on June 17, 1915, thus ushering in a less troubled period in her creation and in his life.
On 21 June he began his service in Prague, accompanied by Edith who had moved into the Hotel Paris. From May 1915, he worked as a clerk in a prison camp in Lower Austria, where he made some portraits of detained officers. In 1917 he was transferred to Vienna and on 5 January 1918 Klimt died, of whom Schiele painted a portrait on his deathbed. In March, the 49th Viennese Secession Exhibition will be held, chaired by Klimt himself.
The painter did not have time to carry out most of his tasks: on October 28, 1918, his wife, then in her sixth month of pregnancy, died of the Spanish flu, which then spread throughout Vienna, and claimed millions of victims in Europe. Egon Schiele died of the same disease three days later, on October 31, 1918, also ending his inner torment.
Presentation video of the biographical film of the artist (2016) directed by Dieter Berner
