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Egon Schiele

© Nick Burton

Egon Schiele was born on June 12, 1890, in Vienna, the son of the stationmaster of the provincial railroad station at Tullin. Schiele was something of a prodigy at a very early age, and his extraordinary drawing skills received much attention from a local art teacher. Schiele's father contracted syphilis, and died in 1904, leaving Egon as a ward of his uncle who was an inspector at the North Railroad Station in Vienna.

The sexual nature of his father's illness had quite an effect on the young artist, and he is said to have learned a good deal about his body and his sexuality with his younger sister Melanie. He persuaded his mother, at the protest of his uncle, to let him study art in Vienna, and he was advised by his professors to not study at the Kunstgerwebeschule (the School of Applied Arts), but rather the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Schiele passed the entrance examination with flying colors and was admitted to the class of a Professor Griepenerkel, not a proponent of modern art.

During his second year there, Schiele made a series of ambitious drawings that he made apart from his Academy assignments, and presented them at the Vienna atelier of Gustav Klimt. Klimt recommended Schiele for design commissions at the Wiener Werkstatte, Vienna's well respected arts association. With Klimt's praise and assistance, Schiele soon adopted a superior attitude, and as a consequence, was presented with a reform petition at the Academy.

Schiele's first independent works were shown at the 1909 International Kunstschau (art show) at Klimt's invitation, and the works were seen as merely poor imitations of Klimt's own unique style, as well as carrying influences from the Art Nouveau and Jugendstil. He soon after began working on an ambitious life-sized portait of his sister Gerti in a newer style, placing the figure against a white void that intensified it.

He soon found a deeply psychological foundation for his painting in a kind of exposition of sexuality that seemed to take in his father's illness and resulting madness as well as his own erotic drives. Some of his work also carries a voyeuristic quality, seen in paintings like "Self Portrait Nude" (1909).

On April 12, 1912, two constables arrived with a search warrant at his garden house outside Vienna, confiscating two drawings from his bedroom. He was taken to the town jail in Nuelengbach and placed in a basement cell . The villagers, not fond of Schiele's life-style that included an open relationship with his model Valerie Neuzil and his work of sexually explicit paintings, had filed charges of "immorality" against him. After 24 days under arrest, news reached Vienna and his friend Heinrich Benesch brought him watercolors and drawing materials. Schiele made thirteen watercolors in jail and kept a diary.