Egon Schiele in Vienna: Portraits -

From time to time, in the history of art, there are characters who are difficult to classify into streams or styles, artists with an aesthetic language so intense and personal that is in some way, a stimulating mystery that delights and disturbs us, alternately and simultaneously leads us along paths of anxiety and ecstasy that we simply can’t forget.

This is exactly the case of Egon Schiele (Tulln, Austria, 1890-Vienna, 1918), an artist whose life and work was full of torments and obsessions. He was rutile and fleeting star in the fascinating, modernist Vienna of the Belle Epoque period, which vanished with his death a whole world of what we call the Danube worldview.

Together with Oskar Kokoschka and his mentor Gustav Klimt, who profoundly influenced his work, Schiele was one of the most outstanding artists of Viennese modernism. Although in the beginning of his career, his work was greatly influenced by Art Nouveau, soon he developed a style that combined decorative structures with the use of a broken line and aggressive fractured color, which is one of the best examples of Expressionism.

His most powerful and impressive works are perhaps the portraits of nude men and women in which he expresses through their positions a variety of emotions ranging from the desperation to passion.

A thrilling polarity between love and loneliness, as well as between death and life, stresses all his work. His penetrating nudes, full of a fleshless eroticism and openly exposed, somehow show an insolent and proud sadness.

It is precisely his portraits and self portraits – Schiele painted himself over 150 times, and with the exception of Rembrandt, whose life was much longer, no other painter in the history has made so many self-portraits – perhaps the best illustration of his extraordinary work, so for the first time we have the opportunity to attend an exhibition that has them all together at Belvedere Museum in Vienna until the 13^th of June www.belvedere.at

Curated by Agnes Husslein-Arco, and Jane Kallir, who are the leading authority on Schiele´s work, this exhibition brings together approximately one hundred pieces including paintings, drawings, acurarelas, and gouaches including: portraits of his models-lovers, his wife Edith, of Russian prisoners of war, he had to watch when he was recruited, and one of his greatest artistic obsessions, the child Erich Lederer. All these works were gathered from museums, galleries and private collections from Europe and the United States to make one of the major artistic events of the year.

In addition, as an appropriate complement to this exhibition, the Leopold Museum in Vienna, presents the largest collection of Schiele´s works in the world.

For more details http://www.leopoldmuseum.org/