Egon Schiele. The Complete Paintings 1909–1918 wer. angielska

From Rebellious to Revered

Obsessive, radical, disturbing: Egon Schiele

After  Egon Schiele  (1890-1918) freed himself from the shadow of his mentor and role model  Gustav Klimt, he had just ten years to inscribe his signature style into the  annals of modernity  before the Spanish flu claimed his life. Being a child prodigy quite aware of his own genius and a  passionate provocateur, this didn’t prove to be too big a challenge.

His  haggard, overstretched figures,  drastic depiction of sexuality, and  self-portraits  in which he staged himself with emaciated facial expressions  bordering between brilliance and madness, had none of the decorative quality of Klimt’s hymns of love, sexuality, and yearning devotion. Instead, Schiele’s work spoke of a  brutal honesty, one that would upset and irreversibly change Viennese society.

Although his works were later defamed as “degenerate” and for a time were almost forgotten altogether, they  influenced generations of artists  – from  Francis Bacon and Günter Brus  to  Tracey Emin. Today, his then-misunderstood oeuvre continues to fetch exorbitant prices on the international art market.

Presented in a  voluminous format  that captures all of the intensity and emotional truth of his work,  Egon Schiele. The Complete Paintings 1909–1918  features  221 paintings  and  146 drawings  that  retrace the fertile last decade of Schiele’s life. With many pieces  newly photographed  for this edition, these works are paired with  excerpts from his countless writings and poems, as well as essays introducing his life and oeuvre, to situate the Austrian master in the context of European Expressionism and trace his extraordinary legacy.