Egon Schiele, New Edition

Egon Schiele was a meteor that flashed across the galaxy of Viennese art at the beginning of the last century. Although he lived only twenty-eight years--dying quite suddenly of influenza in 1918 just as World War I came to an end--he left a stunning pictorial oeuvre. Schiele's obsession with sexuality, his own and that of others, made him at once a voyeur and a participant in that sexual imperative which Freud was concurrently plumbing with such unsettling results. The disturbing revelations of Schiele's unmasking portraiture and of the new science of psychology disclosed a collective cultural anxiety during the last years of the crumbling Austrian empire. Schiele was disturbingly his provocative explorations of erotica with their startlingly modern sensibilities do not prepare the viewer for the tenderness revealed in his lyrical landscapes and mostly unpeopled town scenes. These emit a haunting loneliness and are related to an obsession with pathos expressed in the artist's melancholy allegories and existential portraits.