egon shciele

Schiele was born in 1890 in Tulln, Lower Austria. His father, Adolf Schiele, the station master of the Tulln station in the Austrian State Railways, was born in 1851 in Vienna to Karl Ludwig Schiele, a German from Ballenstedt and Aloisia Schimak; Egon Schiele’s mother Marie, née Soukup, was born in 1861 in Český Krumlov (Krumau) to Johann Franz Soukup, a Czech father from Mirkovice, and Aloisia Poferl, a German Bohemian mother from Český Krumlov. [1] [2] As a child, Schiele was fascinated by trains, and would spend many hours drawing them, to the point where his father felt obliged to destroy his sketchbooks. When he was 11 years old, Schiele moved to the nearby city of Krems (and later to Klosterneuburg) to attend secondary school. To those around him, Schiele was regarded as a strange child. Shy and reserved, he did poorly at school except in athletics and drawing, [3] and was usually in classes made up of younger pupils. He also displayed incestuous tendencies towards his younger sister Gertrude (who was known as Gerti), and his father, well aware of Egon’s behaviour, was once forced to break down the door of a locked room that Egon and Gerti were in to see what they were doing (only to discover that they were developing a film). When he was sixteen he took the twelve-year-old Gerti by train to Trieste without permission and spent a night in a hotel room with her. [4]
Despite his military service, Schiele was still exhibiting in Berlin. He also had successful shows in Zürich, Prague, and Dresden. His first duties consisted of guarding and escorting Russian prisoners. Because of his weak heart and his excellent handwriting, Schiele was eventually given a job as a clerk in a POW camp near the town of Mühling. There, he was allowed to draw and paint imprisoned Russian officers; his commander, Karl Moser (who assumed that Schiele was a painter and decorator when he first met him), even gave him a disused store room to use as a studio. Since Schiele was in charge of the food stores in the camp, he and Edith could enjoy food beyond rations. [13]

Schiele was born in 1890 in Tulln, Lower Austria. His father, Adolf Schiele, the station master of the Tulln station in the Austrian State Railways, was born in 1851 in Vienna to Karl Ludwig Schiele, a German from Ballenstedt and Aloisia Schimak; Egon Schiele’s mother Marie, née Soukup, was born in 1861 in Český Krumlov (Krumau) to Johann Franz Soukup, a Czech father from Mirkovice, and Aloisia Poferl, a German Bohemian mother from Český Krumlov. As a child, Schiele was fascinated by trains, and would spend many hours drawing them, to the point where his father felt obliged to destroy his sketchbooks. When he was 11 years old, Schiele moved to the nearby city of Krems (and later to Klosterneuburg) to attend secondary school. To those around him, Schiele was regarded as a strange child. Shy and reserved, he did poorly at school except in athletics and drawing, and was usually in classes made up of younger pupils. He also displayed incestuous tendencies towards his younger sister Gertrude (who was known as Gerti), and his father, well aware of Egon’s behaviour, was once forced to break down the door of a locked room that Egon and Gerti were in to see what they were doing (only to discover that they were developing a film). When he was sixteen he took the twelve-year-old Gerti by train to Trieste without permission and spent a night in a hotel room with her.
In 1907, Schiele sought out Gustav Klimt, who generously mentored younger artists. Klimt took a particular interest in the young Schiele, buying his drawings, offering to exchange them for some of his own, arranging models for him and introducing him to potential patrons. He also introduced Schiele to the Wiener Werkstätte, the arts and crafts workshop connected with the Secession. Schiele’s earliest works between 1907 and 1909 contain strong similarities with those of Klimt, as well as influences from Art Nouveau. In 1908 Schiele had his first exhibition, in Klosterneuburg. Schiele left the Academy in 1909, after completing his third year, and founded the Neukunstgruppe (“New Art Group”) with other dissatisfied students. In his early years, Schiele was strongly influenced by Klimt and Kokoschka. Although imitations of their styles, particularly with the former, are noticeably visible in Schiele’s first works, he soon evolved his own distinctive style.

A great innovator of modern figure painting, Egon Schiele is known for creating erotic and deeply psychological portraits, on many occasions using himself as the subject. Schiele often used color sparingly, his work identifiable instead by his characteristic sinuous black line. In his many self-portraits, Schiele is typically nude and staring directly towards the viewer, making the works both revealing and confrontational. Schiele’s female subjects are often nude as well, their bodies portrayed in various contorted positions. Whether representing himself or others, Schiele’s pictures are strikingly raw and direct. A student of the famous Symbolist artist Gustav Klimt, Schiele’s body of landscapes (though only a small collection) evoked Klimt’s folkloric tone and flattened compositional space. Schiele was prolific, but his artistic career ended tragically when he fell victim to the Spanish flu in 1918 at only 28 years of age.
A great innovator of modern figure painting, Egon Schiele is known for creating erotic and deeply psychological portraits, on many occasions using himself as the subject. Schiele often used color sparingly, his work identifiable instead by his characteristic sinuous black line. In his many self-portraits, Schiele is typically nude and staring directly towards the viewer, making the works both revealing and confrontational. Schiele’s female subjects are often nude as well, their bodies portrayed in various contorted positions. Whether representing himself or others, Schiele’s pictures are strikingly raw and direct. A student of the famous Symbolist artist Gustav Klimt, Schiele’s body of landscapes (though only a small collection) evoked Klimt’s folkloric tone and flattened compositional space. Schiele was prolific, but his artistic career ended tragically when he fell victim to the Spanish flu in 1918 at only 28 years of age.

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, he ordered the National Socialist (Nazi) authorities to seize any European artwork that he didn’t approve of. Hitler rejected artwork which he believed insulted the classical ideals of human beauty. Egon Schiele’s drawings fell into this category and was judged as degenerate art. Some of the degenerate art was sold at auction in Switzerland in 1939 and more was disposed of through private dealers. About 5,000 items of degenerate art were secretly burned in Berlin later that year. Today, more and more countries are signing declarations and laws which commit to returning lost or stolen artworks to their rightful owners.
Egon Schiele, Squatting Girl 1917 © Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München

Egon Schiele grew up in an eccentric station of the city, in a quiet and abundant countryside between sunflowers, castles and the banks of the Danube. Early, his appetite for drawing led him to sublimate and transcend this countryside. Later, his painting Four Trees (1917), although then torn between his morbid inspirations of time and thirst for nature perfectly transcribe his first pencil strokes of his childhood. Another favorite topic of the child Egon Schiele is trains, that he collects and draws it supremely well. His father then saw the sign that his only son will take over his station agent job and encouraged him in this way, going even to burn some of his sketchbooks that do not represent those iron machines steam. The gradual deterioration of the health of the father and his early death, combined with maternal dramas, then provide Egon Schiele a vision of a dark world, tormented and sad. An vision enhanced by the fact that, in the early 1900s, Vienna is “the capital of suicide”: Ludwig Boltzmann, Otto Mahler, Richard Gerstl, Georg Trakl or Otto Weininger are among the famous people who kill themselves.
Born in June 12, 1890 in Tulln an der Donau, in the northwest of Vienna, from a father station agent and a mother from a peasant family, Egon Schiele grew up with two sisters, Melanie and Gerti. Siblings could have been composed of more members, but fate turned against the children of Marie Schiele who gave birth to a stillborn boy in 1881 and who lost one of his daughters, Elvira, born in 1883, then aged 10 years old. This fragile family balance is cracked more when Adolf Schiele contracts a fatal syphilis that he refuses to heal, abandoning then his family in 1905. These tragedies have undoubtedly influenced the work of Egon Schiele, hypersensitive of temperament. How not to think about his painting Egon Schiele Tote Mutter (1910), where this composition in three layers depicts the love-pain of a mother for a child who has not had a chance to emerge.

Egon Schiele. Autoportrait au gilet, debout, 1911. Gouache, aquarelle et crayon gras sur papier, monté sur carton. 51,5 x 34,5 cm. Ernst Ploil, Vienne. Photo : Courtesy of Ernst Ploil, Vienne
Egon Schiele’s work is indissociable from the Viennese spirit of the early 20th century. In just a few years, his drawing emerged as one of the peaks of expressionism.

Kuspit, examining Viennese art of the period, tells us that “The important thing about Schiele’s figures (is) that their psychological nakedness is flaunted, usually through the shivery, involuted line that articulates them. For all its firmness, it is a decorative, disintegrative line — disintegrative through its decorativeness — a kind of omen of the figure’s doom…” Specifically, in regard to this painting he states that “Klimt’s residual decorative ideas (are) used to dramatic effect…(and)…all pretense of civilized impersonality is gone… the difference between private and public is lost.” (my highlights)
However, we should begin by looking at the information which leads us to believe in the interpretation of Gutersloh, first, as a self-portrait. This idea is not present with any clarity prior to Comini. But when taken together, statements as a whole seem to provide cohesion that lead towards this conclusion for someone like Comini to build upon.

References:

http://www.wikiart.org/en/egon-schiele
http://www.artsy.net/artist/egon-schiele
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/life-motion-egon-schiele-francesca-woodman/five-things-know-egon
http://www.carredartistes.com/en/blog/the-very-famous-egon-schiele-n124
http://www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr/en/exhibitions/exhibition/egon-schiele.html
http://medium.com/contemplate/egon-schiele-4329541a3345
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egon_Schiele