ABSTRACT
The life and work of the Austrian painter Egon Schiele form a chapter in the history of modern art which, though brief, is unforgettable in its combination of irrepressible talent, tortured vision, and personal agony. Schiele was the very embodiment of the artist maudit, and the course traced by his short, electric career in the Vienna of the turn of the century has an almost allegorical quality in its unequal mingling of suffering and accomplishment. Yet, Schiele enjoyed the encouragement of a succession of teachers, artists, and sympathetic spirits, and from the time he entered the Vienna Academy of Art at the age of sixteen, he lived the free, if desperately poverty-stricken, life of an artist. The eroticism that in Gustav Klimt is always enveloped in a hedonist's dream of pleasure is, in Schiele, turned into an unyielding exposure of anguish and pain.
