Egon Schiele
Drew the body without flattery for ten years and was dead at twenty-eight.
Egon Schiele was born at Tulln in Austria in 1890, entered the Vienna Academy at sixteen, and left it under Gustav Klimt's encouragement to work in a manner nobody had asked for: contorted, emaciated figures, drawn with a hard nervous line and coloured in flat unnatural patches, with a directness about sex that got him briefly imprisoned in 1912. He painted landscapes and towns as well, seen from above and built from the same angular geometry. He and his pregnant wife Edith both died in the influenza pandemic in October 1918, three days apart, when he was twenty-eight.
The drawings and watercolours are the practical market and are numerous — this was an artist who drew constantly — and they are also extensively faked, with the Kallir catalogue raisonne the essential reference. Provenance across 1938 to 1945 is a matter of active litigation for this artist more than most, following the Grunbaum and Lederer collection cases, and any Austrian or German ownership history before 1945 requires proper examination. The sheets are frequently on thin paper, light-struck and previously mounted. The paintings are very few and are almost entirely institutional.
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