Egon Schiele valuation
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.
What a work by Egon Schiele is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
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.
At a glance
- Born
- 12 June 1890, Tulln an der Donau
- Died
- 31 October 1918, Vienna
- Movement
- Expressionism
More on Wikipedia.
Klimt, the Kunstschau and Neulengbach
Schiele entered the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna in 1906 and was moved on to the Academy within the year. Klimt, whom he sought out in 1907, bought his drawings, arranged models for him, introduced him to patrons and to the Wiener Werkstätte, and invited him to show at the 1909 Kunstschau, where he saw work by Munch, Toorop and Van Gogh.
In 1911 he met Wally Neuzil, and the two moved to Neulengbach, west of Vienna, where he was arrested and jailed in 1912. He showed with the Neukunstgruppe in Prague in 1910 and Budapest in 1912, at the Sonderbund in Cologne in 1912 and with the Munich Secession from 1911, and his younger sister Gerti was one of his most frequent models.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
