Egon Schiele was an Austrian painter, born on June 12, 1890, in Tulln, a small town on the Danube, who died in Vienna in 1918 at the age of 28. He was the protégé of Gustav Klimt, and he drew the human body, his own included, with a hard, broken line that Vienna found shocking.
People remember him for his self-portraits, for the jail term he served over his drawings in 1912, and for a death that came three days after his wife's.
For most of his career the capital kept him at a distance. When it finally took him up, his success lasted only a few months, from the spring of 1918 until his death on October 31.
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Schiele started out far from the studios of the capital. His father, Adolf, ran the railway station in Tulln. He died on January 1, 1905, most probably of the paralysis that late syphilis brings, and left the family poor.
The fourteen-year-old and his younger sister Gerti became the wards of a maternal uncle, also a railway man. The next year, at sixteen, Schiele sat the entrance exam of the Academy of Fine Arts, the school that trained the painters of Vienna, and passed it.
On October 13, 1906, he announced the news in a telegram of three words: "Egon brilliantly through."
The Academy's teaching was conservative, and the new student soon looked elsewhere. In 1907 he went looking for Gustav Klimt, the best known painter in the city and a man who encouraged young artists. Klimt took an interest in him and helped him find his first commissions.
Two years later Klimt also suggested that Schiele send four paintings to the Kunstschau, a large exhibition of new art held that year, known in English as the great International Art Show.
A group of his own
That same year Schiele left the Academy. With other students who had walked out, he founded a group of their own, the Neukunstgruppe, or New Art Group, and became its president. Three years later he would be sitting in a jail cell, charged over his drawings.
What You'll Discover
Why a small town drove him out.
What he painted in his jail cell.
What the judge did with one drawing.
What he wrote to a friend about marrying.
What the spring of 1918 brought.
How his last three days went.