Egon Leo Adolf Ludwig Schiele (German: [ˈeːɡɔn ˈʃiːlə] ; 12 June 1890 – 31 October 1918) was an Austrian Expressionist painter. His work is noted for its intensity and its raw sexuality, and for the many self-portraits the artist produced, including nude self-portraits. The twisted body shapes and the expressive line that characterise Schiele's paintings and drawings mark the artist as an early exponent of Expressionism. Gustav Klimt, a figurative painter of the early 20th century, was a mentor to Schiele.
Egon Leo Adolf Ludwig Schiele was born on 12 June 1890 in Tulln, Lower Austria. His father, Adolf Schiele, the station master of the Tulln station in the Austrian Federal Railways, was born in 1851 in Vienna to Karl Ludwig Schiele, a German from Ballenstedt and Aloisia Schimak; Egon's mother Marie (née Soukup) was born in 1861 in Český Krumlov (Krumau) to Franz Soukup, a Czech father from Mirkovice, and Aloisia Poferl, a German Bohemian mother from Český Krumlov. Schiele had three sisters, Elvira, Melanie and Gertrude. Elvira died as a child of congenital syphilis. Before the birth of Schiele, his mother had suffered the stillbirths of three sons.
According to family lore, Adolf Schiele had contracted syphilis during his honeymoon in Trieste, when he had visited a brothel after his new wife, scared of the consummation of the marriage, fled their bedroom. When the couple had sex a few days later, her husband then passed on the disease to his wife. As a child, Schiele was fascinated by trains and would spend many hours drawing them. Seeing Schiele's drawing as a detriment to his son's schoolwork, his father destroyed these sketchbooks.
Schiele Sr. was known to have had an interest in collecting minerals and butterflies, and also liked to draw. Schiele's family life was however deeply influenced by his father's illness and as the syphilis progressed it left him in a state of mental confusion and would oftentimes cast him into fits of rage.
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 a sexual interest in his younger sister Gertrude (who was known as Gerti), and his father once broke down the door of a locked room that Egon and Gerti were in to see what they were doing, only to discover them developing 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.
When Schiele was 14 years old, his father died from syphilis, and the family, which had been fairly wealthy, was left impoverished. Before his death, Schiele's father, in a fit of insanity, had burned the railway stocks he owned, which would have supported the family financially. Schiele's elder sister, Melanie, became the family's sole breadwinner when she was hired as a ticket clerk at the local railway station.
Schiele and his younger sister, Gerti, became wards of his uncle-in-law (by marriage to Schiele's paternal aunt, Maria), Leopold Czihaczek, also a railway official. Although he wanted Schiele to follow in his footsteps and was distressed at his lack of interest in academia, he recognised Schiele's talent for drawing and allowed him a tutor, the artist Ludwig Karl Strauch. Eventually, the uncle renounced his guardianship of Schiele, and Schiele became dependent on financial support from his mother to continue his art studies. This support was cut off due to his sister Melanie's objecting to the expense of it, and it caused a rift in the family.
In 1906, Schiele applied to the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) in Vienna, where Gustav Klimt had once studied. During his studies at the school, he explored sculpture and created a number of small-scale clay and plaster sculptures. Within his first year there, Schiele was sent, at the insistence of several faculty members, to the more traditional Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Akademie der Bildenden Künste) in Vienna in 1906. His main teacher at the academy was Christian Griepenkerl, a painter whose strict doctrine and ultra-conservative style frustrated and dissatisfied Schiele so much that he left after three years.
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 Vienna 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 Oskar 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.
Klimt invited Schiele to exhibit some of his work at the 1909 Vienna Kunstschau, where he encountered the work of Edvard Munch, Jan Toorop, and Vincent van Gogh among others. Once free of the academy's constraints, Schiele began to explore not only the human form, but also sexuality. Schiele's work was already daring, but it went a bold step further with the inclusion of Klimt's decorative eroticism and figurative distortions. He also painted tributes to Van Gogh's Sunflowers as well as landscapes and still lifes.
In 1910, Schiele began experimenting with nudes, and within a year, a definitive style featuring emaciated, sickly-coloured figures, often with strong sexual overtones, began to emerge. Schiele also began painting and drawing children.
Schiele began to participate in what would be numerous group exhibitions, including those of the Neukunstgruppe in Prague in 1910 and Budapest in 1912; the Sonderbund, Cologne, in 1912; and several Secessionist shows in Munich, beginning in 1911. In 1911, at the age of twenty-one, Schiele met the seventeen-year-old Wally Neuzil, who lived with him in Vienna and served as a model for some of his most striking paintings. She had previously modelled for Klimt and might have been one of his mistresses. Schiele and Wally wanted to escape what they perceived as the claustrophobic Viennese milieu, and went to the small town of Krumau in southern Bohemia. Krumau was the birthplace of Schiele's mother; today it is the site of a museum dedicated to Schiele. Despite Schiele's family connections in Krumau, he and his lover were driven out of the town by the residents, who strongly disapproved of their bohemian lifestyle, including his alleged employment of the town's teenage girls as models. Progressively, Schiele's work grew more complex and thematic, and he eventually began dealing with themes such as death and rebirth.
Together, the couple moved to Neulengbach, 35 km (22 mi) west of Vienna, seeking inspirational surroundings and an inexpensive studio in which to work. As had been the case in the capital, young people and teenagers gathered in Schiele's new studio in Neulengbach. Schiele's way of life aroused much animosity among the town's inhabitants, and in April 1912 he was arrested under suspicion of kidnapping and seducing a girl of 13.
When the police came to his studio to place Schiele under arrest, they seized more than a hundred drawings which they considered pornographic. Schiele was imprisoned while awaiting his trial. When his case was brought before a judge, the charges were dropped, but the artist was found guilty of exhibiting erotic drawings in a place accessible to children. In court, the judge burned one of the drawings ("depicting a very young girl dressed only above the waist") over a candle flame. The 21 days he had already spent in custody were taken into account, and he was sentenced to a further three days' imprisonment. While in prison, Schiele created a series of paintings depicting his jail cell.