Egon Schiele
10.02.2012 - 01.06.2013
This exhibition, Egon Schiele, presents a comprehensive approach to the great Austrian Expressionist’s universe, through a selection of drawings, gouaches, and watercolors from Albertina, Vienna, home to one of the most important and extensive collections of works on paper in the world.
Approximately one hundred works are included in the exhibition, revealing the artist’s stylistic evolution. The exhibition traces a course through his oeuvre, examining early works created while he was attending the Akademie der bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Vienna, pieces he created while influenced by Gustav Klimt and the Viennese Jugendstil, and his departure from naturalism through a radical treatment of color to the use of new, disconcerting motifs, such as the explicit, erotic nude.
Egon Schiele developed a highly personal style through the decorative use of flat surfaces and fluid ornamental lines, a signature of the Viennese Secession. The expressionistic body language and gestures of his figures respond both to the influence of clinical photographs documenting Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot’s female patients, who suffered from hysteria in the Salpêtrière hospital located in Paris, and to Otto Schmidt’s erotic studio photographs. In his work, Schiele freed the erotic representation of the female nude from the ties to caricature or pornography, and eliminated the historical antagonism between beauty and ugliness, giving the feminine nude a renewed and different role in art. In Schiele’s work, the sick body and pathological disintegration of the self both transcend to the category of art.
Exploring the themes present in his work—landscapes, flowers, children, nudes, portraits, and self-portraits—the exhibition presents a survey of the creative oeuvre of Schiele, a significant figure of early 20th-century art who died prematurely when he was only twenty-eight.
Curator: Klaus Albrecht Schröder
Egon Schiele
Seated Couple, 1915
Watercolor, pencil, embossing, mounted on cardboard
51.8 x 41 cm
Albertina, Vienna, inv. no. 29766
The Exhibition
Egon Schiele
The cellist, 1910
Black chalk, watercolor on packing paper
44.7 x 31.2 cm
Albertina, Vienna, inv. no. 31178
Egon Schiele
Gerti in front of Ochre-Colored Drapery, 1910
Pencil, opaque color on Japanese vellum
55.1 x 34.7 cm
Albertina, Vienna, inv. no. 27943
Egon Schiele
Two Crouching Girls, 1911
Pencil, watercolor, opaque white on primed Japanese vellum
41.3 x 32 cm
Albertina, Vienna, inv. no. 27945
Egon Schiele
Seated Couple, 1915
Watercolor, pencil, embossing, mounted on cardboard
51.8 x 41 cm
Albertina, Vienna, inv. no. 29766
Egon Schiele
Erlösung, 1913
Opaque color, pencil on Japanese vellum
48 x 32 cm
Albertina, Vienna, inv. no. 29764
Egon Schiele
Reclining Female Nude with Legs Spread Apart, 1914
Pencil, opaque color on Japanese vellum
31.4 x 48.2 cm
Albertina, Vienna, inv. no. 26667
Egon Schiele
Self-Portrait in Yellow Vest, 1914
Opaque color, pencil on Japanese vellum
48.2 x 32 cm
Albertina, Vienna, inv. no. 31157
Egon Schiele
Self-Portrait Pulling down an Eyelid, 1910
Chalk, watercolor, opaque color on brown packing paper
44.3 x 30.5 cm
Albertina, Vienna, inv. no. 30395
Egon Schiele
Old houses in Krumau, 1914
Opaque color and pencil on Japanese vellum
32.5 x 48.5 cm
Albertina, Vienna, inv. no. 31158
Egon Schiele
Self-portrait with bare navel, 1911
Pencil and watercolor on Japanese vellum
55.6 x 36.4 cm
Albertina, Viena Inv. 33358
Artist
Schiele, Egon
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