As he polished his technical skills, Schiele amassed a slew of clientele, many of whom he memorialized on canvas, and acquired a penchant for realism and introspection. Most exceptionally, Alessandra interviewed and photographed Gertrude Schiele and Adele Harms, the only two muses then still alive. She sent me the recordings, which was exceptionally exciting. Unfortunately, I don’t speak German, but I heard the tones of their voices and how haughty Adele still sounded. Alessandra confirmed to me that she had this very posh Viennese accent. Austrian painter Schiele was born into humble circumstances in Blumenstadt, a tiny yet dynamic Austrian town. Adolf Schiele, Tulln railway’s station master, was his father. Schiele was captivated by trains as a youngster and would spend countless hours sketching them, to the extent that his father felt compelled to trash his sketchbooks. Schiele went to the adjacent city of Krems to attend secondary school when he was 11 years old. Although his art centered on the human figure, Schiele—who had occasion to travel throughout Europe during his career—was also drawn to the land and cities. In fact, the artist's paintings of the countryside and his native Vienna comprise a significant portion of his work. This painting was inspired in part by his mother's hometown, Krumau, where he lived briefly in 1911. Schiele's landscapes—although often devoid of people—contain fascinating parallels with his figural work. His frequent use of a bird's-eye perspective in his landscapes calls to mind one of the most radical elements of his portraiture: his tendency to depict his sitters from above. This canvas contains other characteristic elements of Schiele's idiom as well, most notably, his use of boldly outlined and sharp contours. What causes this work to stand apart from his portrait work is the artist's use of and range of color, something for which Schiele was not known. Egon Schiele, Seated Woman with Legs Drawn Up (1917). The model for the work was the artist’s sister-in-law, Adele Harms. Collection of the

Lamb, Bill (31 December 2018). " "Life and Work of Egon Schiele, Austrian Expressionist Painter." ". ThoughtCo . Retrieved 5 April 2023. Egon Schiele: The Complete Works Catalogue Raisonné of all paintings and drawings by Jane Kallir, 1990, Harry N. Abrams, New York, ISBN 0-8109-3802-2. Schiele's portraits and self-portraits helped re-establish the vitality of both genres with their unprecedented level of emotional and sexual directness and use of figural distortion in place of conventional notions of beauty. Frequently depicting himself or those close to him, Schiele's portraits often present their sitters in the nude, posed in revealing, unsettling angles—frequently viewed from above—and devoid of secondary attributes often depicted in the portrait genre. At times, Schiele used traditional motifs, giving the intensely personal images a more general, allegorical statement on the human condition.

Schiele’s biggest visibility to date came from the Goltz exhibition, which revealed to the public his profound use of private iconography and grim allegory. Two characters stand out from the group, thanks to the particular aura they seem to project: Klimt and Koloman Moser. Coincidence? Wien 1900. Aufbruch in die Moderne, hrsg. von Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Wien 2019 (Ausst.-Kat. Leopold Museum, Wien, ab 15.03.2019). Egon Schiele: Erotic, Grotesque and on Display". ARTINFO. 1 April 2005 . Retrieved 17 April 2008. {{ cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= ( help)

was a seismic year in Vienna. As the Austro-Hungarian Empire crumbled, an intense period of creative vitality drew to an end with the deaths of two of its foremost artists. One was the preeminent and strikingly modern painter of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Gustav Klimt; the other the young, scandalous and prodigiously talented Egon Schiele. Both revelled in the immediacy of drawing, an ideal medium for exploring new ideas of modernity, subjectivity and the erotic. At the tender age of 20, Egon Schiele broke radically with the history of figurative painting, portraying the psychological state of his subjects rather than their physical characteristics. This approach resulted in a deep well of subversive drawings and paintings that unmasked his sitters—including, and perhaps most significantly, himself—as angsty, emaciated, gender ambiguous, and sexually experimental beings. Whitford, Frank (1989). Egon Schiele (World of Art). Thames & Hudson; World of Art Ser. ISBN 0500181837. Unlike his master, Klimt, with whom Schiele is most generally identified, he painted a large number of self-portraits, indicating an obsession with the self comparable to Picasso. Schiele’s aesthetic affected both Expressionist contemporaries such as Oskar Kokoschka and Neo-Expressionist successors such as Julian Schnabel, Francis Bacon, and Jean-Michel Basquiat .During the war, Schiele's paintings became larger and more detailed. His military service, however, gave him limited time, and much of his output consisted of linear drawings of scenery and military officers. Around this time, Schiele also began experimenting with the themes of motherhood and family. [13] His wife Edith was the model for most of his female figures, but during the war (due to circumstance) many of his sitters were male. Since 1915, Schiele's female nudes became fuller in figure, but many were deliberately illustrated with a lifeless doll-like appearance. [ citation needed] Schiele’s workshop became a meeting spot for Neulengbach’s delinquent youth since it was in the capital. Schiele’s lifestyle infuriated the town’s residents, and he was arrested in April 1912 for courting a girl of 13, who was under the consenting age of 14 at the time. When the authorities arrived at Schiele’s studio to arrest him, they confiscated over a hundred sketches that they deemed obscene.