EGON SCHIELE|8 MIN READ
Who Was Egon Schiele
A clear biography of the Austrian Expressionist, covering his training, relationship with Gustav Klimt, radical figure drawings, major works, and early death.
WRITER Moryarty
Born in Austria in 1890, Egon Schiele became one of the defining artists of Viennese Expressionism before dying at 28. His portraits, self-portraits and figure drawings replaced academic ideals of beauty with angular bodies, exposed skin and direct psychological observation.
His career developed during the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It included formal training in Vienna, support from Gustav Klimt, imprisonment over an erotic drawing, military service during the First World War and a major exhibition shortly before the 1918 influenza pandemic ended his life.
The artist at a glance
He worked mainly with pencil, black crayon, gouache and watercolour on paper. He often drew a continuous contour around the body, added colour to selected areas and left much of the sheet untouched. The exposed paper separates the figure from any identifiable room or setting.
Portraits and human bodies dominate his surviving work. His sitters included family members, patrons, children, sex workers, fellow artists, his lover Walburga “Wally” Neuzil and his wife Edith Harms. He also examined his own appearance in dozens of self-portraits, often altering his pose, facial expression and apparent age.
The pictures can appear spontaneous, but the compositions were carefully controlled. Hands, elbows and knees frequently reach toward the edges of the paper. A cropped foot or arm was often an intentional compositional decision rather than evidence of an unfinished study.
His early life in Austria
He was born on 12 June 1890 in Tulln an der Donau, a railway town northwest of Vienna. His father, Adolf Schiele, served as the stationmaster. His mother, Marie Soukup, came from Krumau, now Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic.
Railways appeared repeatedly in his childhood drawings. The family lived close to the tracks, and surviving schoolbooks contain sketches of engines and carriages. His father reportedly destroyed some drawings because he considered them a distraction from schoolwork.
Adolf suffered from syphilis and died in 1905. The boy's maternal uncle, Leopold Czihaczek, then became his legal guardian. Czihaczek wanted him to pursue a stable profession but eventually accepted his application to art school.
In 1906, at 16, he entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He studied under Christian Griepenkerl, a painter associated with historical and allegorical subjects. The academy required students to copy plaster casts and follow established rules for drawing the human body.
That system frustrated him. In 1909, he left the academy and helped establish the Neukunstgruppe, or New Art Group, with fellow students including Anton Peschka and Franz Wiegele. Their first exhibition took place at the Kunstsalon Pisko in Vienna later that year.
Gustav Klimt opens doors
By the time the teenager entered the academy, Gustav Klimt was Vienna's leading modern painter. Klimt had broken with the conservative Künstlerhaus in 1897 and helped found the Vienna Secession, an exhibition society that promoted new art from Austria and abroad.
The two artists met around 1907. Klimt encouraged the younger man, acquired drawings and introduced him to patrons and models. He also participated in the 1909 Internationale Kunstschau, where Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh were represented.
Klimt's influence is clear in the early work. Flattened backgrounds, patterned clothing and elongated silhouettes reflect the decorative language associated with the Secession. The 1908 portrait commonly called Red Hair Blue Hat belongs to this stage, when ornamental fabric still competed with the sitter's face and body.
Klimt did not turn his protégé into an imitator. He offered contacts and professional support without imposing a single method. By 1910, the younger painter had removed much of the gold, ornament and graceful surface rhythm from his pictures.
A harder line takes shape
The change became visible in the self-portraits of 1910. Bodies grew thinner, joints became sharper and skin was marked with green, red or ochre. Black crayon provided a dry, broken contour that differed from Klimt's smoother outlines.
Colour was applied selectively rather than used to model the entire body. A cheek, nipple, knuckle or patch of hair might receive several concentrated strokes while the surrounding paper remained bare. That economy gave small drawings the visual force of much larger paintings.
In 1911, he moved with Wally Neuzil to Krumau, his mother's birthplace. Residents objected to the unmarried couple and to the presence of young models at his studio. They left for Neulengbach, west of Vienna, within the same year.
Police arrested him in Neulengbach in April 1912 after a teenage girl had spent a night away from home in his company. Charges involving abduction and sexual misconduct were dismissed, but he was convicted because erotic drawings had been accessible to minors. He spent 24 days in custody, including the period before trial, and the judge burned one drawing in court.
The imprisonment did not end his career, but it changed his circumstances. He returned to Vienna and relied more heavily on established collectors, including the industrialist August Lederer and the art dealer Hans Goltz. Portrait commissions and exhibitions offered a more dependable income than the informal studio arrangements used in Neulengbach.
Personal change followed. In 1914, he became close to Edith Harms, who lived with her family across the street from his Vienna studio. He ended his relationship with Wally and married Edith on 17 June 1915, three days before reporting for military service.
His duties were less destructive to his work than frontline deployment would have been. He guarded Russian prisoners near Mühling and later worked in military supply offices. Officers sometimes allowed him to draw, and he produced portraits of prisoners and colleagues during his service.
Major works across a short career
Dead Mother I, painted in 1910, belongs to the first independent phase. It presents a dark maternal body enclosing a living infant, reversing the warmth expected from a conventional Madonna and Child composition. The subject connects with his recurring treatment of pregnancy, birth and mortality.
Self-Portrait with Physalis from 1912 shows the artist in a black garment beside a branch of orange Chinese lantern plants. The pale face, raised shoulder and cropped torso create an alert, guarded pose. The Leopold Museum in Vienna holds the painting as part of its large collection of his work.
Portrait of Wally Neuzil, also painted in 1912, gives Wally a direct gaze against a pale background. Its later ownership history became almost as prominent as the image. The picture was seized in New York in 1998 while on loan to the Museum of Modern Art, leading to a long restitution dispute that ended with a settlement in 2010.
The Hermits from 1912 presents two dark, full-length figures pressed together. The second figure is generally associated with Klimt, although the painting is not a literal double portrait. The artist later described it as a mourning picture, and its near-monochrome surface differs from his brighter watercolours.
Death and the Maiden was painted in 1915 after his break with Wally and marriage to Edith. A woman clings to a robed male figure on a bare ground. The title used today links their embrace with separation and death, subjects that became immediate realities during wartime.
Seated Woman with Bent Knee from 1917 shows Edith in striped stockings and a loose green garment. Her body is viewed from above, a perspective that turns the bent limbs into the structure of the composition. The Albertina in Vienna owns the gouache and black crayon drawing.
The Family, painted in 1918, began as a double portrait and was revised to show a man, woman and child. The male figure resembles the artist, while the woman is not a direct portrait of Edith. The child was imagined, since Edith was pregnant when she died and the couple had no surviving children.
Recognition followed by disaster
The 49th Vienna Secession exhibition in March 1918 gave him its main room. He designed the exhibition poster and presented 50 works. Sales and commissions followed, placing him in a stronger professional position after Klimt's death on 6 February that year.
That success lasted only a few months. Edith, six months pregnant, died from influenza on 28 October 1918. Her husband died from the same illness on 31 October, three days later. He was buried at Ober Sankt Veit Cemetery in Vienna.
His early death left a body of work concentrated into roughly a decade. Museums now treat the drawings as finished works rather than secondary preparations for paintings. Their blank grounds, broken contours and compressed poses influenced later artists interested in physical vulnerability, including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Jenny Saville and Tracey Emin.
Museums and collectors must also confront the ownership histories of works that passed through Austria during and after Nazi rule. The dispute over Portrait of Wally helped draw public attention to provenance research, restitution and the forced loss of Jewish-owned collections.
Living with expressive figure drawings
These works suit interiors where the paper and line can remain visible. A crowded gallery wall can overpower a small figure drawing, while a single print with generous space around it preserves the isolation found in the original sheet. Our Schiele collection includes portraits, seated figures and exhibition designs, and the Galerie Arnot exhibition print works well as a single statement piece.
Black aluminium suits his dark contours and handwritten signatures. The narrow profile of a black aluminium frame avoids introducing decorative carving that competes with the drawing. Free framing is available, though aluminium can feel too severe in rooms dominated by warm timber and woven fabrics. In those spaces a light pine frame reads softer beside cream walls, oak furniture and natural textiles.
One honest caution on mounts: avoid a window mat that crops a hand, signature or wide paper margin. Those empty margins are part of the composition, not spare space around it. Collectors who come to us asking for Schiele almost always want the smallest, most intimate sheets, so a modest A4 or postcard format often works better on a wall than a large blown-up print, which can flatten the tension of the original line.
Did you know?
- His birthplace inside Tulln's former railway station is now a museum devoted to his life and work.
- He held his first public exhibition in 1908 at the Imperial Monastery of Klosterneuburg, when he was 18.
- His younger sister Gerti frequently modelled for early portraits and later married his academy friend Anton Peschka.
- Klimt died in February 1918, and he made several drawings of his mentor's face and hands in the hospital morgue.
- The Leopold Museum holds 42 paintings and more than 180 works on paper, the largest museum collection devoted to the artist.
- His 1918 Secession poster depicts artists seated around a table, with his own figure positioned prominently at its head.
Quick answers we hear all the time
Where can I see his work in person? The Leopold Museum and Albertina in Vienna hold major groups of paintings and drawings. The Belvedere in Vienna, Neue Galerie in New York and Museum of Modern Art in New York also display important examples. Vienna is the only city where you can see paintings, works on paper and archival material in a single trip.
How can I distinguish an original drawing from a reproduction? A printed signature proves nothing because it is copied with the image. An original requires a documented chain of ownership, examination of the paper and pigments, and comparison with Jane Kallir's catalogue raisonné, the standard reference that assigns each authenticated work a K number.
How expensive are the original paintings? Houses with Colorful Laundry sold at Sotheby's London for £24.7 million in 2011. Works on paper usually cost less than major oils, but authenticated examples can still reach six-figure or seven-figure prices.
Did he make prints during his lifetime? Yes, but his output of etchings, drypoints, lithographs and woodcuts was small compared with his drawings. Buyers should distinguish those lifetime graphics from modern digital reproductions made after paintings or works on paper. A fine art reproduction is the sensible choice for most homes, since even a modest original drawing is priced beyond a decorative budget.
Are the images free of copyright in Europe? Copyright in the original works has expired because the artist died in 1918. A museum's new photograph or digital scan can carry separate usage conditions, so publication rights should still be checked with the institution that supplied the image.
About the author
Moryarty has curated vintage poster reproductions since 2015. Our team works between Barcelona and Lisbon and has spent more than a decade studying European exhibition posters, Expressionist drawing and the practical differences between museum images and prints made for domestic walls.