Biography

Egon Schiele is an Austrian Expressionist artist who worked from 1906 to 1918. He began his career by enrolling into the Vienna Academy of Art at the age of 15. During his time there he founded a group of young similar artist called Neukunstgruppe, and would participate in various group exhibitions. While he left the Academy after only three years, his time there would become paramount to his career due to his encounter with Gustav Klimt, a well renowned artist in Vienna at the time. Schiele would eventually move forward with his own methods of art making. This style of art making would land the young artist in a Neulengbach jail cell. On April 13, 1912 Egon Schiele was arrested for “immorality” and “seduction”. The charges were in response of a portion of Schiele’s work that involved the depiction of children, and the involvement of children in his studio while “pornographic” drawing were out. Schiele spent 24 days imprisoned and was released with no charges against him. In 1914 he marries Edith Harms who accompanies him in Prague where he was drafted into the Austrian military. He is then transferred back home to Vienna where he is able to paint and produce numerous works of art. After that, he moved to a studio in Hietzinger Hauptstrasse, where he lived out the rest of his life with his wife Edith Schiele. Edith Schiele, pregnant with their first child contracts influenza and dies on the night of October 27, and her husband Egon following shortly behind her dying from the same disease only 3 days later. 

Photo and Info Credit

“Egon Schiele” The Art Story Art Insight <http://www.theartstory.org/artist-schiele-egon.htm> (May 4, 2016)

Comini, Alessanndra. Scheile in Prison. Connecticut: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1973.

Schroder, Klaus A & Sceemann, Harald. Egon Scheile and His Contemporaries – Austrian Painting and Drawing from 1900 to 1930 from the Leopld Collection, Vienna. New York: Neues Publishing Company.,1989.

Werkner, Patrick. Egon Scheile – Art, Sexuality, and Viennese Modernism. California: The Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 1994.

Kallir, Jane. Egon Scheile – Drawings and Watercolors. New York: Thames & Hudson Inc., 2003.