How Egon Schiele Made Enduring Art from His Troubled Life and Times

“May you live in inter­est­ing times,” goes the apoc­ryphal but nev­er­the­less much-invoked “Chi­nese curse.” Egon Schiele, born in the Aus­tria-Hun­gary of 1890, cer­tain­ly did live in inter­est­ing times, and his work, as fea­tured in the new Great Art Explained video above, can look like the cre­ations of a cursed man. That’s espe­cial­ly true of those of his many self-por­traits that, as host James Payne puts it, ren­der his own body “more ema­ci­at­ed than it actu­al­ly was, rad­i­cal­ly dis­tort­ed and twist­ed, some­times face­less or limb­less, some­times in abject ter­ror.” Here Schiele worked at “an inter­sec­tion of suf­fer­ing and sex, as if he is dis­gust­ed by his own body.”

Such a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion, as Payne sug­gests, may not seem com­plete­ly unrea­son­able in a man who wit­nessed his own father’s death from syphilis — caught from a pros­ti­tute, on the night of his wed­ding to Schiele’s moth­er — when he was still in ado­les­cence.

But what tends to occu­py most dis­cus­sions of Schiele’s art is less his famil­ial or psy­cho­log­i­cal back­ground than his line: the “thin line between beau­ty and suf­fer­ing” that clear­ly obsessed him, yes, but also the line cre­at­ed by the hand with which he drew and paint­ed. His art remains imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able today because “his line has a par­tic­u­lar rhythm: angu­lar, tense, and eco­nom­i­cal­ly placed. It’s not just a means of describ­ing form; it’s a voice.”

In this voice, Schiele com­posed not like­ness­es but “psy­cho­log­i­cal por­traits, a search for the self or the ego, a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of the time.” The fig­ure of Sig­mund Freud loomed large over fin-de-siè­cle Vien­na, of course, and into the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, the city and its civ­i­liza­tion were “caught between the old impe­r­i­al order and mod­ern demo­c­ra­t­ic move­ments.” A “lab­o­ra­to­ry for psy­cho­analy­sis, rad­i­cal art, music, and taboo-break­ing lit­er­a­ture,” Vien­na had also giv­en rise to the career of Schiele’s men­tor Gus­tav Klimt. By the time Schiele hit his stride, he could express in his work “not just per­son­al dis­com­fort, but the sick­ness and fragili­ty of an entire soci­ety” — before he fell vic­tim to the Span­ish flu pan­dem­ic of 1918 at just 28 years old, along with his wife and unborn child. In a sense, he was unlucky to live when and where he did. But as his art also reminds us, we don’t mere­ly inhab­it our time and place; we’re cre­at­ed by them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Dig­i­tal Archive Will Fea­ture the Com­plete Works of Egon Schiele: Start with 419 Paint­ings, Draw­ings & Sculp­tures

How Art Gets Stolen: What Hap­pened to Egon Schiele’s Paint­ing Boats Mir­rored in the Water After Its Theft by the Nazis

The Life & Art of Gus­tav Klimt: A Short Art His­to­ry Les­son on the Aus­tri­an Sym­bol­ist Painter and His Work

Gus­tav Klimt’s Icon­ic Paint­ing The Kiss: An Intro­duc­tion to Aus­tri­an Painter’s Gold­en, Erot­ic Mas­ter­piece (1908)

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.