Egon Schiele: Life and Work

When one thinks of modern art in the first decade of the twentieth century, what immediately comes to mind are the French.  There are Braque and Picasso inventing Cubism, Matisse developing Fauvism, and above all the iconoclast Duchamp questioning the very meaning of art.  While these giants fully deserve the recognition they've received, an unfortunate side effect of the attention paid them has been to divert attention from art created elsewhere in Europe, most notably German Expressionism, during that same period.  This neglect has not been entirely the fault of art historians.  The political turmoil which Germany suffered from the beginning of World War I through the end of World War II effectively cut off that country from many forms of cultural exchange, a loss only exacerbated by the Nazi denigration of so called entartete Kunst (degenerate art).  The Nazi agenda resulted in the curtailment of the careers of many important German artists and the suppression, if not outright destruction, of their artworks.  Although Schiele's work was not included in the 1937 Munich show, perhaps because at the time it was not considered valuable enough to be worth confiscation, his name continued to languish in obscurity.

There are other reasons why Schiele did not attain fame any earlier than was the case.  It was his misfortune to die very young, at age 28, in the great flu pandemic of 1918 before he was able to fully establish his reputation and create a mature body of work.  Although he attained some success during his lifetime, it was only after his death that the scope of his achievement came to be appreciated.  In recent years, the notoriety surrounding Portrait of Wally (1912), as an example of artwork looted by the Nazis from European Jews, helped push his name to prominence.  Personally, I consider Schiele the greatest German artist of the twentieth century.

Egon Schiele: Life and Work (Abrams, 2003) by Jane Kallir is an excellent and very readable introduction to this important artist.  The text is an evenhanded and insightful analysis of Schiele's life and work and is accompanied by excellent reproductions of the artist's major works, including 94 full color plates.  Ms. Kallir herself is well qualified to write about her subject.  Her father, Otto Nirenstein, published in 1930 the first catalogue raisonné of Schiele's work and later established in New York City the Galerie St. Etienne with which Ms. Kallir is still affiliated.  The gallery is an important venue for the exhibition of German Expressionist works.  I've previously posted a review of the exhibit Egon Schiele's Women held there in 2012.