Extra Credit: Life of Egon Schiele

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Egon Schiele created portraits of people who showed different types of emotions. A lot of his work included expressionism and human sexuality. Egon was interested in becoming an artist ever since he was a kid. His father wanted him to become an engineer because he drew and loved trains. His parents burned many of his sketchbooks since they wanted him to focus more on becoming an engineer, but Egon wasn’t interested in engineering as he was into art. He went into the Academy of Fine Arts in 1906. He thought the academy instructors were focused more on academics, than art itself. So he and a few other students created a group called “Neukunstgruppe” which translates to “Group for New Art.”

Egon was influenced by artists, Gustav Kilmt and Van Gogh. He admired their work and would later incorporate his own style of art. He continued to make his own work by focusing on human sexuality and expressionism. Many of his experiences in life influenced his work in expressionism. When he married a woman named Edith Harms, he wanted to draw more females. He wanted female models to express their personalities in his portraits.

One work of his that I found interesting was “Sunflowers”. I usually see flowers in art as pretty and colorful, but this painting wasn’t about flowers looking pretty. Instead, it shows flowers in a dying state. The colors give it a more natural look of a how a flower or leaf is supposed to look when they are dying, which is usually a dark yellow or dark brown color. He wanted to show that all living things in life decompose, so flowers and leaves are apart of decomposing after they are dead.

What I found interesting about Egon Schiele is that he had a characteristic that was daring. He didn’t want to do what his parents told him to do, which was to be a train engineer. Instead he chose to do something that he was passionate about and that was art. The feelings he had through out his life, showed what he was hiding in his drawings. His artwork wasn’t always about beauty, but more about naturalness, honesty and hidden emotions.

Egon Schiele Extra Credit

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Egon Schiele was born in 1890 and died in 1918 to the Spanish Flu at the age of 28, just as his artistry career began to become noticed. Schiele once went to an academy for art and dropped out when he was 16 and created the New Art Group in return. Artists during the time of his career did not normally create pieces on par with his, most artists conveyed much context, colors, and either used smooth lines or had certain shapes and angles. During the 1900s you had many forms of art like, Cubism, Bauhaus, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. Schiele’s art is considered Expressionism, but compared to the many paintings and drawings of Expressionism in the 1900s, his work stands out completely. In his time Schiele was unique, so unique that those around him in Vienna looked down on him and thought the art he created was absurd. He rejected the ideal art forms and boundaries many placed. In 1907 Schiele sought out Gustav Klimt, an artist he learned about during the time in academy, and worked with him. Klimt enjoyed Schiele and mentored him, as well as buying Schiele’s paintings and setting up exhibitions or models for him and shared similar interests.

Schiele was drawn to the scant and fragile nature of humans in the nude with unusual poses and angles. Plenty of his drawings use white space and contour lines to express the model and possibly their inner emotions, with some distortions of lengths in limbs and even reality. Some of his models were friends, prostitutes, family or himself. Schiele was obsessed with the female form and had drawn many women, including having 180 women through his studio at one time. Eventually, he married Edith Harms, who modeled often for Schiele, but when his wife began to gain weight, he sought out other women to fill his desire, including her sister.

His work has the potential to look absurd to viewers. Although, by many artists in this modern era he is praised for his nude paintings. The line work that Schiele does is twisted and perhaps contorted, it draws the attention of those who are themselves twisted and mangled in their own lives. His chaotic pieces are inviting to those who too are chaotic, while for others it calls out the unexpected.  One of his pieces called “Death and The Maiden” created in 1915 is a painting that caught my eye. At first it looks like a mess, but it has a lot of emotional detail woven into it. I wasn’t quite sure who I was looking at or what exactly was going on but I did see two people holding onto one another dearly. This human interaction was portrayed very well, even without knowing a back story it told its own altogether, and that’s what I like about Schiele’s art. If it’s with a few contour lines, his drawing moves such emotions to viewers and connects to many people in a particular way.