When the Wild Child Egon Schiele Grew Up

New York Times

26-03-2025

On Oct. 27, 1918, Egon Schiele sketched his wife, Edith, pregnant and feverish in bed. She died from influenza the next day. He died three days later.
Edith, 25, and Egon Schiele, 28, were two of an estimated 50 million victims of the flu pandemic that began sweeping through Europe that year. For almost a decade, Schiele had depicted his intimate life in artworks, creating some 3,000 drawings and 400 paintings, and he continued drawing until the end.
Today, Schiele is often associated with the erotically charged nude portraits he made from the moment he dropped out of Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts in 1909 until about 1914. His more mature and sober works are often overlooked, said Kerstin Jesse, a senior curator at the Leopold Museum in Vienna.
A new exhibition at the museum, 'Changing Times: Egon Schiele's Last Years, 1914–1918,' which opens Friday and runs through July 13, attempts to change that. Some 130 original works by the artist, as well as dozens of personal documents, provide a new glimpse into Schiele's late career.
'I wouldn't say that the later work is better than the earlier work, or vice versa,' said Jane Kallir, who curated the exhibition with Jesse. 'They're just very distinctly different periods in Schiele's life and in his creativity.'
The early works, which Kallir called Schiele's 'expressionist breakthrough,' used sharp lines and muted colors to render sensual and twisted nudes, often figures from Vienna's demimonde.
In 1912, he was arrested, charged with presenting indecent drawings, and he spent 24 days in jail. He also had a notorious love affair with his strawberry blonde model, Walburga Neuzil, who was 16 years old when he immortalized her in his famous 1912 oil painting, 'Portrait of Wally Neuzil.'
Schiele's wild life ended after World War I broke out in 1914. His sister, Gerti, settled down with Anton Peschka, his best friend. The couple, whose first child had been born before the marriage and sent to live with her grandmother, had a second child. Becoming an uncle changed the artist's perspective on relationships, parenthood and women, making him more thoughtful and serious, Kallir said.
His paintings shifted attention to his sitters' emotional lives, rather than their postures or sexuality. He began to focus, Kallir added, 'on the human psyche. He is really capturing the individuality of other people.'
His skills as an artist also developed, she added. 'There's a technical mastery in terms of his control of the medium of drawing and painting,' Kallir said. 'While the drawing style becomes more classically beautiful, with more volume, more realism, the painting style is actually more expressionistic, and you see much bolder impasto and brighter colors.'
In 1915, Schiele married Edith Harms, a demure middle-class woman closer to his age, after cutting ties with Neuzil. Edith's diary, a gift from Schiele before their wedding, reveals intimate details about their mostly unhappy life. The diary is on display in the show and published for the first time in the catalog.
After a quick honeymoon, Schiele had to go into the military. He left Edith in a hotel in Prague with little money and some sketches he told her to sell for food.
Schiele detested military service and wrote to many contacts seeking escape. An antiques dealer named Karl Grünwald managed to get him transferred to a military supply depot in Vienna in January 1917, with relatively few responsibilities, so he could once again concentrate on his art.
During the final year of his life, many of Schiele's creative goals began to crystallize. His new stature was confirmed by a sold-out exhibition at the prestigious Vienna Secession in March 1918.
'Schiele was an artist whose mission was to reconcile contradictions of realism and expressionism, psychological insight and spirituality,' Kallir explained, 'and he was always grappling with these elements. He reaches a different point in terms of amalgamating them in the later works.'
'You can see that his line got more organic, calmer, less jerky,' Jesse said of the artist's later portraits. 'His early works show these very emaciated figures, but later, his bodies started to have life in them, they had a heartbeat, and they begin to seem alive.'
But as a new sense of liveliness was taking hold in his work, the pandemic that would kill him was also gathering pace. Influenza began spreading after World War I, and in February 1918, Gustav Klimt, Schiele's friend and mentor, died from a stroke and pneumonia likely brought on by the flu. (Schiele depicted him in the drawing 'Head of the Dead Gustav Klimt'). Schiele became Austria's new reigning artist and sold everything at his Vienna Secession exhibition.
His last oil painting, a portrait of his friend the painter Albert Paris von Gütersloh, shows that Schiele was 'at the peak of his artistic powers,' when he died on Oct. 31, 1918, Kallir said.
It's hard to imagine what Schiele might have created if he'd had more time, but his contribution to art history, said Jesse, was already immense.
'Some artists made the same number of works in careers that lasted 50 or 60 years,' she said. 'He died suddenly, so we don't know which way he was going.'