Jane Kallir

This book traces Schiele's development as a portraitist through four principal chronological phases, from 1906 to 1918. Starting with the artist's rigorous training at the Vienna Academy, it chronicles Schiele's eventual break with academia and the emergence of his Expressionistic style. As Schiele honed his technical abilities, he gathered a coterie of patrons-many of whom he immortalized on canvas-and developed a tendency toward realism and introspection. Throughout his career Schiele tested the boundaries of traditional portraiture. Confrontational, explicitly erotic, and largely devoid of props or scenery, Schiele's portraits are seminal works of originality and deep empathy with the human condition. This volume also offers a close examination of Schiele's self-portraits and his relationship with Gustav Klimt, Schiele's gestic language in the context of contemporaneous photography and the silent film, as well as brief biographies of Schiele's subjects and transcriptions of illuminating letters pertaining to his life and work.

Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele produced a prolific body of work before his early death at the age of twenty-eight in the flu epidemic of 1918. As well as a few hundred oil paintings, he created nearly 3,000 drawings and watercolours. Limited access to these fragile works and dispersion among several collections have made a comprehensive survey of his work a rarity. This volume assembles this master draughtsman's works on paper, providing a unique opportunity to study his rapid artistic development over the course of his brief twelve years of activity. Jane Kallir, the author of Schiele’s catalogue raisonné, introduces each year of the artist’s output, discussing his step-by-step progression from child prodigy to master of the human form and expression.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Vienna emerged as a great cultural centre that stood at the forefront of developments in music, psychology, and the natural sciences. Equally influential, and still tremendously popular today, are the designs of the Wiener Werkstatte, or Vienna Workshop, a group that was at the heart of the city's cultural scene and whose collaborators included such luminaries as the architect Josef Hoffman, the designer Koloman Moser, and the painters Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. This guide to the arts and crafts of fin-de-siecle Vienna is an excellent introduction to their work in all media - from architecture, furniture, ceramics, and glass, to silver, fashion, and textiles, bookbinding, toys, painting, and the graphic arts - as well as a survey of the cultural development of this pivotal period.