Egon Schiele was a meteor that flashed across the galaxy of Viennese art at the beginning of the last century. Although he lived only twenty-eight years—dying quite suddenly of influenza in 1918 just as World War I came to an end—he left a stunning pictorial oeuvre. Schiele's obsession with sexuality, his own and that of others, made him at once a voyeur and a participant in that sexual imperative which Freud was concurrently plumbing with such unsettling results. The disturbing revelations of Schiele's unmasking portraiture and of the new science of psychology disclosed a collective cultural anxiety during the last years of the crumbling Austrian empire. Schiele was disturbingly dualistic: his provocative explorations of erotica with their startlingly modern sensibilities do not prepare the viewer for the tenderness revealed in his lyrical landscapes and mostly unpeopled town scenes. These emit a haunting loneliness and are related to an obsession with pathos expressed in the artist’s melancholy allegories and existential portraits.
