Egon Schiele lived in Vienna during its last years as capital of the declining Habsburg Empire. Rejected by his family and hounded by society for his interest in young girls, he expressed through his art a deep and bewildering loneliness and an obsession with sexuality, death and decay.

Egon Schiele lived in Vienna during its last years as capital of the declining Habsburg Empire. Rejected by his family and hounded by society for his interest in young girls, he expressed through his art a deep and bewildering loneliness and an obsession with sexuality, death and decay. Schiele died at the age of twenty-eight, yet he left behind him a body of work that sustains a huge public reputation - and myth. This profusely illustrated book delves into both the controversial sexual themes and neglected aspects of Schiele's art, notably his formal experiments and his later expressionist portraits and allegorical paintings - works that reveal much about the importance of his short career.