Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele drew bodies as if they were being pulled apart, was jailed for it, and died at twenty-eight in the influenza pandemic three days after his pregnant wife. He was a stationmaster's son whose father died of syphilis when he was fourteen, entered the Vienna Academy at sixteen, and left it within three years, finding Klimt instead - Klimt bought his drawings, traded work with him and introduced him to patrons, and the debt is visible and then quickly outgrown. Where Klimt is ornamental, Schiele is skeletal: elongated limbs, dislocated joints, unmodulated colour and a line that describes strain rather than contour. He drew himself hundreds of times, and drew adolescent girls, which in 1912 got him arrested at Neulengbach; the abduction and seduction charges were dropped, he was convicted of exhibiting an erotic drawing where children could see it, and the judge burned one of the drawings in court. He served in the war in a supply role and kept working. His 1918 Secession show was his first popular success. Edith died on 28 October and he on 31 October. He spent twenty-four days in custody at Neulengbach and made a series of drawings of the cell, inscribed with what it felt like. He married Edith Harms in 1915 and painted her repeatedly; his long-term model and companion Wally Neuzil, whom he left to marry her, died of scarlet fever nursing in a military hospital in 1917. The Family, an unfinished canvas of himself with a woman and a child, was painted in the year his wife was pregnant and both of them died. Restitution claims over Schiele works looted from Jewish collectors have run through the courts for decades.

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