Egon Schiele

Fülszöveg

Egon Schiele lived in Vienna during its last years as capital of the declining Habsburg empire. Rejected by his family, hounded by society for his interest in young girls, he expressed through his art a deep and bewildering loneliness and obsession with sexuality, death and decay. He was only twenty-eight when he died, yet he left behind him a body of work that sustains a huge public reputation - and a myth. This book sets out to examine both. From childhood onwards, Schiele was convinced not only of his own genius but of the need for others to realize it. His constant complaints have persuaded many that he was ill-used by the critics and the public but as Frank Whitford shows, Schiele did become an established artist with, for his age, a successful practice. He was able to give expression to something fundamental to the culture of Vienna of his day - and to the twentieth century. Along with many of his contemporaries, he rejected the old world of hypocrisy and appearances. His... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Egon Schiele lived in Vienna during its last years as capital of the declining Habsburg empire. Rejected by his family, hounded by society for his interest in young girls, he expressed through his art a deep and bewildering loneliness and obsession with sexuality, death and decay. He was only twenty-eight when he died, yet he left behind him a body of work that sustains a huge public reputation - and a myth. This book sets out to examine both. From childhood onwards, Schiele was convinced not only of his own genius but of the need for others to realize it. His constant complaints have persuaded many that he was ill-used by the critics and the public but as Frank Whitford shows, Schiele did become an established artist with, for his age, a successful practice. He was able to give expression to something fundamental to the culture of Vienna of his day - and to the twentieth century. Along with many of his contemporaries, he rejected the old world of hypocrisy and appearances. His pictures are the visual expression not only of his own psychic turbulence but alsó of the turbulence of the times, of the relentless spirit of enquiry and self-searching that marked the city of Freud, Musil, Kraus and Mahler. Schiele's figure drawings are perhaps the most personal of his works. Frank Whitford goes beyond these often startiing achievements to consider alsó the major (and less well-known) symbolic and landscape paintings and even the evidence of the artist's poems. But it is ultimately the genius of Schiele's line that turns his obsessions - with eroticism, with himself, with the life that he could project into his subject - into a haunting beauty. Frank Whitford was born in 1941 and educated at Wadham College, Oxford, the Courtauld Institute, London and the Freie Universitát, West Berlin. He worked as a cartoonist for the Sunday Mirror and the London Evening Standard until 1970, when he became a lecturer in the history of art at the Slade School, University College, London. Since 1975 he has been a senior lecturer at Homerton College, Cambridge. For ten years he was a contributing editor of Studio International and his recent books include Eduardo Paolozzi (1971), Japanese Prints and Western Painters (1977) and Tokio (1980). On the cover: The artist's wife, 1917. Albertina, Vienna. Vissza