Egon Schiele

Schiele lived in Vienna during the years of the decline of the Habsburg empire. Rejected by his family, shunned by society because of his almost pathological interest in girls, he used his art to express a profound and disconcerting loneliness and an obsession with sexuality, death and decay. He died at the age of just twenty-eight, leaving a rich corpus of works to support his enormous fame and the myth that has grown up around him.
Succinct but exhaustive, this book constitutes a useful means of understanding Schiele's complexity through the contradictions and scandals of his art, his life and his time.


Frank Whitford is the art critic of the Sunday Times of London. He has taught at the University of London, Cambridge University and the Royal College of Art. His publications include: Klimt and Bauhaus, Oskar Kokoschka, A Life, Expressionist Portraits and Kandinsky: Watercolours and Other Works on Paper Kandinskij Watercolours, which won the Hawthornden Prize. In 2002 he was awarded the Cross of the Order of Merit in Germany.