Self-potrait with a chinese lantern, 1912. 

Egon Schiele is an artist who works with extreme bodily distortions and explicit eroticism; the bold defiance of conventional norms of beauty which made Schiele's artworks unpopular during his lifetime are the same features which make them so mesmerizing today. Schiele (1890-1918) was one of the leading figures of Austrian Expressionism and his formidable talents were fully matures when he was a teenager. He was best-known for his nude or semi-nude drawings of women, portraying them in awkwardly contracted poses to convey distress. 

What interests and baffles me is the extent of Schiele's commitment to his artistic creations. The artist was arrested for immorality and seduction in his works, yet he continued to create numerous watercolours and drawings during his two-week imprisonment.  

Creating some three thousand drawings over the course of his brief career, Schiele was an extraordinary prolific who regarded drawing as his primary art form, appreciating it for its immediacy of expression. Painter Gustav Klimt was the primary influence on Schiele's development, serving as Schiele's friend and mentor. Schiele inherited Klimt's focus on erotic images of female forms and the reigning Secessionist style, with its emphasis on flowing line and ornamentation. However the emotionally intense and often unsettling Expressionist idiom that Schiele eventually developed opposed his mentor's Art Noveau-inspired style.  

A piece by Egon Schiele which most attracted me to his work is "Self-Portrait with Chinese Lantern Plant" (1912). This is perhaps Schiele's most celebrated self-portrait. In this work, painted during a time in which he was participating in numerous exhibitions, Schiele gazes directly at the viewer, his expression suggesting a confidence in his artistic abilities. This painting was exhibited in Munich in 1912 alongside work by a number of other Expressionist artists, the painting has a companion portrait depicting his lover at the time, Wally Neuzil (the Wally portrait was stolen by the Nazis from the home of a Jewish Austrian, only to be returned to Vienna in 2010 following a prolonged, twelve-year legal battle). It now serves as a "poster child" for the Leopold Museum in Vienna, which houses the largest Schiele collection in the world. Grievously, Schiele died prematurely from the Spanish flu, at the age of only twenty-eight, just three days after the death of his pregnant wife, and at a time when he was on the verge of the commercial success that had eluded him for much of his career. 

Self-portrait with a striped shirt, 1910.

 This piece, composed in 1910, is one of an ongoing series of self-portraits where Schiele began to produce more Expressionistic works which showcase his emerging 'aesthetic of ugliness'. Most of the portraits he painted depict the artist through exaggerated gestures, startling colour combinations, and jagged contour lines. Most of these portraits feature an emaciated depiction of himself with an overall grotesque appearance, usually nude or semi-nude. 

This piece showcases a bold clearly defined shape set against a flat, light background. The figure is rigid, his gaze unblinking and holding his head awkwardly with a passive expression that indicates sensitivity and vulnerability. Characteristic of the Expressionist style that Schiele was increasingly practising at this time, he expresses his anxiety through line and contour, and flesh that appears abraded and subjected to harsh elements. Although Schiele deploys less distortion than in other self-portraits, the painting refuses to idealise its subject, featuring child-like marks and harsh lines characteristic of the contoured manner of the artist's drawing style.  

Shiele's work is akin to the works of his primary influence of the time, Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) who's portraits are similar in context and form. It is interesting to compare this portrait to that of Klimt, particularly the piece entitled 'Portrait of a Lady'. This composition of this painting is very similar to that of Schiele's 'Self-portrait with striped shirt'; both portraits showcase a side wards angle of a figure's head and shoulders with uneven edges and expressive marks of colour. The gesture of Klimt's piece appears to be much more relaxed whereas that of Schiele's piece is seemingly more agitated and awkward.

In this portrait, Schiele has used colour sparingly and made his work identifiable instead by his characteristic sinuous black line. I was drawn to this piece because I am intrigued by how he has presented himself in a way which is strikingly raw and direct.

'Portrait of a lady', Gustav Klimt 1916-17.