Austrian artist and painter Egon Schiele is known for his portraits of nude women, tortured beings in hopeless and twisted positions. Close to Gustav Klimt, he was part of the Austrian Expressionist Movement, which saw its first rays of light at the beginning of the 20th century. Through vivid, and sometimes violent brushstrokes of paint, he brings us shocking personal stories...Here you will find 7 things you probably didn't know about Egon Schiele!
#1
At the age of 17, Egon Schiele met Gustav Klimt who was 45. Their age difference did not prevent them from becoming good friends and developing a mutual admiration for each other.
#2
Accused many times of abusing teenage girls he employed as models, in April 1912, he was arrested for seducing an underage girl.
#3
Following this accusation, when police officers came to his studio, they confiscated hundreds of “pornographic” drawings. Schiele was later convicted of displaying such drawings in his studio in the presence of children. He was sentenced to 25 days in prison.
#4
For the official Vienna exhibition of 1918, he created a poster that was very similar to the scene of the "Last Supper" where he himself was....Jesus Christ.
#5 Egon Scheiele loved women. He once wrote about how many women had been in his studio in an 8-month period, where there had been somewhere around 180 women!
#6
After a long relationship with a former prostitute and his favorite model, he decided to marry a young woman from a good family, Edith Harms. During the first months of their marriage, he remained faithful to her and asked only for Edith to be his model. However, the further she fell from the physical ideal of feminine fragility and delicacy, the more he turned to her sister, with whom he had an affair.
#7
Schiele died young, aged just 28, from the Spanish Flu epidemic. His death came three days after his wife, pregnant with their first child, died from the same disease.
Source: https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/7-things-not-know-egon-schiele/
