EGON SCHIELE. LAST YEARS

Midway through a career that started in 1909 and spanned barely ten years, the life of Tulln-born artist Egon Schiele (1890–1918) took a dramatic turn. The heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated on June 28, 1914, and by August most of Europe was at war. In November 1914, after a tumultuous extramarital relationship, the artist’s favorite sister, Gertrude “Gerti” (1894–1981), married his friend and former classmate Anton Peschka (1885–1940). During the same period, Schiele gradually distanced himself from his longtime companion, Walburga “Wally” Neuzil (1884–1917). Just before starting his military service, first in Prague and then in Neuhaus in Bohemia, he married the demure “girl next door,” Edith Harms (1893–1918) on June 17, 1915. 

The combined impact of marriage and war sensitized Schiele to external realities. His allegorical paintings became more universal and less self-involved, his portraits became more empathic – a quality supported by a more realistic style. Egon’s increasingly humanistic orientation began with his drawings of Edith and soon extended to other subjects, such as his portraits of soldiers. Growing success in the last two years of his life enabled the artist to expand his activities as a portrait painter and plan large-scale projects, including the design of a mausoleum. 

Just before his twenty-eighth birthday he was at the peak of his career and thinking deeply about how to revive Austria’s cultural scene in the postwar period. However, in October 1918, both Edith and Egon Schiele died within a few days of one another from the “Spanish flu.” The story of their marriage was left unfinished and Schiele’s artistic career, too, came to an abrupt end. The question of what he might yet have achieved remains forever unanswered. 

For the first time, the Leopold Museum is dedicating a comprehensive monographic exhibition explicitly to Schiele’s works from 1914 until his untimely death at the age of twenty-eight in October 1918. Featuring some 130 works from international museums and private collections, it combines biographical and artistic elements and offers new insights into the final years of the artist’s life by including previously unknown archival material, such as Edith Schiele’s hitherto unpublished diary, reproduced in its entirety in the accompanying catalogue. 

Curators: Kerstin Jesse, Jane Kallir
Curatorial Assistance: Simone Hönigl

The Search for the Self

Transfiguration was painted in the first half of 1915 and is one of the most enigmatic works from this time. Two figures seem to be floating above a fragmentary, stylized landscape, with the lower figure more firmly rooted to the ground. In this double portrait, the artist, who formerly often depicted himself as a “seer,” is now also blind. One possible interpretation is that Schiele is taking leave of his former self and his youthful narcissism, which was “blind to others,” while the more mature Schiele, who remains grounded, is “blind to himself” – for now.

In a time of turmoil, this confrontation with the self was inevitable: separation and marriage, world war and its life-changing consequences made it necessary for Schiele to adapt to completely new circumstances and roles. In his later work, Schiele abandoned the radical experiments with form from his earlier years of 1910 to around 1913, including the strikingly contorted poses and staged gestures of his figures and self-portraits, the often wild gesticulations, grimacing expressions, and angular lines. Instead, he developed a more realistic style imbued with deeper empathy. His lines became more organic, measured, and less erratic.

Edith Anna Harms

The Harms family, which consisted of Edith, her older sister Adele, and their parents Johann and Josefine, moved in early 1913 into the building opposite the artist’s studio on Hietzinger Hauptstrasse. The sisters were raised in a sheltered environment; both learned to sew and cook and were fluent in English and French. Schiele seemingly first made contact with the two women in January 1914, a relationship that intensified by December of that year. In early 1915, Egon and Edith confessed their love for each other.

Just three days after their wedding and a brief honeymoon in Prague, Schiele had to leave Edith behind in a Prague hotel on June 21 and report to his regiment. The 21-year-old woman had never been alone before and found it extremely difficult to endure her husband’s prolonged absence. In her diary – which she had originally received from Egon as a sketchbook and had kept since their wedding – she wrote, among other things, about unbearable loneliness.

Edith’s changing moods, which were mainly due to her prolonged loneliness, led Egon to grapple with human intimacy in a manner that was completely unfamiliar to him. In his portrait drawings, he became acutely receptive to each of her fleeting moods, capturing them with great sensitivity.

The portraits of Edith, created from 1914 onward, mark a new sense of empathy that also emerges in Schiele’s other portrait works. His later success as a sensitive portraitist was in part a result of his personal maturation process.

Portraits

When comparing Schiele’s only known self-portrait as a soldier with a self-portrait from 1910, the stark contrast in style and expression becomes immediately apparent. Rendered with a sometimes loose yet assertive pencil stroke, the 1916 portrait presents the artist in an unusually realistic manner – his gaze is skeptical and solemn, his forehead slightly furrowed, and his weary eyes darkly shaded. There is no trace of the theatrical posing or expressionistic distortions characteristic of his earlier works.

The Female Figure

When Schiele returned to his Vienna studio in February 1917 and once again had access to models, his works in this genre exhibited a distinct stylistic shift compared to earlier pieces.

The figures became noticeably more sculptural, with an emphasis on female curves. "Now these are bodies, swollen with life," observed the painter Anton Faistauer in reference to the late works of his friend. Furthermore, Schiele demonstrated his progressively refined skill through deliberate poses and sophisticated use of perspective. Certain postures – crouching, reclining, standing, or bending – were repeatedly explored, refined, and perfected.

His handling of color in works from 1914/15 onward further underscores Schiele’s interest in plasticity. The rendering of skin became increasingly nuanced, often displaying a greater level of detail and differentiation.

Success and Final Works

Back in Vienna, Schiele was determined to assume a leading artistic role and was filled with creative ambition. His success grew steadily. Most significantly, he was entrusted with organizing the 49th Exhibition of the Vienna Secession in March 1918.

Project: An allegoric life cycle

In the final two years of his life, Schiele began working on a cycle of allegorical nude depictions, which he intended to present in a mausoleum built specifically for this purpose. This cycle, conceived to address the great themes of earthly existence, death, and resurrection, was both a summation of the artist’s lifelong spiritual explorations and an attempt to process the immense human losses of the First World War.

Schiele did not live long enough to complete his Mausoleum cycle, and the surviving, partly unfinished paintings offer only a vague indication of the direction he might have taken. His final works reveal a fusion of realism and expressionism, spirituality and objectivity. In 1918, the writer Hermann Menkes observed: “[Schiele] paints strength and fragility, the weariness of the soul, and its renewal. He is sober and ecstatic, a realist and a dreamer.”

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