Changing Times: Egon Schiele’s Last Years

31.03.2025

The Leopold Museum Shows Comprehensive Schiele Exhibition Featuring More than 130 Works

This spring, the Leopold Museum is dedicating a large-scale monographic exhibition to the central artist of the Leopold Collection: Changing Times. Egon Schiele’s Last Years: 1914–1918 is the first presentation to shine the spotlight on the artist’s late oeuvre. The eccentric exceptional artist only had around ten years of activity before he died at the age of 28 from the “Spanish Flu”. Throughout this decade, Schiele created a comprehensive oeuvre, which is best known for his key paintings and those drawings in which he addressed his own mental states as well as the self-questioning of an entire generation. From 1914, Schiele faced dramatic changes both of a private and historical nature, which he was forced to adapt to and which impacted on his oeuvre. His introspection gave way to a new focus on external realities and novel themes, altering his artistic style.

Schiele’s later oeuvre, which – in contrast to his earlier works – is characterized by calmer, more fluent and organic strokes, more realistic figures with an increased physical presence, as well as greater empathy, is still not as well-known today. Based on more than 130 works from the museum’s collection as well as on loans from international institutions and private collections, and divided into nine themes, the exhibition weaves together biographical and artistic elements. Exploring Schiele’s stylistic and personal transformations, it affords new insights into the last period of his life, which came to an abrupt end with the artist’s unexpected death in 1918. The diary of Edith Schiele – kindly provided by the Kallir Research Institute – is presented and published in its entirety in the exhibition catalogue for the very first time. In this diary, the artist’s wife recorded her experiences and emotions between 1915 and 1918.

“With its Schiele collection, featuring 300 works, 48 of which are paintings, the Leopold Museum is home to the world’s largest and most eminent compilation of masterpieces by this extraordinary protagonist of Austrian Expressionism. This is owed to the far-sighted feel for the quality and singularity of works of art and the obsessive passion for collecting that characterized the ophthalmologist Rudolf Leopold (1925–2010). He and his wife Elisabeth Leopold (1926–2024) shared their unending enthusiasm for the painter and draftsman, who at the beginning of their collecting activities – in the 1950s – had been all but forgotten. Today, Egon Schiele numbers amongst the most renowned artist personalities in the world.”

Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum

From Schiele’s Search for His Self to Life-Altering Changes

To this day, Schiele’s art exerts an unbroken pull on beholders. The majority of his works created until 1914, which include numerous self-portraits, reflect the artist’s adolescent search for his own identity in expressive poses and wild gestures. After Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia in 1914, Schiele was initially spared from military duty, and was able to keep focusing on his art and on his new acquaintance with his neighbor Edith Harms.

In 1914, Schiele’s favorite sister Gertrude, known as “Gerti”, married his fellow artist Anton Peschka, with whom she already had a daughter from their pre-marital relationship. Shortly after their wedding, the couple had a son, making Schiele a two-time uncle. The exhibition Changing Times shows how Schiele’s artistic explorations of the theme of family were shaped by his own relationships: While the mothers in his oeuvre often fail to connect with their children and appear lifeless, he rendered babies as symbols of vitality and creativity.

Edith and Egon were married in 1915, only a short time after the artist’s painful separation from his previous partner Walburga “Wally” Neuzil. Immediately after the wedding, Schiele was drafted into the military in Prague, and was later transferred to the Bohemian town of Neuhaus (now Jindřichův Hradec). The infringement of his freedom, the impressions of war and the life-altering changes brought about by married life caused the artist to dial down his adolescent soul-searching and radical formal experiments. His allegorical paintings became more universal and less egocentric, his portraits more sensitive, and his overall style more realistic.

Alienation and Empathy

From around 1915, Schiele increasingly explored couple motifs. Despite their physical intimacy, his couples often seem to lack an emotional connection, while his puppet-like figures convey a sense of alienation: To Schiele, being part of a couple apparently meant having to scale back aspects of his self.

“Only a few days after their wedding, Schiele was called up for military duty with the Imperial-Royal Army, forcing him to leave his new wife behind in a Prague hotel. Edith had never felt so alone, and struggled to cope with the long separations from her husband. In her diary, which she called her ‘book of consolation’, and which is presented for the first time at the Leopold Museum, she recorded her feelings of unbearable loneliness. Her mood oscillated between hope and desperation. Edith’s emotional needs forced Schiele to deal with interpersonal intimacy in a way that was entirely new to him. His art became more empathetic as he tried to capture his wife’s changing moods, presenting her as an elegant, thoughtful, reserved or unforgiving individual. His portraits show a rather restrained personality with a meditative and melancholy expression.”

Jane Kallir, curator of the exhibition, Kallir Research Institute, New York City

Sensitive Portraits and Landscapes – Schiele’s Life in the Army

“Schiele’s new empathetic approach also impacted on other motifs. Carrying out various military duties, he grew a lot on an interpersonal level. In conversations with soldiers, his superiors and prisoners of war, he learnt about people’s different fates and hopes. His heightened sense of empathy is reflected in numerous portraits of soldiers and officers he created from 1915; today, we are aware of more than 40 such likenesses he executed until 1918. This newly discovered realism made Schiele’s portraits more attractive to commissioners, and over time, he was able to increase his renown by painting eminent personalities.”

Kerstin Jesse, curator of the exhibition, Leopold Museum, Vienna

Schiele’s later landscapes are also testament to his increasing naturalistic approach – much in contrast to his early, often stylized landscape motifs, which at times featured anthropomorphic elements.

Success, Late Nudes and Last Works

In 1917, Schiele was able to return to Vienna, and was determined to assume a leading position in the art world. A portfolio of prints he issued, featuring reproductions of his drawings, soon sold out, and the artist was asked to help with the realization of exhibitions. Schiele’s lines became more organic and less erratic, and he demonstrated his artistic prowess in well-considered poses and sophisticated foreshortening. While the bodies won plasticity, his female figures lost their personality and became generic types. Schiele started to create a cycle of allegorical depictions, meant to illustrate the major themes of earthly existence, death and resurrection, which he wanted to present in a mausoleum.

Shortly before his 28th birthday, the artist had reached the zenith of his career, and forged plans for the revival of the Austrian art scene after the War. However, Edith, who was six months pregnant at the time, and Egon Schiele both died in October 1918, within a few days of one another, from the “Spanish Flu”. The story of their marriage, just like Schiele’s artistic career, thus ended abruptly and remained unfinished.

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue in German and English in separate editions, with essays by Sandra Dzialek, Kerstin Jesse, Jane Kallir and Hannes Leidinger, a prologue by Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Edith Schiele’s unabridged diary entries, as well as a biography compiled by Simone Hönigl.

Curators: Kerstin Jesse, Jane Kallir

DIGITAL EXHIBITION

PRESS MATERIAL AND PRINTABLE IMAGES

PHOTO GALLERY OF THE EXHIBITION OPENING

 

Opening Ceremony

The opening ceremony hosted by the Leopold Museum’s Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger – in the presence of the Leopold Museum board members Josef Ostermayer, Saskia Leopold and Danielle Spera as well as the museum’s Commercial Director Moritz Stipsicz – was attended by around 1,200 guests, including the curators of the exhibition, Kerstin Jesse and Jane Kallir with Gary Cosimini, Barbara Potisk-Eibensteiner (CFO of Post AG), Harald Friedrich (chairman of LLB), entrepreneur Christian Knobloch (CKV Group), attorney Andreas Huber, the collectors Karlheinz and Agnes Essl, Werner Gradisch – a descendant of Egon Schiele –, Helmut Klewan, attorney Ernst Ploil (im Kinsky), Nikolaus Leopold (Leopold Fine Arts) and Waltraud Leopold, gallery owners Susanne Bauer and Katharina Zetter-Karner, art historians Stephanie Barron, Patrick Werkner and Thomas Zaunschirm, author Waris Dirie, the members of the Salon Leopold committee Catharina Knobloch and Jakob Jelinek, Karin Bergmann-Blau and Max Scheugl, cultural manager Alexandra Arnim, Dorotheum expert Marianne Hussl-Hörmann, Josef Kirchberger, Veronika Kerres (chairlady of the association Vinzi-Rast), Belvedere curator Franz Smola, Barbara Kallir and Tom Shima, Nadine Kraus-Drasche (Dorotheum), the authors of the essays in the exhibition catalogue Hannes Leidinger and Sandra Maria Dzialek, Gabriele Lenikus (Lenikus GmbH) and Alina Lenikus, Rainer Metzger (University of Karlsruhe), Wien Museum deputy director Ursula Storch, Cay Urbanek (commercial CEO Volkstheater), Marianne Kirstein-Jacobs, the director of the MQ Bettina Leidl, the director of the Vienna Museum of Military History Georg Hoffmann, Nikolaus Kratzer, curator of the State Collections of Lower Austria, artist Florian Reither (Gelitin), Dorotheum associate Martin Böhm, Sabine Folie (director of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts), Siwoung Song (World Culture Networks), soprano Maria Shebzukhova, solicitor William Stockler, Julia Zdrahal-Urbanek (Altopartners), the former president of the National Assembly Wolfgang Sobotka, diplomat Peter Launsky-Tieffenthal, Chiara Galbusera (curator of the collection of the Austrian National Bank), notary Alexander Michalek, and many others.

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