Egon Schiele

Estate of the artist
Erich Lederer, Geneva
Elisabeth Lederer, Geneva (by descent from the above in 1985)
Estate of Erich and Elisabeth Lederer, Vienna (by 1995)
De Pury and Luxembourg Art, Geneva (acquired from the above in 1998)
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Experiment Weltuntergang. Wien um 1900, 1981, no. 192, illustrated in the catalogue
New York, Neue Galerie, Egon Schiele: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections, 2005-06, no. D70, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele: The Complete Works, London, 1998, no. 814, illustrated p. 440

Executed on buff-coloured wove paper, not laid down, T-hinged to the mount at the top two edges. There are artist's pinholes to all four corners and at intermittent intervals along the upper edge and to the centre of the right edge. There are two 1cm. tears to the centre of the right edge, a 3cm. tear to the centre of the lower edge and a 1.5cm. tear towards the top of the right edge. There is a 4cm. flattened crease to the left of the upper edge and a further flattened crease running parallel to the lower edge. Apart from some light flattened creasing around all four edges and a nailhead-sized burn to the upper right corner, this work is in fairly good condition. Colours: The paper tone is warmer whilst the pencil lines are stronger and more consistent in tone in the original.
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'Art remains forever the same: art. That is why there is no new art. There are new artists...The new artist is and must be completely true to himself. He must be a creator. He must be able to build his own foundation directly and quite alone, without relying on the past or on tradition.'
Egon Schiele, December 1909

Egon Schiele is regarded as one of the most outstanding avant-garde artists of the 20^th Century. Twenty-eight years younger than his fellow Austrian, Gustav Klimt, he early on rejected the decorative aesthetic of fin-de siècle Art Nouveau and Viennese Secessionism. After leaving the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1909, he began to develop his own highly individual Expressionist style. Schiele's fine draughtsmanship had long been praised and admired while he was a student working with the young artists such as Oskar Kokoschka in the Neukunstgruppe, but as he emerged as an individual artist with supreme creative vocation his works became more pronouncedly daring in their subjects and their execution.

His artistic career coincided with the birth in Vienna of psychoanalysis and many of the themes that preoccupied him in his work, such as mortality, sexuality and identity are common to that of his contemporary, Sigmund Freud. Though his career was cut tragically short by his untimely death at the age of only twenty-eight, he left behind an extraordinary body of work, which includes some of the most powerful and erotic images of the human figure in art history. The passionate responses evoked by his pictures directly reflect the passion he invested in them. Almost invariably, it is Schiele's overt eroticism that receives the most attention, overshadowing the breadth and complexity of his vast œuvre. As a group, the following works exhibit the wide range of Schiele's remarkable talent and as such provide a fascinating insight into the artist's creative genius.

Drawn in 1911 the present work is an outstanding example of Egon Schiele's talent as both draughtsman and artist. The line is unwavering in its careful progress toward the creation of form. The hesitant subject in the present work belies a young, nervous wariness that suits Schiele's style.

In 1911 Schiele left Vienna to live in the town of his mother's birth, Krumau. Although his output was excellent throughout his time in Krumau he was not a popular neighbour and upset the locals with his hiring of teenage girls for modelling and extraordinary Bohemian lifestyle. His girlfriend Wally Neuzil accompanied Schiele to Krumau and although little is known of her she was also a model for Gustav Klimt, since her sinuous form perfectly suited the style of the two masters. The present work, though not a direct example of Schiele's adolescent interest in sexuality, is a striking piece that underlines the fascination he had with the depiction of youth. Perhaps it was his backward upbringing that made him the extraordinary genius so admired then and now.

'He called himself "an eternal child" and even three years later would not go on vacation without packing a set of toy trains. Impeded psychological growth was the natural by-product of an educational system that treated eighteen year-old students like children, and assumed that even a thirty year-old was not ready for the full responsibilities of adult life.' (J. Kallir, Egon Schiele, Life and Work, New York, 1990, p. 69)