Alessandra Comini

Egon Schiele's Portraits, New Edition Alessandra Comini

Egon Schiele was a meteor that flashed across the galaxy of Viennese art at the beginning of the last century. Although he lived only twenty-eight years--dying quite suddenly of influenza in 1918 just as World War I came to an end--he left a stunning pictorial oeuvre. Schiele's obsession with sexuality, his own and that of others, made him at once a voyeur and a participant in that sexual imperative which Freud was simultaneously plumbing with such unsettling results. The disturbing revelations of Schiele's unmasking portraiture and of the new science of psychology disclosed a collective cultural anxiety during the last years of the crumbling Austrian empire. As a seer into the souls of his sitters, Schiele redefined portraiture in the age of Angst. This new edition features a new introduction by the author.