The Austrian artist Egon Schiele was born in 1890 and died young, in the 1918 flu pandemic. He was only 16 when he went to the Vienna Academy of Fine Art and had his first exhibition in 1908.
Schiele's work is built on drawing, rather than painting, often using very thin washes of color in only parts of an artwork. Painters should look at his work to see how much can be conveyed with little detail, for instance how just painting a face and a hand can still give a sense of the body between them.
Schiele focused on sexuality and eroticism in his work, which makes him a 'tricky' artist to admire in some circles -- and for some interesting descriptions by writers trying to avoid the issue. The Nation's Art Critic Arthur C Danto says: "Eroticism and pictorial representation have coexisted since the beginning of art, and many great artists have a few erotic images in their 'X Portfolios' (to use Robert Mapplethorpe's term). But Schiele was unique in making eroticism the defining motif of his impressive if circumscribed oeuvre." The Oxford Companion to Western Art says Schiele was at the "vanguard of the Expressionist preoccupation with psychological exploration".
