egon schiele

Egon Schieles early life

Schiele was born in 1890 in Tulln, Lower Austria. His father, Adolf Schiele.  As a child, Schiele was fascinated by trains, and would spend many hours drawing them, to the point where his father felt obliged to destroy his sketchbooks. To those around him, Schiele was regarded as a strange child. Shy and reserved, he did poorly at school except in athletics and drawing, when he was sixteen he took the twelve-year-old Gerti by train to Trieste without permission and spent a night in a hotel room with her. When Schiele was 15 years old, his father died from syphilis, and he became a ward of his maternal uncle, Leopold Czihaczec, also a railway official. Although he wanted Schiele to follow in his footsteps, and was distressed at his lack of interest in academia, he recognised Schiele's talent for drawing and unenthusiastically allowed him a tutor.

Egon schiele is mostly recognised for his intensity and his large number of self-portraits, in his pieces the characters usually assumed twisted and strange body shapes that characterised his art as the it goes against the norms of human beauty. He often produced almost pornographic pieces showing his perception on sexuality and the human body. More than 150 oil paintings, gouaches, watercolours, and drawings in ink, crayon, and pencil on paper