Works by Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele drew and painted himself, gaunt and often naked, and the people around him in hard, broken outlines, and all of it is a young man's work: the flu of 1918 killed him at 28.

In 1906 he entered the Vienna Academy, where Christian Griepenkerl's strict, conservative teaching drove him out after three years. In 1907 he sought out Gustav Klimt, who bought his drawings, arranged models for him and introduced him to possible patrons, and his earliest works lean on Klimt's. Standing Girl, from about 1910, is the largest drawing of his known: a few hard contours on brown wrapping paper for the body, and flat blacks for the checked cloth around it. In a watercolour Self-Portrait of 1911 he poses naked and wide-eyed, the figure edged in white gouache against tan paper.

Wally Neuzil, whom he met in 1911, was his model and companion until he married Edith Harms in 1915. Death and the Maiden, painted after Wally left him, has her clinging to a dark-robed man with Schiele's own face on a white sheet over brown rocks; her face comes from an earlier picture, his is new. In 1918 his work hung in the main hall of the Vienna Secession, and portrait commissions followed. That year he painted Albert Paris von Gütersloh, the friend who wrote the first study of his art, with both hands raised and fingers spread against a scrubbed orange ground. In the autumn the Spanish flu killed Edith, six months pregnant, and three days later Schiele, and the portrait stayed unfinished. Portraits and figures are the bulk of the works below, more often painted than drawn.

Sources: Wikipedia, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Belvedere, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.