Egon Schiele. The Complete Paintings 1909-1918

He died at the age of 28 from the Spanish flu, which carried him without a doubt to the pantheon of the cursed artists. What would he have produced, had he lived longer? The work of Egon Schiele (1890-1918) is so abundant and, most of all, so audacious, that one wonders if he had not already said it all. Whether we consider his surprising landscapes that resemble colorful inlays, or his portraits that perfectly grasp the model’s psychology, or even intimate scenes with no cover-up (including masturbation and various embraces), one is surprised by the very mature look this twenty year old man had. One needs to be strong to leaf through this large, 7 kg book, a true catalogue raisonné covering the years 1909 to 1918 (with 221 paintings studied in detail). But it allows us to enter the intricacies of this creation and to study his evolution from work to work, from his beginnings under the influence of Klimt – whom he drew in black stone on his death bed in February 1918 – up to the war years and his encounter with Edith Krams, the essential model and briefly his wife, who died three days before him, pregnant, on 28 October 1918.

• Egon Schiele. The Complete Paintings 1909-1918, directed by Tobias G. Natter, Taschen, 2017, 612 p., €150.