Egon Schiele - The Complete Paintings

Tobias G. Natter

Taschen

2017

612 páginas

20h 24m

ISBN-13: 9783836565684

In this expansive XXL-format book, we survey the complete catalogue of Schiele paintings from his most innovative and prolific decade between 1909 and 1918. The near 600 featured works reveal how the artist reveled in stylistic freedom and shock, abandoning classical figuration for a distorted and exaggerated physicality that rendered emotional and sexual truth. His subjects are elongated, angular, and twisted. With protruding ribs, contorted limbs, and sickly skin, the body becomes a locus of anguish. The only reprieve is the promise of sex. Like no other early 20th-century artist, Schiele laid genitalia bare, bringing some of the most candid renderings of the vagina in Western art history, as well as scenes of masturbation and lesbian sex.