Name: Egon Schiele
ISBN: 9780810941991

Jane Kallir

Expanded edition of work first published: New York: Abrams, 1990. More than 200 new entries have been added. All media covered. A bibliography, indexes, concordance of catalogues raisonnés, and reproductions of Schiele's signatures also included.

Egon Schiele

Ivan Vartanian

This work is divided into year-by-year sections, with each section including a text that discusses the major events in Schiele's life, and the inter-relation between artist's drawing and developments in his oil painting.

Drawings and Watercolors

Tim Pendry

This is a review of Egon Schiele's drawings and watercolours, perhaps around 10% of his 3,000 works, but not of his oil paintings which need to be explored elsewhere. Jane Kallir, who appears to have dedicated her scholarly life to understanding and interpreting Schiele, provides a succinct and coherent psychological biography, tracing his short life year by year. The production values (Thames &amp; Hudson but owing a great deal to the editing of Ian Vartanian of Goliga Books in Japan) are superb with full page illustrations of the works to a very high standard. There is not much to add other than that I am persuaded by Kallir's thesis that Schiele's power to move lies in his ability to express individual maturation from adolescence to adulthood. There is, of course, the strong sexual element to his drawings but it should not be studied to the exclusion of what became his true area of genius - the portrait. What Schiele does is rescue humanity from the false dichotomy between the erotic and the pornographic in his art while clearly struggling to come to terms with and eventually submit to social expectations. This is why the life story is usefully read alongside the more intimate drawings and watercolours, away from grand and pompous allegories and market-driven portraiture great though these may be. The works are an essay in strategies of love and objectification in dealing with the power of the sexual. They will last so long as men and women are free to choose what they can see in order to effect personal transformation and so long as new individuals emerge to deal with sex and society. It is a male perspective but, as Ms. Kallir points out, it comes to a view of women as persons in his final years (1917/1918). We can only guess where he might have headed if he had survived the Flu at 28.

Egon Schiele

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