Egon Schiele (1890 - 1918) Was An Austriac Painter And An Early Exponent Of Expressionism. I Have Selected

Egon Schiele (1890 - 1918) was an Austriac painter and an early exponent of Expressionism. I have selected two statements made by Magdalena Dabrowski and Rudolf Leopold about Schiele's art. The passages can be found in "Egon Schiele - The Leopold Collection, Viena" published by DuMont Buchverlag in association with The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

"Arguably, one of the greatest talents of his time, Schiele, who died at the early age of twenty-eight, created an absolutely prodigious output: his total oeuvre is said to include more than 3,000 works on paper and some 300 paintings. Schiele was, first and foremost, an exceptional draftsman; in fact, even his paintings rely on drawing as their principal structural component. Color is used to enhance the expressiveness and the mood of the pictures and, occasionally, to structure space. Schiele's principal subjects include portraits (among them, numerous self-portraits), figural/allegorical works, and landscapes. These works often make use of symbolic representation and metaphor to convey the malaise of modern man in all its raw and painful truth. " (Magdalena Dabrowski)

"The Expressionists Kokoschka and Schiele were the first to incorporate the tragic and ugly into their work as a way of evoking stronger emotions; one might even say that they invented the use of ugliness as an element of pictorial composition and introduced its potential to the art of our century. The images they created in their determination to express the depths of experience are as compelling and valid today as they were then. The current widespread interest in the two artists and frequently lavish praise accorded them are proof that our present-day tastes in art are in agreement with those of the Expressionist avant-garde of the early part of the century." (Rudolf Leopold)