Egon Schiele, Freud Museum

Egon Schiele died of the Spanish Flu when he was only 28. It killed over 20 million people in Europe at the close of the First World War. But by this time he had already been imprisoned for exhibition of pornographic material to minors and for charges which were later dropped, of seducing and abducting an underage girl. On his arrest police seized over a hundred of his paintings that they considered to be erotic.
His journals from his time in prison show his reaction to the ceremonious burning over a candle flame in court of one of his paintings of a semi-naked woman:
“Auto-da-fé! Savanarola! Inquisition! Middle Ages! Castration, hypocrisy! Go then to the museums and cut up the greatest works of art into little pieces. He who denies sex is a filthy person who smears him in the lowest way his own parents who have begotten him.”
Schiele had studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, but moved away from it and founded the New Art Group (Neukunstgruppe), where he was somewhat more free from the restrictive Academy to explore sexuality through his work. The naked woman remained a main trope of his work, right up until the end. His last drawings in the 3 days between his and his wife’s death were nudes, some in masturbatory poses.
For lovers of Schiele, this upcoming talk at the Freud Museum will shed some light on his raw, painfully crazed portraits. Gemma Blackshaw, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Plymouth, speaks as part of a season of talks and events at the Freud Museum accompanying their exhibition ‘Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing’ from 22 October 2014 - 22 February 2015.
Click here for our preview of Schiele's retrospective at the Courtauld Gallery this autumn.