[The Atypical Painter] on Egon Schiele

 Perhaps the most infamous figure to come from Austria, Egon Schiele refined expressionism like no other artists of the era. With the demand of raw sexuality, self-portraits, portraits and nude self-portraits, Schiele's allowed his desires to leak our of his mind and onto the canvases. At 15, Schiele lost his father to Syphilis, making him a ward of the state with a broken interest in academia. At 16 Schiele began to attended the Akademie der Bildenden Künste but left due to dissatisfaction at the normality of his instructor and his contemporaries. By 1911, wanting to escape the claustropobic atmosphere of Vienna, Schiele moved to the small, unassuming Austrian town of Český Krumlov , where his recruitment of young teenage girls for nude paintings soon led to him being expelled from the township.

In April of 1912, in the town of  Neulengbach, Schiele was arrested for seducing a girl below the age of consent. Over a 100 drawings were seized by the police that were considered pornographic. Schiele was charged with exhibiting erotic drawings in a place accessible to children. Upon sentencing, the judge burned one of his paintings in court and after 21 days in custody during the trial, he was sentenced to a further 3 days. During that brief time of detention, Schiele completed a 12 drawing series of the discomfiture of life inside of jail.

In today's standard, Schiele would be undoubtedly labeled a pedophile or more accurately, an Ephebophile; he was an artist of impeccable dysfunction, irrepressible talent and compulsive expression. There are distortions, malformations, inexact beauty, derangement beyond repair, where functionality is suspended and calcified.

In the portrait of Dr. Erwin Graff, completed in 1910, the dark tint, the elongated hands of Dr. Graff are of note, as is the disassociation in his eyes. The portrait was said to have been completed in exchange for the doctor performing an abortion on one of Schiele's underage lovers. Symmetry is left to be, to fill out its own wayward margins, the intricacy that details from the portrait displays the true talent of the controversial artist, almost forgotten by modern times.

Schiele's faults made him a menace of the day but his art was the thing that could not be restrained. The triumph of the individual over art being a myth is found in the very biography of Schiele; his art demanded that he put himself on the line. The becoming of art always holds an infamous tale; when the personal life meets turmoil, art rises as a beautiful malignancy.