Egon Schiele

The Leopold Museum in Vienna is a Mecca for devotees of Egon Schiele as it houses thelargest Schiele collection in the world—the collection at the Leopold Museum - 42 paintings and 188 works on paper. Comprising works from 1905 to 1918, the year of Schiele's death, this book features large-scale reproductions that allow readers to closely examine the artist's extraordinary use of line and colour. Presented chronologically, these works on paper are accompanied by insightful commentary. An introduction and biography of Schiele by Rudolf Leopold discuss the artist's influences, his controversial career, and his place in the pantheon of twentieth-century artists. The art collection of Rudolf Leopold, displayed in this volume, well represents the brilliant draftsmanship, idiosyncratic color, and intense, often neurotic power of Schiele's work. Ms. Dabrowski's introduction tells enough about the painter's family background to account for his sexually morbid self-portraits and enough about turn-of-the-century Viennese society to account for his épater le bourgeois female nudes. Schiele was under thirty when he died in the flu epidemic of 1918. One can only wonder where his art would have gone in the 1920s, because in some respects he was already ahead of them. -- The Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe-Lou Adams.