Egon Schiele: Drawings and Watercolors

Schiele's oils have often been reproduced and are well recognized. However, limited access to the fragile works on paper and dispersion among several collections have made for an unbalanced representation of his work as a draftsman.

This book assembles drawings and watercolors from public and private collections and reproduces work from every year of the artist's career, beginning with the juvenilia and early academic studies. The focus means that work that is rarely reproduced is represented extensively, providing a unique opportunity to study the rapid artistic development of Schiele over the course of his brief twelve-year career.

The book is organized chronologically and divided into year-by-year sections. Each section includes a text that discusses the major events in Schiele's life and the interrelation between the artist's drawing and developments in his oil painting. Features a previously unpublished Schiele watercolor and several works that have never been reproduced in color.

Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele produced a prolific body of work before his early death at the age of twenty-eight in 1918. The oeuvre is comprised of a few hundred oil paintings and thousands of drawings and watercolors.

Publishers Weekly

Co-director of the Galerie St. Etienne in New York, Kallir takes the reader through Schiele's incredibly fast development as a figurative artist of explosive sexuality, ending with his death at age 28 during the 1918 flu epidemic. More than 300 full-color, full-page plates carry titles, dates and physical descriptoins at the bottom of each page ("Standing Nude with Orange Stockings. 1914"), but the book itself is small for an art book, about the size of a typical hardcover novel, which makes turning the pages feel like reading the story of Schiele's life, a life inseparable from the decline of decadent, WWI-era Vienna. Richard Avedon has written a short foreword, and in his introduction Vartanian (Andy Warhol: Drawings and Illustrations of the 1950s) makes a plea for the reader to interpret Schiele's vision of sexuality as a kind of sacred message. After a "Biographical and Stylistic Study" by Kallir, 11 chapters covering one year each follow, with an essay introducing an uninterrupted arrangement of each year's images. Schiele's fleet, obsessive, searching work on paper includes beautifully colored landscapes, flowers and clothed figures, and his nudes retain a vital and unflinching immediacy that is perhaps even more clear here than in the paintings. The book deepens one's appreciation of a very overexposed artist's achievement-a difficult feat indeed. (July) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Jane Kallir is a noted Schiele scholar and the author of the catalogue raisonné. She is co-director of the Gallerie St. Etienne in New York.