I'll start off by saying that the second I saw Egon Schiele's "Seated Woman With Bent Knee", I fell in love.
Schiele's backstory is a peculiar one: dissatisfied by the stuffiness of Vienna's traditional art schools, at age 17 Schiele sought mentorship under Art Nouveau master Gustav Klimt, who not only took Schiele under his wing, but bought some of his drawings, arranged models for him, and introduced him to potential clients. This eventually inspired him to drop out of school and seek out his own artistic vision free from the constraints of conventional art instruction. More specifically, it allowed him to get into some really freaky shit.
For instance, Schiele took up a fascination with pubescent children, particularly young girls, and often had them pose as the subjects of his drawings and paintings. Sure enough, Schiele soon became infatuated with a seventeen-year-old girl named Wally, who was to move into his studio and model for some of his most famous paintings. Schiele and Wally ran away together, staying mainly in small towns peripheral to Vienna. Needless to say, the inhabitants of these towns were none too pleased with Schiele's erratic, bohemian lifestyle. Eventually, their animosity escalated and resulted in a 1912 arrest -- he was charged for seduction and abduction of a young girl below the age of consent. The charges were soon dropped, though he was found guilty of exhibiting erotic drawings in a place where children could readily see them.
In time, Schiele settled down with a nice Protestant girl, Edith Harms, intending to continue his relations with Wally on the side. When Wally caught wind of the marriage, she left and never saw Schiele again. In 1918, a pregnant Edith caught Spanish influenza and died. A devestated Schiele died three days later of the same illness. He was 28 years old.
Part of me is attracted to Schiele's work simply for the fact that his life was so unusual.
But what truly draws me to his artwork is its expressivity -- his technique is visceral, raw, and unrefined, qualities wherein lies all his charm. The pieces are not particularly realistic: backgrounds are left blank, brush strokes clearly visible, lines taper off and are left unfinished... and yet I think its precisely this kind of impulsive resistance to conventional depictions that make the work perhaps more real than any verisimilar, "true-to-life" painting ever could. This reality-grounded viscerality is also mirrored thematically speaking, with pieces focusing on sex, death, identity, self-exploration... Really, Schiele made pieces that reach to the very depths of human experience, allowing for a sort of universalized, timeless body of work that remains relevant nearly 100 years after his death.
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