Reinhard Steiner Books

Expressive nudes and self-portraits, strange movements and morbid colours Egon Schiele (1890-1918) - along with Oskar Kokoschka - is the painter who had the most long-lasting influence on the Vienna art scene after the great era of Klimt came to a close. After a short flirtation with Klimt’s style, Schiele soon questioned the aesthetic orientation to the beautiful surface of the Viennese Art Nouveau with his rough and not easily accessible paintings. Many contemporaries found Schiele’s expressive nudes and self-portraits, with their strange movements and morbid colours, to be ugly and even morally objectionable--criticism which culminated in criminalizing the painter as ’obscene’ and resulted in 1912 in an indictment and short jail sentence. However, not even his harshest critics could dispute the artist’s extraordinary drawing talent. About the Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Art Series

Erwin Mitsch's authoritative study of Egon Schiele's paintings and drawings includes a careful and representative selection of his nudes, portraits, allegories and landscapes, in order to provide a thorough overview and penetrative insight into the artist's character and life as well as his works themselves. The Austrian painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918) was a crucial and widely recognized figure in the birth of modern art. His uncompromising style of expression gave form to the anxieties and insecurities that beset Western culture at the turn of the nineteenth century, stigmatizing modern art to this day.

The paintings of Maria-Elena Vieira da Silva are the result of a life-long search for the lost centre of the modern world. This book offers an account of that search, using the artist's paintings as markers of the journey.