Kate Carey Peters visual art blog (formerly blackrabbit): June 2011

Schiele has long enjoyed a cultish following, and his brief life has all too frequently been mythologized. His early death, his fascination with taboo subjects, and his consequent prosecution have prompted biographers to portray him as a martyr to bourgeois morality, a sort of fin-de-siècle rebel with a cause. However, the real Schiele was a far more complex character: true at heart to his middle-class roots, but naively convinced that artistic genius guaranteed him immunity from the strictures of conventional propriety. Not yet twenty when he created his first Expressionist canvases, he was possessed of an artistic maturity well beyond his years, and as a result he captured the pangs and obsessions of adolescence as no artist before or since ever has. Lacking adult inhibitions, Schiele was able to confront on the most profound level the nature of human existence, including the struggle for identity, creativity, sexuality, and the inevitability of death.
(Jane Kallir)