Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele was born in 1890 in Tulln an der Donau, a town on the Danube northwest of Vienna. In 1906 he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he chafed against its conservatism, and in 1909 he left with classmates to form the Neukunstgruppe. The decisive relationship of his early career was with Gustav Klimt, the leading figure of the Vienna Secession, who encouraged the younger artist and introduced him to patrons and models.

Schiele developed a stark, linear style built on contorted figures, raw self portraits, and frankly erotic nudes that broke sharply with the decorative surfaces of Viennese modernism. The work courted scandal: in 1912 he was briefly jailed in the town of Neulengbach on charges connected to his drawings of nudes. He continued to paint landscapes, townscapes, and portraits alongside the figure studies, and his reputation grew quickly in Vienna's avant garde circles.

Klimt died in February 1918, and that spring the Vienna Secession gave Schiele the place of honor in its 49th exhibition, showing a large group of his paintings and drawings in the main hall. It was his first commercial and critical triumph. The success was short lived. In late October 1918 the Spanish influenza pandemic killed his pregnant wife Edith, and Schiele died three days later, on 31 October 1918, at the age of twenty eight.

Schiele is treated by scholars and institutions as a central figure of early twentieth century European art, the artist who turned the expressive line of the Vienna Secession into something psychologically raw and modern. The Leopold Museum, which holds the largest collection of his work, frames him as the pivotal figure of Viennese modernism alongside Klimt and Kokoschka, and Tate has described his draftsmanship as an unusually intimate process built on continuous, eye to model drawing. The dealer and scholar Jane Kallir, author of the standard catalogue raisonne, is the most cited authority on both his oeuvre and his market. Critical writing tends to weigh the confrontational eroticism of the figure work, once cause for his imprisonment, against the formal restraint of the landscapes and portraits. The throughline is consistency of vision: a body of work made almost entirely before the age of twenty eight that critics still read as fully formed rather than promising.

Schiele's market is concentrated in Vienna and at the London and New York evening sales, and it rose sharply in the first two decades of this century. His auction high is Häuser mit bunter Wäsche (Vorstadt II), known in English as Houses with Laundry (Suburb II), a 1914 townscape that sold for GBP 24,681,250, about USD 40 million, at Sotheby's London on 22 June 2011, consigned by the Leopold Museum. A second major townscape, Dämmernde Stadt (Die kleine Stadt II), made USD 24,572,500 at Sotheby's New York in 2018. His works on paper, a far larger share of the output, trade actively and form the more liquid end of the market.

For a Schiele collector, provenance is not a footnote but the center of the diligence process. Because so many works passed through Jewish collections in Vienna that were looted or forced into sale during the Nazi era, a number of paintings and drawings have been subject to restitution claims and settlements, including the long dispute over Portrait of Wally that the Leopold Museum resolved by paying USD 19 million, and the return of works tied to the collectors Fritz Grünbaum and Karl Mayländer. Standard diligence is to consult the catalogue raisonne and examine carefully who owned a piece in the 1930s and 1940s. The practical implications are concrete: clean, well documented provenance commands a premium and supports liquidity, while a gap in the ownership record can stall a sale or invite a claim years later. The works on paper offer a deeper and more accessible market than the rarely traded major oils, but the same provenance scrutiny applies across the board.