Product Description

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.

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 Features a previously unpublished Schiele watercolor and several works that have never been reproduced in color. Over 350 color illustrations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25467 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

From 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.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
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.

Customer Reviews

Egon Shiele: the book to own if you only want one
Jane Kallir (also the author of Egon Schiele's 'catalogue raisonne' -- usually a HUGE expensive book which includes a picture of every known available representation of an artist's work) says 'Since completing the catalogue raisonne, I have always yearned to combine the story of Schiele's life and his artistic development into a single book'. And wow, what a beautiful job she has done.

This book begins with some of the earliest pictures of Egon's art (when he was about 16 and drawing trains) and ends with a picture of his wife (12 years later -- drawn not long before both she and Schiele died during the flu epidemic which swept the globe following World War I).

What makes this book extraordinary is the showcase of over 300 excellent color reproductions of Schiele's art shown in chronological order and Kallir's insightful commentary on the 'nuances of Schiele's stylistic development during each 12 month period'.

To paraphrase the author (again), this is Schiele's unique 'coming of age' story -- 'in these works, we watch Schiele literally grow up, almost day by day -- an artist with the technical virtuosity to express those experiences as they were happening'.

And to sum up, I borrowed this book from the library and found the book so awesome that I ordered my own copy from amazon.com before I finished reading it -- and now that I have finished reading the book, I'm taking the time to say, this is the most unique (and moving) art book (I'm guessing I've read 200) I've ever read.

How did they do it?
Flipping through the Kallir/Vartanian book on Schiele's drawings and watercolors is a guaranteed way to make several hours of your life disappear without you even noticing it. The reproductions, presented in chronological order from 1907 through 1918, are a joy to ponder and get lost in. Schiele scholars and fans have been given a lavish gift. The biggest mystery is how the publisher, Thames & Hudson of London, could produce this marvel-like book for a such a miniscule cover price--it has the look and feel of a hundred-dollar book.

This is publishing at its absolute finest.

great value
I've bought several books on Schiele's work over the years but this is, by
far, the best book I've seen so far on the artist's drawings and
watercolors. Plus, it's a great value! It's double the page count of any
other book and has more than double the reproductions of any other book. But
it is the same price (or cheaper) than a lot of other Schiele books out
there. The reproductions are fantastic and the text is really great. A great
buy for all art lovers.