Egon Schiele (The World of Art) - Livro de bolso

Egon Schiele (1890-1918) lived in Vienna during its last years as capital of the declining Habsburg Empire. Rejected by his family, hounded by society for his interest in young girls, he expressed through his art a deep and bewildering loneliness and obsession with sexuality, death, and decay. He was only twenty-eight when he died, yet he left behind him a body of work that sustains a huge public reputation -- and a myth. This book sets out to examine both. From childhood onwards, Schiele was convinced not only of his own genius but of the need for others to realize it. His constant complaints have persuaded many that he was ill=-used by the critics and the public but, as Whitford shows, Schiele did become an established artists with, for his age, a successful practice. He was able to give expression to something fundamental to the culture of the Vienna of his day -- and to the twentieth century. Along with many of his contemporaries, he rejected the old world of hypocrisy and appearances. His pictures are the visual expression not only of his psychic turbulence but also of the turbulence of the times, of the relentless spirit of enquiry and self-searching that marked the city of Sigmund Freud, Robert Musil, Karl Kraus, and Gustav Mahler. Schiele's figure drawings are perhaps the most personal of his works. Whitford goes beyond these often startling achievements to consider also the evidence of the artist's poems. But it is ultimately the genius of Schiele's line that turns his obsessions -- with eroticism, with himself, with the life that he could project into his subject -- into a haunting beauty. A Pickwickian figure, plump and pink-faced, Frank Whitford (1941-2014) was an art critic and talented cartoonist who rejoiced in his reputation as a bon vivant. An expert on 20th-century German and Austrian art, he published a regular stream of books throughout the 1970s and '80s.