How Prison Changed Egon Schiele’s Portraits for Better or Worse

“Bürgerschreck!” rang the accusations in German at Austrian painter Egon Schiele in April 1912. This “shocker of the bourgeois” found his home rifled by local constables searching for evidence of the immorality locals suspected of a man who lived with a woman not his wife and invited local children to pose for him. The constables brought over one hundred drawings as well as Schiele himself to the local jail, where he sat for 24 days until a court trial during which the judge flamboyantly burned one of Schiele’s “pornographic” portraits in front of the chastised artist before releasing him. That experience changed the rest of Schiele’s life and art. Egon Schiele: Portraits at the Neue Galerie in New York City centers on this turning point in Schiele’s portraits, which remain some of the most psychologically penetrating and sexual explicit portraits of the modern age. Schiele’s capacity to shock today’s audience may have declined as modern mores finally catch up to him, but the power of his portraits to captivate through their unconventionality, sensitivity, and empathy never gets old. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Prison Changed Egon Schiele’s Portraits for Better or Worse."

How Vienna in 1900 Gave Birth to Modern Style and Identity

The Viennese Waltz differs from other waltzes in the speed of the rotation—a dervish-like dance in which the dancers are spun out of their normal existence. That dizzying disorientation helps turn their world upside down. At the turn of the twentieth century, Vienna stood at the heart of a similar kind of waltzing whirlwind in which artistic and cultural forces acted to disorient a whole generation and set the tone for a new, modern reorientation for all Western society. In Vienna 1900: Style and Identity, which runs at the Neue Galerie through June 27, 2011, we rediscover just how influential that city and time were for all that followed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Caught up in our own dizzying times, we can see much of our own disorientation (and perhaps solutions to problems of style and identity) in the amazing cast of characters assembled in Vienna 1900. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Vienna in 1900 Gave Birth to Modern Style and Identity."

[Image: Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951). Gaze, 1910. Oil on cardboard. Belmont Music Publishers, Pacific Palisades. Courtesy Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna. © 2011 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/VBK, Vienna. Photograph © Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna.]

[Many thanks to the Neue Galerie for the image above from, press materials for, and a review copy of the catalog to the exhibition Vienna 1900: Style and Identity, which runs through June 27, 2011.]