Grimacing Man at the Threshold of the Modern

On October 31, 1918, the Viennese artist Egon Schiele succumbed to the flu pandemic at the age of 28. The collection of drawings and paintings that he left behind reveals the work of a precocious artist through a remarkably formative period. His prolific—some might say frenetic—output consists of many self-portraits of an ambivalently erotic nature. When we peruse Schiele’s catalogue we are alternately attracted and repulsed—drawn in by the immensity of his talent and then repelled by the skeletal frames, hollowed ventral cavities, and sickly straggles of hair that his nudes present to their viewers.