Egon Schiele:
Fondation Louis Vuitton
Egon Schiele’s work is inseparable from the Viennese spirit of the early 20th century, and the artist is still celebrated for his emotionally charged figurative works that depict the emotional and physical distortions of the human body. Before he died in 1918, the artist had created some 300 paintings and several thousand drawings over the course of 10 years. Egon Schiele (1890–1918), at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, the first monographic survey in 25 years, brings together some 120 works – drawings, gouaches and paintings – organised chronologically across four rooms, following the concept of line and its development in the artist’s work. Curator Dieter Buchhart explains, “Very few artists have approached line and drawing with the same virtuosity and intensity as Schiele. … By evolving from the ornamental line towards the expressionist line, combined, in three dimensions, fragmented and amputated, he enabled a borderline dissonant and divergent experience of the line as a sign of human existence.”
The exhibition runs at Fondation Louis Vuitton until January 14, 2019, concurrently with a major survey of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Both Schiele and Basquiat are fascinating for their fleetingness and their intensity. Both died aged 28. In under a decade, they became major figures in the art of their century.
