Egon Schiele. Beyond taboos

Egon Schiele (1890-1918) - a boy from the Austro-Hungarian province, whose art adorns the most important museums of the world, a provocateur accused of spreading pornography, a precursor of expressionism, on whose canvases death and lust intertwine in a loving embrace.

Schiele, who died at the age of only 28, left behind an astonishingly rich body of work, turning the aesthetic canons upside down. “Egon Schiele. Beyond Taboo” draws a fascinating portrait of a brilliant artist: a restless child, crowned by the First World War and the plague of the era, who, through eroticism, reached the most fragile, intimate and defenseless in us.

“Egon Schiele. Beyond Taboo” tells about what formed the inner world of the artist. So we visit decadent Vienna and Art Nouveau Prague, from which he fled to the province,
We go to Český Krumlov or Austrian Neulengbach, where he made the provinces worse. We learn about complicated relationships with women: a fascination with Gerti's sister, a passionate relationship with muse Valerie Neuzil, a long-distance marriage with Edith Harms. One of the key heroines of this biography is also the mother, indifferent to the talent of her son. “I painted to be seen,” Schiele noted.

He created at a time of questioning bourgeois norms and the flourishing of art, in the shadow of a declining empire. It is not surprising that the creators of the documentary emphasize the similarities between the artist and Franz Kafka. Both were preoccupied with the relationship of sex and death, lived with a premonition of disaster and radically changed the landscape of painting and literature. Filled with masterpieces “Egon Schiele. Beyond Taboo” presents treasures from the world's largest collection of Schiele's paintings in Vienna's Leopold Museum. Nudity no longer outrages anyone, but what really exposes Schiele is the body's defenselessness against the action of time. And this is still a powerful taboo.