ART IN THE CENTER | 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.

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.