Alessandra Comini

Schiele in Prison Alessandra Comini

In April of 1912, twenty-one-year old Austrian artist Egon Schiele (1890-1918), known for his frank depictions of erotica as well as his Expressionist portraits, was arrested and imprisoned in a basement cell in the rural town of Neulengbach, some twenty miles from Vienna. There he made agonized diary entries and created twelve drawings of his dank surroundings. Half a century later, in August of 1963, as an enterprising PhD student from Texas in search of all sites and persons having to do with Schiele, the author of this book did what no previous scholar had yet done. She located and photographed the forgotten cellar and cell in which Schiele had been unjustly incarcerated. This book presents an English translation of the artist's extraordinary prison diary, a biographical chronology, and two essays, one concerning Schiele's cultural context, and the other, an enlightening analysis of the pungent artworks created in prison.