Queer and Screaming: Inspired by a Human: Egon Schiele

To make up for how much I suck at this whole blogging thing, I decided to make a post about one of my favorite artists, Egon Schiele. That much you were most likely able to deduce from the title. You can tell I'm a little rusty.

I stumbled upon Schiele last spring--that damn Internet is always stuffing my brain with new things--but I forgot about him for a while. Then this winter, I was talking to Ramona and she mentioned him, and I ended up borrowing a book about him from her. I read it cover to cover (that's usually what one does with a book), soaking up all of the deliciousness of his oeuvre.

What I love about his work is how much he just doesn't care about certain things. He treated the body as an object when creating art (and sadly just in general...there were several accounts of him sexually molesting his young female models. Why people gotta be dumb, ya know?), which added a dimension of rawness to his pieces. The bulk of his work was self-portraits and nude portraits of himself and others, but he started doing more landscapes and houses in his later years. He was only 28 when he died in 1918, so his life was pretty short, but for such a young artist he accomplished a great deal artistically and even politically. His style was sort of revolutionary for his time, with all his blunt nudism and contorted bodies and stuff, but people love(d) him. My sense of it is that he was sort of that really crazy guy that people were like, "Okay are you even human what is your brain doing plz explain????" but at the same time totally respected that they would never fully understand what he was all about. He just did his own thing, and I think that really rocks. So here are some of my favorite of his pieces. I didn't include any full-on naked people in case that would make anyone uncomfortable. The captions are not the actual names of the pieces, because I couldn't find all of those.

[Photos via Tumblr.com.]