After Egon Schiele (1890–1918) freed himself from the shadow of his mentor and role model Gustav Klimt, he had only ten years left to inscribe himself into the history of modernism with an unmistakable signature before he, like millions of others worldwide, was carried off by the Spanish flu. As a prodigy convinced early on of his own genius, and a provocateur by passion, this did not come hard to him. His emaciated, elongated figures, his stark depiction of sexuality, and his self-portraits in which he staged himself, hollow-cheeked, somewhere between genius and madness, had nothing of the decorative quality of Klimt’s hymns to love, sexuality, and yearning devotion. Schiele was brutally direct, and in doing so he successfully affronted Viennese society.

Even if his works were later denounced as “degenerate” and for a time nearly forgotten, they influenced generations of artists, from Günter Brus and Francis Bacon to Tracey Emin. Today, the works that were so misunderstood in their time command exorbitant prices on the international art market.

In this substantial new book, Egon Schiele: The Complete Paintings 1909–1918, 221 paintings and 146 drawings from the fertile final decade of Schiele’s life illustrate his extraordinary development at the height of his career. A large portion of the works were painstakingly re-photographed for this volume. Alongside them are excerpts from his many writings and poems, as well as essays that place him in the context of European Expressionism and trace the immense influence his work exerted.