Egon Schiele: Eros and Passion (Pegasus Library)

Austrian Expressionism proclaims that art itself is a violation of society's conventions and norms. No other artist in early twentieth-century Vienna depicted the body with such radical candor as Egon Schiele. A preoccupation with Eros, sexuality, and death pervades his entire oeuvre, his insatiable curiosity and new developments in erotic and psychiatric photography driving him to explore the shift in the relationship between the visible and the invisible, the depictable and the undepictable in launching his pictorial fantasy of the bodies of men and women in general and the artist in particular. But despite the uncompromising truthfulness of his allegedly pornographic imagery, the visual enjoyment of the work of this consummate artist transcends the opposition between sensual arousal and aesthetic perception.