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Through an exploration of Egon Schiele's life and enigmatic “mannerisms”, which recall those of autistic children and schizophrenic patients, the author explores the impact his outstanding and disturbing paintings can have.
The approach is biographical, revealing Schiele the artist as an already gifted though disturbed child. Some material refers to Schiele's way of expressing painful yet creative fantasies, in which different parts of his body (in particular his hands), projected into his paintings, form part of an intimate, creative, disturbed language.
From childhood to his early death, Schiele used a coherent figurative language which was both realistic and oneiric; the author develops some ideas on art and psychoanalysis, particularly as to the creative process within a complex and disturbed personality.
Working as he did between the psychotic and non-psychotic elements of his personality (Bion), Schiele is an appropriate artist for our time. His drama, his feelings of disintegration and “dismemberment” are nourished by the creative, sane parts of his personality. The true psychotic artist is not entirely psychotic, for creation requires aesthetic taste and harmony.