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Egon Schiele (1890-1918) was a leading figure of second-generation Viennese modernism. Appreciated in his time as an extraordinary draughtsman, he was also notorious for the blatant eroticism of his young female nudes and the ruthless honesty of his tortured self-portraits. A historically informed psychoanalytic approach reveals both the intrapsychic and psychohistorical significance of his work.
Schiele's explorations in portraiture were partly the product of internal conflicts on many levels. But they were also refracted through a turn-ofthe-century crisis in European masculine identity. The crisis was born of social and political developments that worked to undermine middle-class males' sense of power and self-esteem, among them the woman's movement and a new cultural awareness of the psychological power of mothers and of female sexuality. These factors were especially powerful in the psychology of artists, who often felt both marginal and effeminate in a culture that valued the manly virtues of the warrior and the entrepreneur. Their effects are reflected in the fragmented self-images, overpowering mothers, and seductively self-certain girls and women of Schiele's paintings.