Egon Schiele. The beginning

Anybody who has read Lewis Crofts´ wonderfully imaginative 2008 novel The Pornographer of Vienna will have gleaned a vivid picture of the early life of Egon Schiele. From conception in Trieste, through his early years on the station at Tulln an der Donau, to the trials and tribulations of Vienna (and his eventual death from Spanish flu), Crofts provided essential insight. Although many of the later pictures that accompany that life are readily available, Egon Schiele: The Beginning, now published by Hirmer to coincide with an exhibition in Tulln, opens up the early chapters, offering an intriguing glimpse into the young Schiele´s mind.
As with any artist´s juvenilia, there are the stock life studies and sketches, which don´t necessarily associate with later flair and character. Yet the engorged fruit figured in Melonen of 1905 certainly betray the intense scrutiny we know from Schiele´s more famous work. And throughout these early pictures, largely undertaken while he was studying at the Gymnasium in Klosterneuburg, there is a rigorous focus.
The reproduction of a sketchbook from 1906 offers its own journal of the times: the arrival of a steam train, the face of a first love, the bucolic slowness of Niederösterreich and the new shadowy presence of the motor car. Even within the academy sketches, some generic but well-formed, there are seated and standing male nudes from 1908 which have striking linear intensity. By then, at the age of 18, Schiele was clearly flying. Boats in the Harbour (Trieste), Sonnenblume I and Mutter mit Kind (Madonna) are yet more unfamiliar works made familiar by their characteristically searching quality