Death of Egon Schiele

On 31 October 1918 Egon Schiele, one of the greatest painters of Austrian Expressionism, died of the Spanish flu in Vienna. He was 28. He died in his parents-in-law’s flat on Hietzinger Hauptstraße in the Hietzing district, three days after his wife Edith, who had fallen ill on 19 October and died on 28 October, six months pregnant. Schiele fell ill with the same disease. In those same days revolution broke out in Vienna, and the Habsburg monarchy, in which he had spent his whole life, was falling apart before the inhabitants’ eyes.

Schiele was born in 1890 in Tulln on the Danube, the son of a railway stationmaster. At sixteen he was admitted to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, and Gustav Klimt became his mentor. He soon developed his own sharp style, however: emaciated, angular figures, naked bodies and self-portraits full of unease. His bold nudes scandalised bourgeois audiences, and in 1912 he was even held in custody in Neulengbach in a case concerning indecent drawings.

On 17 June 1915 he married Edith Harms, and four days later he was called up. He never reached the front. He served in Prague, then escorting Russian prisoners of war and as a clerk in a camp for captured officers at Mühling in Lower Austria, and from 1917 in military offices in Vienna. In the spring of 1918, after Klimt’s death in February, he became the most important living painter in Vienna. At the 49th exhibition of the Vienna Secession he showed several dozen paintings and drawings. The exhibition was a great success, and the prices of his drawings trebled.

The Spanish flu, which raged in Vienna that autumn and killed hundreds of people a week, cut this career short within a few days. The young photographer Martha Fein photographed him on his deathbed. He was buried beside his wife in the Ober St. Veit cemetery in Vienna. His sudden death shook his friends and collectors, but in the wider world, like the epidemic in the Polish lands, it passed in the shadow of the political events of those days. Only years later was Schiele recognised as one of the most important artists of his generation, alongside Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka.