Choice
"A readable and very important contribution to the immense Schiele bibliography. . . . Excellent color illustrations and bibliography. Highly recommended."

Book Description
The Austrian artist Egon Schiele (1890--1918) is renowned for his intensely confrontational portraits, self-portraits, erotic images, and allegories. What is less well known today is that Schiele was also a talented and prolific landscape painter. These fascinating landscapes, however, are now gaining the attention of scholars and the art world. Indeed, Landscape at Krumau (1916) by Schiele recently sold at auction in London for about $20 million. In this beautifully illustrated and engaging book, Kimberly A. Smith provides the first full examination of Schiele's landscapes and townscapes, offering a new approach to and insights into the artist's work and motivations. Diverging from the conventional interpretation that Schiele's paintings are revelations of the artist's psychology and emotional experience, Smith focuses instead on how his landscapes relate to the political, social, and historical conditions in early-twentieth-century Austria. As Smith argues, Schiele's extraordinary landscape paintings are marked by a dialectic of resignation and renewal and convey the character of Viennese modernism itself.

About the Author
Kimberly A. Smith is assistant professor in the Art Department at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"The Austrian artist Egon Schiele (1890--1918) is renowned for his intensely confrontational portraits, self-portraits, erotic images, and allegories. What is less well known today is that Schiele was also a talented and prolific landscape painter. In this illustrated book, Kimberly A. Smith provides the first full examination of Schiele's landscapes and townscapes, offering a new approach to and insights into the artist's work and motivations." Diverging from the conventional interpretation that Schiele's paintings are revelations of the artist's psychology and emotional experience, Smith focuses instead on how his landscapes relate to the political, social, and historical conditions in early-twentieth-century Austria. Schiele's extraordinary depictions of the towns and countryside of Austria register and respond to the alienating effects of modernity, the problematic nature of selfhood, the eroding coherence of the imperial state, and other anxieties of his era. As Smith argues, the artist's landscape paintings express the same sense of ruin that preoccupied his contemporaries, but these pictures also contain a compelling note of redemption. In many ways Schiele's landscapes offer solutions to the very crisis his images present. The landscape paintings thus illuminate not only the structural dynamics of these pictures but also the character of Viennese modernism itself.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal