cover image Egon Schiele: His Life and Death

Egon Schiele: His Life and Death

Xavier Coste, trans from the French by Ivanka Hahnenberger. Firefly, $19.95 (72p) ISBN 978-1-77085-940-1

Schiele’s brief, controversial career is examined with bold insights in this graphic biography. Not only did Schiele have affairs with several women at once (many of whom were also his models), he also paid young girls to pose for erotic paintings, which earned him a stretch in prison. He emerged something of a changed man, but, after serving in World War I, he would only enjoy a brief period of popularity before dying in the Spanish flu epidemic that ravaged Europe, days after the death of his pregnant wife. Coste doesn’t shy away from the emotional brutality of Schiele’s story. In fact, he embraces it, weaving elements of Schiele’s eerie, idiosyncratic painting with his own artistic style. Drawing on the same Expressionist techniques that drove Schiele’s artistic passions, Coste conjures a story that beckons the reader to see the world through its subject’s eyes. (Sept.)