EGON SCHIELE|8 MIN READ

The Stories Behind Egon Schiele Artworks

Four early drawings and one lecture poster, each with a real person behind it. Meet Gerti, the younger sister who posed for two of them, and Moa, the dancer whose name Schiele wrote in capitals on the page.

WRITER Moryarty

Egon Schiele was an Austrian artist whose sharp, unsparing figures made him one of the great names of Expressionism. He was born in 1890 and died in 1918 at twenty-eight, so the works we call early are really the heart of his short career. These are the stories behind five Egon Schiele artworks from those years: portrait drawings and figure studies on bare paper, plus one printed poster he designed for a lecture in Vienna. Each of them is available as a reproduction in our Egon Schiele collection.

Schiele's sister Gerti posed for him. The dancer Moa sat for him, and Schiele wrote her name on the sheet. Rudolf Leopold later owned one of the sheets, and a Vienna student society asked for his poster design. These are five individual histories, not a survey of his whole career.

Who owned Self-Portrait with Striped Shirt before the Leopold Museum?

In 1910 Schiele turned twenty, four years after the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna had accepted him as a sixteen-year-old. In these years he drew his own face and body over and over. Self-Portrait with Striped Shirt belongs to that practice.

The Leopold Museum's record lists the sheet as black chalk and gouache on paper, dated 1910. Schiele used the chalk to set down the structure of his own face and upper body, then let the gouache carry the colour. The museum's text mentions the big, questioning eyes.

In 1910 he produced three large full-figure self-portraits, among them a seated male nude now in the Leopold Museum. The striped-shirt sheet belongs to a year of deliberate self-examination rather than a passing mood.

TrckaSchiele1 — Josef Anton Trčka, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

What keeps the drawing alive is the meeting of those two materials, and a print of this self-portrait keeps both of them. The eye follows the shirt's bold stripes as a repeating beat, while the direct gaze and the warm, textured background stop the picture from feeling like a school exercise.

The drawing's later life is unusually well documented. The earliest owner named in the provenance is Eduard Josef Wimmer-Wisgrill of Vienna, and the record places the work in his hands before 1948.

At some point before 1972 it entered the collection of Dr. Rudolf Leopold, a Viennese collector, and it stayed with him until 1994. That year the drawing passed to the Leopold Museum-Privatstiftung, the foundation behind Vienna's Leopold Museum. The museum holds it today, and its online record notes that the sheet isn't on display at the moment.

Who was Schiele's sister Gertrude, and how does she connect to the Peschka family?

Mädchenakt (Gertrude) is dated 1910, and its sitter is the artist's younger sister. The sheet shows a solitary figure in bold, angular line on warm paper, with almost no background.

The Gertrude of the title is Schiele's younger sister, who lived from 1894 to 1981 and was called Gerti. She sat for him so often around 1910 that her face and figure appear again and again in the drawings of that year.

In 1914 she married Anton Peschka, a painter and one of Schiele's closest friends. The marriage made Schiele's friend his brother-in-law, so the sister who had posed for these drawings now joined two painters' families.

Gerti's son Anton Peschka Jr. left the Peschka Collection to the City of Vienna when he died in 1997, so it passed into public ownership.

The Wien Museum showed Schiele & Peschka: A Family Constellation from 30 April to 27 September 2026, with the Peschka Collection at its centre. If the drawing itself is what you want, this reproduction of the Gertrude study carries the warm paper and the reddish accents into a room of your own.

The woman who posed for Kneeling Female in Orange-Red Dress

Kniende in orange-rotem Kleid is dated 1910, and the Leopold Museum identifies its kneeling sitter as the artist's sister Gertrude.

Signature Schiele 1917 — Egon Schiele (1890-1918), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The model identified as Gertrude is the Gerti of the study above, in the same year, here with the orange-red dress as the main note of colour.

On this sheet Schiele drew the figure in chalk and laid the colour on it in gouache. The museum's entry notes how the position of the legs and feet wedges the figure into the flat surface of the picture, while the German catalogue text describes an upper body built from separate, almost crystalline fields of colour. The original sits in the Leopold Museum in Vienna, where it's not currently on display.

Bare paper and one strong dress colour are what make the drawing translate so easily to a poster today. This reproduction of the kneeling figure lets the orange-red dress become the one rich note of colour in an otherwise quiet print, while the twisted pose keeps the eye moving across the page.

Moa and Schiele's change from Jugendstil to Expressionism

Moa Mandu came from Bosnia. Almost everything else about her has been lost. She met Schiele through Erwin Osen, a theatre painter who was close to the artist.

Osen and Moa danced together in cabarets. Between 1910 and 1911 both of them sat for Schiele many times, and from those sittings came a series of dancer portraits.

The sheet is signed and dated 1911, and beside the figure Schiele wrote MOA in capitals, something he rarely did for a model. The woman sits in a patterned robe on almost bare paper, with touches of black, blue, brown and red. That inscription turns a figure study into a record of a performer. It's part of why a print of the Moa portrait feels like a small piece of theatre history on a wall.

German: Der Maler Max Oppenheimer title QS:P1476,de:"Der Maler Max Oppenheimer" label QS:Lde,"Der Maler Max Oppenheimer" — Egon Schiele, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In Krumau, a small town where Schiele kept a studio, the bohemian habits of Schiele, Moa and Osen outraged the townspeople. After a few months in 1911 he gave the studio up and left.

The watercolour is usually seen as a turning point in Schiele's art. He takes Gustav Klimt's robed figures and wraps Moa in richly patterned textiles, so thick with geometry that the cloth hides the body, while the face is drawn with a sharper realism. The result sits beyond Jugendstil, on the way to Expressionism. Arthur Roessler, who wrote a memoir of the artist, remembered the dancer's large, jet-black eyes under heavy lids, and the picture builds toward that gaze.

The original is a watercolour with pencil and opaque colour on paper. It came to the Leopold Museum-Privatstiftung in 1994, and the Leopold Museum in Vienna holds it today.

What lecture did Schiele's Shaw or the Irony poster announce?

The Akademischer Verband für Literatur und Musik, a student society linked to the University of Vienna, used the university's lecture halls for readings, plays and concerts. It published Shaw or the Irony for one particular evening.

It announced a lecture by the writer Egon Friedell on Shaw oder die Ironie, given in Vienna on 11 April 1912, and the lettering paired the title with an extra line, Besser als Shakespeare.

The design is dated 1910, but the poster was published in 1912, the year Friedell actually spoke. MoMA's collection entry records a colour lithograph printed in Vienna by Brüder Rosenbaum. In those years the city's print shops turned out cultural announcements for lectures, concerts and exhibitions, and this student society commission belongs to that world. The layout is vertical and emphatic: a central figure drawn with the same angular contours as the studio drawings, bold black linework, strong typography and vivid orange accents.

This one was also issued as a small poster stamp, the kind of tiny printed label collectors pasted into albums. The Schiele stamp is counted among the most famous in that field, and its fame gave the design a collecting history of its own.

By 1915 the design had become part of a book on poster art. Österreichische Plakatkunst, published in Vienna by Kunstverlag J. Löwy, reproduced the sheet.

Copies survive in two important collections: the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in its Architecture and Design department, and the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. MoMA later included the poster in its exhibition Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, Vienna, a long way for a student-society announcement to travel. If the idea of a Schiele with bold typography appeals, a print of the lecture poster brings the orange accents and the emphatic lettering to a wall of your own.

German: Fräulein Beer title QS:P1476,de:"Fräulein Beer" label QS:Lde,"Fräulein Beer" — Egon Schiele, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Pick the poster whose story you want to live with, and hang it where you'll see it often.

Did you know?

In 1918 he designed the poster for the 49th exhibition of the Vienna Secession.
His other sister was Melanie, the elder of the two.
The vocabulary of movement Schiele took from the mime Erwin Osen shows up in many of his later works, especially the self-portraits.
Moa, with her extravagant expression, was a popular model for other artists as well.
A 1910 portrait of Gerti in Vienna's Leopold Museum is drawn on both sides. The back of the sheet carries Schiele's fashion designs for men.

Questions about Egon Schiele

Who was Egon Schiele? An Austrian painter and draughtsman born in Tulln an der Donau on 12 June 1890. He died in Vienna on 31 October 1918.

What is Egon Schiele's art style? Art historians count Egon Schiele among the Expressionists. The Kallir catalogue raisonné, the standard numbered list of his works, assigns the Moa sheet the number D90, and the Leopold Museum lists it under Expressionism.

Who modelled for Egon Schiele's paintings of women? His younger sister Gertrude sat for several works around 1910. Besides the kneeling figure discussed earlier, Artnet News names her as the model for the 1910 Portrait of a Woman now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and for a seated female nude in Vienna's Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien.

When was Schiele's Shaw poster made? The design carries the date 1910, but it was published in 1912 for Friedell's lecture on 11 April. The Austria-Forum image archive lists the 1912 colour lithograph as announcing Friedell's conférence.

Did Egon Schiele find success in his lifetime? By 1918 he had achieved success. His exhibition at the Vienna Secession in March of that year brought him financial and critical success, though he died the following October at twenty-eight.

Where can I buy Egon Schiele prints? Our collection of his drawings gathers reproductions of these works and the Shaw lecture poster. We restore each artwork by hand before printing. Every reproduction is printed in our Barcelona workshop on 230 gsm fine art matte paper. We ship across Europe, and delivery takes 2 to 4 days depending on the destination.

About the author

We're Moryarty, a European poster company founded in 2015, with shops in Barcelona and Lisbon. We find our posters in libraries, museums and online collections, restore every artwork by hand without changing its design or colours, and print each reproduction in-house in Barcelona on heavyweight fine art paper. We'd rather see these works as prints on a home wall than as entries in a catalogue.

Sources

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