This book provides an overview of Egon Schiele's development from his earliest days at the Vienna Academy to his untimely death in 1918. Born in 1890, Schiele sloughed off the tradition of Viennese Art Nouveau and became the founder of Austrian Early Expressionism. Between 1910 and 1918 he created an oeuvre in which, for the first time in the history of art, the body in its explicit nakedness became the symbol of the human being's existential loneliness and homelessness. Nor, in his self-portraits, did Egon Schiele shy away from drastic uglification and obscene self-stigmatization.