I know I haven’t updated this site in a while - sort of took some time off to work on other stuff, I suppose. It’s really hard to stay focused during the summer here in Southern California. Actually, it’s hard for me to stay focused no matter where I am, but that’s another story…
For those of you that don’t know, I’m an eBay voyeur. I browse through 1000’s of eBay auctions just to see what strange things people are selling. I know I have no life, you don’t have to tell me.
So, I found this eBay auction for a studio in the Czech Republic that used to belong to Egon Schiele.
The auction description reads like I was expected to know who Mr. Schiele was. I didn’t, but decided to find out. When I did some research (on the web of course), I found out that Egon Schiele was a famous Austrian Expressionist painter who was a contemporary, and student of, Gustav Klimt. I’ve seen numerous Klimt works in museums around the world and I suppose, without knowing, I might have seen some Schiele pieces as well. Schiele never fully realized his artistic potential as he died when he was only 28 years old. But, that’s not the interesting part.
Here’s where the story turns. I read a couple of online biographies of Schiele and they say is that he had a sexual relationship with his younger sister when they were both in their teens. He was, apparently, in love with her, and one of the bios even get as specific as talking about a night that the brother/sister spent together. With incest fantasies being relatively popular on the web, I thought it was interesting to read about a guy who actually had more than a fantasy - he had a relationship. One thing that I wasn’t able to find in the biographies was any information on how this incestuous love effected his relationship with his sister later in life. They do talk about him making a lot of paintings of young girls nude throughout his career, which may be in some way related to that early relationship, but no one knows for sure.
It should also be noted, that Schiele was considered by many to be a “pornographer” in his day. Today he is regarded as a great and important artist. These issue, free speech, art, pornography, and government (Schiele spent some time in jail), are always interesting to me.
All of this nonsense came about just because I happened upon a random eBay auction. The studio is still available as I’m writing this, minimum bid, US$870,000. Please let me know if you end up buying it!
Click on the more link below for some Egon Schiele web stuff.
If you want to read more about Egon Schiele or see some of his work, check out these links:
Long bio with numerous images.
Article on the auction value of his work.
Always look on Google too.
Thanks for reading!
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