Egon Schiele – Seated Woman (Artist's Wife) (1917)

Louisiana poster with the work, Seated Woman (Artist's Wife) (1917), by Austrian, Egon Schiele (1890-1918). With Louisiana's exhibition, Vienna 1900 - Art and Design, in 1991, for the first time in Scandinavia, you could see a comprehensive representation of the breakthrough of modern art in Vienna around the year 1900. Not least the visual arts, here represented by Egon Schiele, a central, figurative painter at the start of the 20th century.

Seated Woman is also known as Seated Woman with Bended Knee and is a portrait of Schiele's wife, Edith. Schiele produced portraits of Edith in oil, watercolor and ink right up until her death during the Spanish Flu.

When Schiele started at the art academy, he made contact with Gustav Klimt, who was then well established as an artist in Vienna. In 1909, Klimt invited Schiele to exhibit four paintings at the Wiener Kunstschau, where Schiele was in good company—with pictures by Munch, Matisse, Kokoschka, Gauguin and Van Gogh.

Schiele had a wide choice of subjects. Both landscapes, the city, trees, flowers—but not least images of people, where eroticism became a central motif for Schiele: He moved outside the typical nude studies of the time and described sexual activity very directly.

Egon Schiele is seen as one of the early exponents of Expressionism, with his early, often slightly distorted works evolving into a more graceful, precise and technically Expressionist style.