Schiele

I bought this good condition Schiele art book, and its great and like-new; however, taped inside is a photo of a grandpa and a baby girl wearing bunny slippers. I can't find the seller's info, so if you read this and want it back my email is gnocchigami64 @gmail.com

This book by Reinhard Steiner gives a very intellectual treatment to the art of Egon Schiele. From pages 9 to 11, Nietzsche is quoted as a guide to the self, and for the first quote, Steiner must be translating from the German himself, for the footnote is not to an English version of Nietzsche's work. Could this be familiar?It is a theatre of the self which is in dangerous proximity to Friedrich Nietzsche's aphoristic description (in 1888) of the modern artist: "The modern artist, physiologically close kin to the hysteric, bears the signs of hysteria in his very character too . . . The absurd excitability of his constitution, which makes a crisis of every experience and drags drama into the merest chances of life, renders him utterly unpredictable: he is no longer one person, but at most a gathering of persons, and now this one, now that will be conspicuous amongst them, with unabashed confidence. . . ." (pp. 9-10).Almost everything in the book is reproduced in color, but the paintings might not please everyone. Consider them stark.

As a quick study of/introduction to Egon Schiele, this book is great. Timeline, bio, an examination of influences and early works are included, but the highlights are Schiele's mature paintings. His self-portraits make him look like a concentration camp internee. Beautiful, scary stuff.