Ai Weiwei: the reasons behind his arrest? But his work also hinted at a darker side to sexual freedom, an ambiguity that can be traced back to his childhood. Schiele was born on 12 June in the small town of Tulln, in Austria, and was the only son in his family not to have been stillborn or miscarried. He grew up with his sisters, Melanie and Gertrude, in an apartment above the train station where their father, a railway controller, worked.
According to his mother, Schiele began drawing at the age of 18 months, and his father had early hopes he would combine this aptitude with his love of trains by becoming an engineer, but when the year-old boy insisted on drawing instead of completing his Latin homework, his biographer Alessandra Comini tells us, Egon's father threw the offending sketchbook in the stove.
It affected the boy profoundly. Because this continues to live in me. Melanie would later claim that his promiscuity was intended to defy the odds, daring the gods to afflict him with the same disease that had killed their father. It overshadowed everything he saw.
It seeped into his drawings, where the women appear inflamed, translucent; all elbows and spines, ribs and eye sockets.
They met in the spring of when she was only 17 years old, and Schiele painted her throughout their four-year affair. Her flashing green eyes, generous mouth and tawny hair are instantly recognisable in his work.
