Kallir Research Institute

Kallir Research Institute Foundation for the study of Austrian & German Expressionism and Self-Taught Art

After Egon Schiele’s 1912 imprisonment (for “public immorality”), Gustav Klimt introduced him to August and Serena Leder...
06/04/2026

After Egon Schiele’s 1912 imprisonment (for “public immorality”), Gustav Klimt introduced him to August and Serena Lederer, who were prominent Viennese patrons of the arts. Schiele painted their teenaged son, Erich, that same year, producing a number of studies of him and his older sister, Elisabeth, around the same time. He hoped eventually to paint the entire family, but no such commission ever materialized.

August Lederer would have been about 61 years old when he posed for this 1918 charcoal portrait. In linework at once bold and spare, Schiele describes the industrialist as well-dressed, serious, and assured.

Image: Egon Schiele, “August Lederer,” 1918, charcoal on paper.

While most of Gustav Klimt’s drawings served as studies for his paintings, “Fish Blood” is a fully realized artistic exp...
06/02/2026

While most of Gustav Klimt’s drawings served as studies for his paintings, “Fish Blood” is a fully realized artistic expression. The ethereal women rendered here in pencil and ink may represent the gender binary of the fin-de-siècle period, in which women were largely seen as embodying primordial nature, consumed by sexual instinct.

After its first public exhibition at the 1903 Vienna Secession, the drawing vanished from public view until its “rediscovery” nearly a century later.

🎨 Image: Gustav Klimt, "Fish Blood," 1898, pencil and ink on heavy brown wove paper.

Egon Schiele’s lingering stylistic debt to Jugendstil (the Germanic interpretation of Art Nouveau) is evident in this 19...
05/30/2026

Egon Schiele’s lingering stylistic debt to Jugendstil (the Germanic interpretation of Art Nouveau) is evident in this 1909 watercolor’s two-dimensionality and ornamental monogram. The two subjects’ partial concealment in a capacious shared robe, and the touches of color to the visible portions of their faces, however, prefigure Schiele’s “Expressionistic breakthrough” of the following year.

Though typically clean-shaven, the Austrian artist wore a mustache toward the end of 1909. Each of these figures alludes to his persona.

🎨 Image: Egon Schiele, “Couple,” circa 1909, watercolor and pencil on paper. Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh: Speyer Purchase Fund for Drawings.

Human figures often fill the page in Egon Schiele’s 1911 drawings, with poses and drapery extending to the edges of the ...
05/28/2026

Human figures often fill the page in Egon Schiele’s 1911 drawings, with poses and drapery extending to the edges of the sheet. Ill-defined supporting structures—trapezoidal “pillows” and womblike blankets—consume much of the pictorial space.

“Reclining Girl,” shown here, was executed during Schiele’s gradual transition to a more delicate drawing style. Because the artist still favored a soft pencil (by year’s end he’d prefer harder leads), his line is bold. His careful treatment of the sleeping subject’s hand and face soften the angular composition.

🎨 Image: Egon Schiele, “Reclining Girl,” 1911, pencil on paper.

It may come as a surprise that, despite an oeuvre consisting mainly of landscapes, Grandma Moses rarely painted outdoors...
05/26/2026

It may come as a surprise that, despite an oeuvre consisting mainly of landscapes, Grandma Moses rarely painted outdoors. She instead dedicated focused time to observing her surrounding environment. Moses reflected on her approach: “I find that I work much better this way than if I paint directly from nature. My imagination has freer play and my subjects are not confined to objects around me.”⁠
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Featuring roughly 80 of the self-taught artist’s imagined scenes, the Smithsonian American Art Museum retrospective “Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work” (through July 12, 2026) examines Moses’s lasting impact on American art history.

Ten years in the making, the exhibition includes 15 paintings either donated or promised to SAAM by the Kallir family, along with loans from dozens of American museums and private collections.

Image: Grandma Moses, "How the Wind Blows," 1946, oil on high-density fiberboard. Private collection, NY. © Grandma Moses Properties Co., NY.

Egon Schiele sometimes positioned himself on a ladder or stool in his studio, drawing his models from an elevated vantag...
05/23/2026

Egon Schiele sometimes positioned himself on a ladder or stool in his studio, drawing his models from an elevated vantage point. The Austrian artist’s signature typically corresponds with his placement in relation to his subject in the resulting works, potentially disorienting the viewer.

For this 1914 example, we may assume Schiele worked at the feet of the model reclining on a cushion below him. The sheet’s blank background and vertical orientation render the figure strangely weightless, crouched and balanced on tiptoe.

🎨 Image: Egon Schiele, “Reclining Woman with Blond Hair,” 1914, gouache, watercolor, and pencil on simile Japan paper, The Baltimore Museum of Art; Purchase, F***y B. Thalheimer Memorial Fund and Friends of the Art Fund.

In the last two years of his life, Egon Schiele received a significant number of portrait commissions. As had long been ...
05/21/2026

In the last two years of his life, Egon Schiele received a significant number of portrait commissions. As had long been his custom, Schiele executed many of these works at the request of artist friends and intellectuals. However, he was also increasingly approached by paying customers from outside his own circle, some of whom sought likenesses of their children.

This 1918 depiction of a little girl reveals Schiele’s facility as a draughtsman. The artist’s lines are heavy and impressively continuous, with each stroke offering a sense of texture or three-dimensional volume.

🎨 Image: Egon Schiele, “Seated Girl,” 1918, black crayon on paper.
Photo credit: © Auktionshaus im Kinsky GmbH, Vienna.

“Charge,” the fifth scene of Käthe Kollwitz’s “Peasants’ War” cycle, foregrounds an empowered female revolutionary. This...
05/19/2026

“Charge,” the fifth scene of Käthe Kollwitz’s “Peasants’ War” cycle, foregrounds an empowered female revolutionary. This figure represents Black Anna, one of the few women named in Wilhelm Zimmermann’s history of the 16th-century rebellion (upon which the German artist loosely based her seven image series).⁠
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Kollwitz achieved the now-iconic etching’s variety of textural and tonal effects by pressing patterned fabric and transfer paper into the soft ground on her printing plate. In a letter from early 1903, she described the results as “[her] best work to date.”⁠
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🎨 Image: Käthe Kollwitz, "Charge," 1902-03, etching. Plate 5 from the cycle "Peasants' War."

Most of Egon Schiele’s artistic output in 1913 appears to have been unrelated to any specific commission. Two monumental...
05/16/2026

Most of Egon Schiele’s artistic output in 1913 appears to have been unrelated to any specific commission. Two monumental allegorical oils begun in this year (but never completed) spawned what may be Schiele's single largest group of interrelated studies: his “torsos.” These depictions of headless, mostly female figures appear singly and in groups, either n**e or wearing short tunics.

The coloring in this example reflects the Austrian artist's growing concern with rendering three-dimensional volume on a two-dimensional surface. The model’s flesh is colored from the edges inward, while the visible brushstrokes on her garment convey both the fabric’s movement and the bulk of the underlying body.

🎨 Image: Egon Schiele, “Standing Semi-Nude with Brown-Green Vest, Back View (Torso),” 1913, gouache, watercolor, and pencil on paper.

Egon Schiele characteristically divided his early 1911 watercolors into discrete areas, each bounded by the contours of ...
05/14/2026

Egon Schiele characteristically divided his early 1911 watercolors into discrete areas, each bounded by the contours of the underlying drawing and treated differently. Hair and drapery were densely limned, usually in gouache, while flesh was more thinly washed.

In this example, it’s unclear whether the model’s lower body is covered by a garment, a sheet, or something else altogether. Her exposed flesh is more subtly and thinly colored, while Schiele has allowed delicate pencil lines alone to describe his subject’s eyes and lashes.

🎨 Image: Egon Schiele, “Semi-Nude,” 1911, gouache, watercolor, and pencil on cream wove paper.

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