T.A.E.’s Book Review – Schiele by Reinhard Steiner

Reinhard Steiner’s Schiele is a compact Taschen monograph, running to 96 pages, and its chapter structure already reveals its interpretive intelligence: “The artist’s self,” “I went by way of Klimt,” “The figure as signifier,” “The visionary and symbolic works,” and “Landscapes of the soul.” That progression suggests a book less interested in exhaustive biography than in tracing Schiele as a sequence of pressures—selfhood, lineage, embodiment, symbol, and inward weather. It reads like an argument about how an artist becomes legible to himself and to history. 

What gives the book its force is the way it frames Schiele’s style not as mere provocation, but as a language of perception. The publisher’s description emphasizes his “graphic style,” “figural distortion,” and “psychological and sexual intensity,” and Steiner’s selection of works appears designed to show that these are not decorative shocks but the core of Schiele’s artistic ethics. In this sense, the book is persuasive because it treats the body as an epistemological problem: Schiele’s figures do not simply pose; they expose. 

The most memorable moments are those in which Steiner lets the artist’s own voice flare through the commentary. Two lines are especially revealing: “I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds,” and “I want to look intently at grasses and pink people.” Together, they condense the book’s sensibility—an art driven by appetite, danger, tenderness, and a restless need to see more sharply than ordinary vision allows. Steiner’s achievement is to make those words feel like a key to the pictures: Schiele is not only painting bodies, but testing how far sensation can be pushed before it turns uncanny. 

The book’s limitation is also its defining feature: at 96 pages, it is a lucid introduction rather than a deeply archival study. The publisher explicitly presents it as a selection of “key Schiele works” that introduces his “short but urgent career,” so the reader should not expect the density of a full scholarly monograph. But within those limits, Steiner offers a nimble, visually alert, and thematically coherent account of why this artist remains so unsettlingly modern. It is a book that understands that a creator’s lasting power lies not in scandal, but in intensity disciplined into form.