Sick Russian, 1915

Unlike many of his fellow artists, Egon Schiele (1890-1918) was initially exempt from military service during World War I due to a congenital heart condition. In the spring of 1915, however, he was pronounced fit for service and, shortly after his wedding to Edith Harms (1893–1918), was sent to Neuhaus (present-day Jindřichův Hradec) in Bohemia to receive his basic training. Upon entering the military, Schiele became part of a social structure that stood in stark contrast to his repeated periods of self-isolation in earlier years. From the beginning, he sought the help of influential supporters in a bid to be transferred to the war press office in Vienna. Instead, he was deployed to work on building the city’s defenses and to guard transports of Russian prisoners of war between Gänserndorf and Vienna. In the second half of 1915, as well as the following year during his service at the prisoner of war camp in the Lower Austrian town of Mühling, Schiele created a series of haunting portraits of prisoners. Marked by a sense of help- and hopelessness, they appear at the mercy of the military camp’s organization and its mechanisms.

VG, 2021