The Kallir Research Institute Announces Participation in Major Exhibition, CHANGING TIMES: EGON SCHIELE’S LAST YEARS, 1914–1918

Visual Arts

CHANGING TIMES: EGON SCHIELE’S LAST YEARS, 1914–1918
On View at the Leopold Museum, Vienna, from March 28 to July 13, 2025

CO-CURATED BY JANE KALLIR AND KERSTIN JESSE
INCLUDING NEW DISCOVERIES
FROM THE KALLIR RESEARCH INSTITUTE

New York, NY – January 22, 2025 – The Kallir Research Institute is pleased to announce its participation in Changing Times: Egon Schiele’s Last Years, 1914–1918, a major exhibition at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, on view from March 28 to July 13, 2025. Co-curated by KRI president Jane Kallir and Kerstin Jesse, Senior Curator at the Leopold Museum, the exhibition includes numerous artworks and never-before-exhibited documentary materials loaned through the Kallir Research Institute.

Changing Times, comprising 129 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and one sculpture, interweaves biographical and artistic elements to illuminate the radical changes Schiele experienced in the last five years of his brief life. While prior exhibitions have tended to focus on the artist’s “Expressionist breakthrough“ (1910-13), Schiele in many ways reached his creative pinnacle in the later period. His marriage in June 1915 to Edith Harms and his subsequent induction into the Austrian army sensitized him to external realities. His portraits became more empathic, his allegorical paintings more universal, less self-centered.

Changing Times focuses on three largely unexplored areas of Schiele’s later years: the impact of his sister Gerti’s marriage; the intricacies of his relationship with Edith; and his final, unrealized project: a mausoleum commemorating the losses of World War I. Hitherto unknown letters detail the upheavals within the Schiele family, and Edith Schiele‘s diary will be published in full for the first time. Jane Kallir’s catalogue essay, “Edith and Egon: Scenes from a Marriage”, chronicles these events along with the concomitant shifts in Schiele‘s style. The exhibition concludes with a schematic reconstruction of the mausoleum cycle, comprising most of Schiele‘s 1917-18 allegorical nudes.

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Image Credits

Left: Egon Schiele: Sketch for a Group Portrait (Friends) (49th Secession Exhibition Study), 1918. Oil, gouache, crayon, and pencil on cardboard. Titled and inscribed “Egon Schiele, Wien XIII, Wattmanngasse 6, Skizze für ein Gruppenbildnis Wert [crossed out],” on the verso of the frame. 17 3/8″ x 20 1/4″ (44 x 51.4 cm). Study for the 49th Secession Exhibition Poster (Kallir G15). Kallir P324. Private collection, courtesy Kallir Research Institute, New York.

Right: Egon Schiele: Portrait of Anton Peschka, Jr., the Artist’s Nephew, 1917. Gouache, watercolor and black crayon on paper. Signed and dated, lower right. 15″ x 10 1/4″ (38.1 x 26 cm). Kallir D. 1881. Kallir Family Foundation, New York.

About the Kallir Research Institute

The Kallir Research Institute (KRI) is a nonprofit foundation established in 2017 to continue and expand upon the scholarship of art historian and art dealer Otto Kallir (1894–1978). Its research focuses primarily on the Austrian and German Expressionists, foremost among them Egon Schiele, Richard Gerstl and Käthe Kollwitz. The KRI also specializes in the work of artists who were introduced to the U.S. by Kallir—including Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Kubin, and Paula Modersohn-Becker.

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