He still was found guilty of displaying erotic pictures where children could see them, and had to serve an additional three days in jail.Īlfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe-Torso, 1921Īmericans are often considered puritanical, but that certainly wasn’t case among the founding members of this country’s avant-garde.
After Schiele spent 21 days in prison, the rape allegation was dropped. When police later raided his studio and confiscated nearly 100 sketches, he was further charged with distributing immoral material. Kids from the neighborhood often congregated at his studio, much to the consternation of the folks in town, and in 1912, he was arrested on charges of seducing a minor. Unable to afford proper artist’s models, he persuaded prostitutes and teenage shop girls to pose for him. Schiele, a leading figure of the period and something of an Expressionistic bad boy, created dozens of studies of females in unashamedly sexual positions (see the following image as well). Vienna at the turn of the 20th century was a hotbed of sexual neuroses, so it makes sense that artists at the time gravitated toward erotica. Egon Schiele, Reclining Female Nude with Violet Stockings, 1910