Changing Times: Egon Schiele's Last Years, 1914–1918: Leopold Museum, Vienna

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 nearly 120 paintings, watercolors and drawings, 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.