Egon Schiele

The fingers splay like a rake and the shoulders twist. Schiele's figures never take a comfortable position. He studied under Klimt but inherited none of the gold or pattern — only line. The contour is sharp, the flesh is a sick colour, and the ground is usually empty, so the figure seems suspended in nothing. Self-portraits and nudes make up half the work. He was tried on obscenity charges and jailed at twenty-four. He died of Spanish flu in 1918, aged twenty-eight, after a career of barely ten years and several thousand drawings.