The Body as Battleground

Egon Schiele (1890-1918) pushed Expressionism into the body itself. His self-portraits show gaunt, twisted figures with sharp limbs and unguarded poses — the body as a site of anxiety and desire, not beauty. His nervy, exact line is among the most striking in 20th-century drawing.

Expressionism never really ended. Whenever later art needs to show an intense inner state, it reaches for the same tools — distorted bodies, charged color, anxious line. Francis Bacon's screaming popes and Jean-Michel Basquiat's raw, scrawled figures both work in the lineage Munch and Kirchner opened up.