Director, Glenn Lowry: Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka were the two main figures of Austrian Expressionism, which emerged in Vienna around 1910.
Curator, Starr Figura: Schiele and Kokoschka were basically rivals. Kokoschka, whose works are on view elsewhere in this gallery, was a few years older, and felt a bit threatened, I think, by Schiele and so would often express disdain for his talent and his work. But in fact the two had a lot in common.
Like the Brücke and the Blaue Reiter, Kokoschka and Schiele were interested in transgressing the stiff social mores of the day. They were focused very particularly on portraiture and the body, especially the naked body as a way of penetrating the human psyche. Keep in mind that Schiele and Kokoschka were contemporaries of Sigmund Freud, who was also living in Vienna at the time, and had published his Interpretation of Dreams only about a decade earlier.