Art Nouveau figure "Gerti Schiele in a checkered cloth" (1908/09) by Egon Schiele

The young artists, who founded the so-called Neukunst Group in 1909, wanted to break in the spirit of the secession movements with the frozen traditions of academic-visual art. The co-founder was also Egon Schiele, born on June 12, 1890 in Tulln on the Danube, who had studied at the Vienna Academy from 1906-09. His early work still has impressionist features and shows the influence of Gustav Klimt's Viennese Art Nouveau patterns, but from 1910 more and more expressionist traits are included. The girls' acts in particular are of provocative sensual eroticism that violated the understanding of moral at the time and brought him a short prison sentence in 1912.