On November 12, 2026, Neue Galerie New York will reopen its galleries after a long closure, and the collection waiting behind the doors at 1048 Fifth Avenue is the most comprehensive Schiele collection outside Austria. For anyone buying art for the wall, it’s a good opportunity to do something rarely done: look at Egon Schiele without starting with the nudes. Because there’s an entirely different Schiele, and he’s the one that works as a poster in an ordinary Swedish home – the trees, sunflowers, houses climbing up a Bohemian hillside. He painted landscapes throughout his short life, and they carry the same intensity as the portraits without demanding the same courage from the person hanging them.
Quick facts: Egon Schiele was born on June 12, 1890, in Tulln an der Donau and died on October 31, 1918, in Vienna, aged 28. Neue Galerie New York reopens its galleries on November 12, 2026, with an anniversary exhibition running until January 11, 2027 – the museum was founded in 2001 by Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky, whose collections together constitute the foremost collection of Schiele works in the United States. At the same time, the Egon Schiele Museum in Tulln is presenting its annual exhibition on the rivalry between Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, from March 28 to November 1, 2026.
The sunflower Schiele treated as a portrait
Vincent van Gogh painted sunflowers in a vase, in full light, as an exclamation. Schiele painted them standing in the ground, late in the season, with the leaves already brown and drooping. He returned to the subject several times around 1909–1911, during a period when he had just left the art academy in Vienna and was looking for his own path away from everything he had learned there.
What makes these images unusual is the pose. Schiele often places a single plant in the center of the image, lets it fill almost the entire height, and crops it so it doesn’t fit. The stem bends. The leaves hang like arms. The flower head sits at the very top, often in shadow, and looks not at the viewer but off to the side. Anyone who has seen his standing figure portraits will immediately recognize the composition – it’s the same visual logic, only with a plant in the leading role.
From an art-historical perspective, it’s an interesting approach, as it places Schiele between two traditions. He took the decorative, flat pictorial space from Gustav Klimt and the Wiener Werkstätte, but rejected beauty. The sunflower is neither a still life nor a decoration. It becomes a figure.
"Schiele never painted a plant. He painted a body that happened to be a plant."
In practical terms, this means that a Schiele-inspired floral image behaves differently on the wall than a classic botanical print. It's vertical, has empty space around it, and can – or rather, needs to – hang alone. If you'd rather have several subjects side by side, the softer botanical prints do the job, while the more expressive plant designs among our floral posters are closer to Schiele's temperament.
Four Trees, 1917 – the work in which he finally found peace
If you can see only one Schiele landscape, it should be "Four Trees" from 1917. The canvas measures 110.5 by 141 centimeters, hangs at the Belvedere in Vienna, and is one of the few works in which he uses a landscape format on such a large scale.
The subject is easy to describe and hard to forget. Four chestnut trees stand in a row before softly rolling hills in the warmth of an autumn evening. The leaves are reddish-brown. One of the trees has already lost almost all its leaves. Around the middle of the painting, the sun sinks as a glowing red disc behind the horizon, and the air between the trees lies in horizontal bands of yellow, orange, and gray-green.
There's no drama in it. No distortion, no angularity, none of the vulnerability that defines his figures. The painting was made the year before he died, the same year he achieved his commercial breakthrough at the Secession exhibition in Vienna, and it's often read as an image of four stages – three trees at different stages of losing their leaves and one that is almost bare. You don't have to buy that interpretation to see that the composition is built on rhythm: four verticals against a series of horizontals.
That very rhythm explains why the work fits so well in a home. Horizontal bands soothe the eye, and the four trunks give the eye something to count. It's the same principle that makes serene landscapes rewarding to hang on the wall, something we discussed in more detail in our article on research on landscape preferences.
Tulln, Krumau, and Vienna – three places that explain his visual language
Schiele's geography is unusually easy to follow, and it explains a lot. He grew up in Tulln an der Donau, a small town 20 kilometers upstream from Vienna where his father was a stationmaster. His childhood drawings are almost exclusively about trains and railway tracks, and it's tempting to see the long parallel lines as a precursor to the horizontal bands that later make up his landscapes.
Krumau—now Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic—was his mother’s birthplace. He traveled there in the summer of 1911 with his model and companion Wally Neuzil, and painted the house facades that became his most characteristic city scenes: tightly packed rooftops, windows like black squares, a river cutting through the image. The couple were driven out of town by the neighbors, but he never let go of the subject. He returned to it from above, in bird’s-eye view, again and again.
Vienna was the contrast: the academy he left in 1909, the Klimt circle that welcomed him, the art dealers, and finally death. The fact that one and the same artist encompasses railway lines, Bohemian rooftops, and Viennese interiors is a reminder that an artist’s career is rarely just one style. Anyone looking for facades and city scenes to hang on their wall will find them in our posters of famous places section, while pure nature scenes are gathered under nature scenes.
Tip: Want the feel of Schiele without his subject matter? Look for three things in an image: a large expanse of empty space around the main subject, an intentionally shaky or uneven outline, and a palette that sticks to earth tones with exactly one contrasting color. That combination creates the same tension and suits far more rooms than the original subjects.
1918: eight months that decided who would inherit Klimt
The year 1918 is his entire career in condensed form, and that is precisely the story the Egon Schiele Museum in Tulln highlights in its exhibition on the rivalry with Oskar Kokoschka, open from March 28 to November 1, 2026. The exhibition is based on a simple claim: when Gustav Klimt died in February 1918, two young Austrians were ready to claim his place, and both knew it.
In March, Schiele was given a place of honor in the main hall of the Secession’s 49th exhibition. He showed nineteen works, sold almost everything, and his portfolio was suddenly full of portrait commissions from bourgeois Vienna. He had won, in practice.
In October, the Spanish flu arrived. His wife Edith, six months pregnant, died on October 28. Three days later, on October 31, he died himself, aged 28. Kokoschka lived until 1980 and turned 93—the rivalry therefore continued unilaterally for another six decades.
The exhibition in Tulln uses audio stations featuring original recordings of his sisters Melanie and Gerti, creating the unusual situation where you can hear the family talk about an artist otherwise known almost exclusively through images. It’s hard to avoid the fact that dying at 28 has given his art a mythic glow, but his short career also explains something concrete: he never had a late period. All we have is an artist between the ages of 19 and 28.
Living with Schiele - rooms, formats, and neighboring subjects
Schiele’s visual world is intense, and that places demands on where you hang it. The experience of customers who buy expressive art is fairly clear: the subjects work best where you’re moving around or relaxing, not where you work.
The hallway is the best place to start. You pass through, catch a striking image out of the corner of your eye, and don’t have to engage with it for hours. A single vertical sunflower image measuring 50 × 70 centimeters above a dresser is practically an ideal case. A reading nook and bedroom work too, but in that case, choose the landscapes over the figures - the evening light in “Four Trees” is essentially a sunset, and sunsets belong in rooms you go to in the evening.
The living room can handle larger formats, preferably landscape orientation. A wide landscape image measuring 70 × 100 centimeters above a 2.2-meter sofa gives you that proportion of about two-thirds of the furniture’s width that almost always looks right. However, avoid mixing Schiele-like subjects with heavily patterned textiles. The power of the images lies in the empty space around them.
The frame choice matters more here than usual. Oak or natural wood brightens the brown and olive-green tones, a black frame sharpens the contours and makes the subject harsher, while a white frame tends to flatten the image. Our guide to choosing the right frame for the right poster goes through the trade-offs in detail. And for anyone who wants to combine Schiele’s intensity with other art from the same era, there’s our full selection of artworks by famous artists, where Viennese Modernism alongside Klimt is a natural starting point - we’ve written a guide to Gustav Klimt’s life and subjects for anyone who wants to continue from there.
Frequently asked questions about Egon Schiele and his art on the wall
Neue Galerie’s reopening in November is a good reason to give Schiele a second chance, especially if you’ve dismissed him as merely provocative. The landscapes, trees, and sunflowers are among the finest works left behind by Austrian modernism, and they fit surprisingly well in a Nordic home. Feel free to browse our artworks by famous artists for inspiration, and read more about the exhibition directly at Neue Galerie New York or about “Four Trees” at the Belvedere in Vienna.