New Book Salutes the Audacious Austrian Artist Egon Schiele

For a painter who died at 28, Austrian iconoclast Egon Schiele left a lasting (and sordid) stamp on the art world. He got his start as a protege of Gustav Klimt, but Schiele's pieces are vastly different from his mentor's gilded, shimmering beauties. Featuring distorted, sometimes sickly-looking figures with mottled skin, his work shocked the fin de siecle establishment, especially since it often presented both him and his young female subjects naked. The artist's greatest and most staggering hits have now been packed into Egon Schiele: The Complete Paintings 1909-1918 (Taschen), a hefty monograph that's primed to make your coffee table a deliciously disturbing place. As your guests clutch their pearls and get an eyeful, they'll also learn of the visionaries Schiele thankfully corrupted, from Francis Bacon to Julian Schnabel to David Bowie.