Egon Schiele died at 28, yet his canvases are still the subject of multi-million dollar international legal battles. This episode explores the turbulent life behind the twisted, emaciated, sexually raw portraits: a childhood in a railway station master’s home poisoned by syphilis, a father who destroyed his sketchbook and burned the family’s railway stocks, and a teenage hostility toward authority that carried him into and out of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

We follow Schiele from Gustav Klimt’s mentorship and the 1909 Kunstschau encounter with Van Gogh and Munch, through the scandals in Krumau and Neulengbach, his 1912 arrest and 24 days in custody, and the calculated marriage to Edith Harms that cost him his muse Wally Neuzil. The story ends with his triumphant 1918 Secession exhibition, his death in the Spanish flu pandemic three days after his pregnant wife, and the Nazi-era looting that turned his paintings into artifacts of the Holocaust.

• How congenital syphilis and a father’s mental decline shaped Schiele’s rejection of idealized beauty
• Klimt’s role in buying his drawings and connecting him to the Wiener Werkstätte and wealthy patrons
• The courtroom moment when a judge burned one of his drawings over a candle
• Death and the Maiden and the 1915 letter declaring he would marry advantageously, not to Wally
• The Portrait of Wally seizure at MoMA and the $19 million Leopold Museum settlement