Skandalkünstler

13:43 Jan 23, 2014 

It depends on when the „Skandalkünstler“(in German quote marks) label was applied to Schiele. If retrospective, enfant terrible would fit the bill. If it is a quote from the period, it should be closer to the original. Because it is a loan word from French, it works just as well in German as in English; it was therefore available to contemporary commentators but (if my supposition is correct) they preferred a compound noun that included the element of 'Skandal'.

13:19 Jan 23, 2014 

Schiele is sometimes referred to in this way. Might it work here?

Telling a tale of scandal and revolution, in this program cultural correspondent Stephen Smith discusses how Gustav Klimt and other groundbreaking artists brought their own highly erotic version of Art Nouveau to Vienna. ... and the emergence of the enfant terrible Egon Schiele
http://films.com/ItemDetails.aspx?TitleId=26707

Schiele is known as the 'enfant terrible' of turn-of-the-century Vienna. But what exactly made him so infamous and why are his paintings so beloved?
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Egon-Schiele-Living-Isabel-Kuhl/dp/3...

18:52 Jan 22, 2014 

I trust your knowledge on this area. 'Radical artist', as you described below, may also be an option.

15:55 Jan 22, 2014 

15:51 Jan 22, 2014 

I don't want to get into a discussion about evaluating Schiele's work through the prism of today's understanding. What is one man/woman's pornography is after all another's eroticism. But he was indicted for artwork which would not raise an eyebrow today. The point is how his audience then saw him and what he was intending. Did he set out to be a pornographer? No. Was he trying, like many other artists of the time internationally, to represent the joyous, real nature of human bodies and their interactions? To throw off the overweaning bourgeois morals of the time? Yes. He was not building his career on the basis of courting scandal. He was building it on the basis of being a radical artist, both in terms of form and content.

15:41 Jan 22, 2014 

Helen: Many of Schiele's pictures were hardcore porn, so I think he was probably courting scandal. And Wendy: because I think Andrew has already given us a good answer.

15:40 Jan 22, 2014 

So why not post controversial artist, Phil? Then we'd have three appropriate suggestions to choose from!

14:58 Jan 22, 2014 

Perhaps it helps to know something about Schiele's life. If his audience was scandalised, which it was, it does not necessarily mean he intended to scandalise. And some of the scandal did not relate at all to his work. It had more to do with young girls (I have no idea whether the charges were justifiable) and 'living in sin' with a 17-year old woman. Eric Gill and Jacob Epstein were plagued with an audience constantly offended by their work - did they set out to scandalise them? No.

14:54 Jan 22, 2014 

Andrew's references both show scandal merchant as meaning someone who generates controversy.