A new show in the northern Italian city of Rovereto charts the development of the great Austrian expressionist painter Egon Schiele .
Schiele, a controversial figure in his brief lifetime (1890-1918) who was thrown out of art school and later convicted of obscenity, is spotlighted amid a collection of works by his precursors and contemporaries - some of them never before seen in Italy .
The exhibit shows the early influence of another great Viennese artist at the turn of the 19th century, Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), whose stylised nudes, scantily clad in ornate mosaic work and framed in Art Nouveau settings, infused in the young Schiele a passion for inventing new ways of depicting the female figure .
As well as portraying the important role played by Schiele's friend and mentor, the show also locates the revolutionary artist amid the Viennese artistic ferment of his time .
For the first time, it brings back together from Austrian and German galleries a raft of works by the Neukunstgruppe (New Art School) founded by Schiele and his contemporaries in 1909 .
Artists like Oskar Kokoschka, Anton Faistauer, Anton Kolig, Carl Moll, Koloman Moser, Max Oppenheimer and Anton Peschka accompany Schiele on his way to becoming the iconoclastic, shocking artist whose triumph at the Viennese Secession Show in 1918 appeared to herald a glittering career after years of scrubbing along, often relying on prurient patrons .
That prospect was snuffed out by the great Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918 .
The exhibit also shows the impact of Schiele and his lesser contemporaries on art in this area of northeastern Italy - which was then the Austrian South Tyrol .
The exhibit, Schiele, Klimt, Kokoschka And Their Viennese Friends, runs at Rovereto's MART museum of modern art from October 7 to January 8, 2007 .
