Egon Schiele

Schiele's contorted self-portraits and nudes—raw, expressionist, psychologically exposed—push figurative art to its existential extreme. Dying at 28 in the same Spanish flu epidemic that claimed Klimt weeks earlier, he left a compact, searingly intense body of work. Drawings and watercolors have set records above $40 million; his paintings are among the most fought-over early Modernist works.