Before meeting Graff and his patients, Schiele made art that was largely derivative. He had studied at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts with mixed results, and landed a few pieces at a major international exhibition in 1909, but his style was still Klimtian and Jugendstil, full of decorative froth and languorous, dreamy bodies. Fast-forward a year, and everything had changed. His work was suddenly a rogues’ gallery of ghoulish figures with keyed-up colors and unnaturally shrunken or engorged body parts. Even Schiele knew it: “I went through Klimt until March,” he wrote in a letter. “Today I believe I am someone completely different.”