Egon Schiele
Standing Female Nude (Gerti Schiele) (Stehender weiblicher Akt), 1910
Watercolor and charcoal on paper
44.4 × 31.5 cm (17 7/8 × 12¼ in.)
Auctioned in 2008 at Christie’s for USD 1,049,000
(Kallir d517)

Standing Female Nude (Gerti Schiele) is one of several intimate works Egon Schiele created in 1910 featuring his younger sister Gertrude (“Gerti”), who was around 15 or 16 years old at the time. That year marked a turning point in Schiele’s artistic development: he broke away from academic convention and began forging the raw, angular style that would define his mature work. His self-portraits and studies of Gerti were central to this evolution — not just technically, but emotionally. Unable to afford professional models, Schiele often turned to those closest to him. Gerti, living nearby and willing to pose, became a frequent subject in this formative period.

In early 1910, Schiele produced five large paintings: three self-portraits and two of Gerti posing. This drawing echoes the first of those canvases, showing her standing nude with her head turned to the side, set against a blank, unmodulated background. The pose is frontal but not confrontational; the figure is exposed, yet the gaze is averted. There is no setting, no narrative — only the body suspended in space, rendered with Schiele’s emerging confidence in line and contour.

The nudity here is more explicit than in many of Schiele’s early works, but not overtly erotic. The figure is youthful, vulnerable, and self-conscious. Her limbs are slender, her posture slightly tentative. The charcoal outlines are firm but not aggressive, while the watercolor adds a translucent softness to the flesh. The tension lies in the contrast between exposure and restraint — between the anatomical clarity and the emotional ambiguity.

Jane Kallir, co-director of Galerie St. Etienne and author of the definitive catalogue raisonné of Schiele’s works, has shaped much of the modern understanding of his biography and artistic evolution. She notes that Gerti was initially embarrassed to pose nude, allowing her brother to draw her only from behind. The studies for the large oil painting emphasize her coyness, while the finished canvas — and this related drawing — become meditations on adolescent vulnerability. Unlike the defiant self-portraits Schiele made in the same period, Gerti’s image is marked by hesitation and inwardness. The body is not idealized, but observed — not stylized for seduction, but for psychological resonance.

The pictorial void surrounding the figure intensifies this effect. There is no furniture, no drapery, no symbolic anchor. The blank paper becomes a field of tension, where the figure floats between objecthood and subjectivity. Schiele’s gestural line, already distinct from his academic training, transforms the nude into an emotional state — not a study of anatomy, but of presence.

Auctioned at Christie’s in 2008 for over a million dollars, this drawing remains one of Schiele’s most charged early nudes. It is not a portrait of Gerti alone, but a document of Schiele’s evolving gaze — one that sought not beauty, but truth, however uncomfortable.