Egon Schiele:
Man and Woman (Embrace) (Man und Frau (Umarmung), 1917
gouache and black crayon on paper
48.9 × 28.9 cm (19¼ × 11⅜ in.)
Auctioned at Christie’s, New York, 2010, for USD 7,362,500
(Kallir d2126)

In Man and Woman (Embrace), Schiele stages an intimacy that is at once tender, protective, and quietly charged. The young man gathers his companion fully into his arms; she leans into him without hesitation, accepting the shelter of his body. Their mouths do not meet. Instead, he turns his head slightly, lifting his lips toward her ear—as if to graze it with a kiss or murmur something meant only for her. Her hands rise toward her chest, a gesture that reads as both modesty and warmth. Though we understand her to be nude, Schiele reveals almost nothing of her body; the man’s enveloping form becomes her covering.

His broad, muscular back functions as a deliberate screen, interposing itself between the viewer and the woman’s vulnerability. It is a rare moment in Schiele’s oeuvre where eroticism is conveyed through discretion rather than exposure—through the subtlety of a pose that withholds as much as it reveals.

This gouache relates directly to the oil Umarmung (Liebespaar II), painted the same year (Kallir d304). Among the seven associated drawings, the present sheet stands as the decisive study in which Schiele commits to the unusual vantage point that defines the final painting: the couple seen from behind, the man’s back interposed between viewer and embrace. Here, Schiele inverts the dynamic—yet the emotional logic remains: closeness expressed through the architecture of bodies, through the way one figure becomes the other’s refuge.

As noted in Jane Kallir’s study and in the auction note, the related oil also carries a deeply personal dimension. Schiele’s identification with the male figure marks a return to the nude self-image after several years of avoidance—a retreat shaped in part by the trauma of Neulengbach in 1912. In the years that followed, he shielded himself through allegory and clothing, presenting the self as visionary, ascetic, or emblematic rather than physically exposed.

By 1917, that protective distance begins to soften. Desire becomes a catalyst for re-engagement, allowing Schiele to approach the nude body—his own included—without the earlier layers of symbolic disguise. Even so, a measure of reserve remains. In the oil, the male figure turns his back to the viewer, offering only a partial likeness. The gesture is both revealing and guarded, a way of acknowledging the self while maintaining a veil of privacy. Yet the identification is unmistakable: the figure embodies Schiele’s renewed willingness to confront himself directly, to let intimacy serve as a form of self-recognition.

The female figure, however, is not Edith. By this point she no longer posed nude, and Schiele instead engaged a professional model for the studies associated with the 1917 embrace compositions. This choice reinforces the distinction between lived intimacy and artistic construction: the emotional truth of the pose is Schiele’s, but the physical presence is that of a model whose body allowed him to refine the contours, tensions, and protective gestures that define the final image.

These developments lead directly into the extraordinary moment that followed. In 1918, Schiele’s major contribution to the Vienna Secession—an exhibition that effectively functioned as a retrospective—became the great triumph of his career. With Klimt’s death earlier that year, Schiele was widely recognized as his natural successor, the leading progressive voice of Viennese modernism. He was only twenty‑eight, and the embrace compositions of 1917 stand at the threshold of this final ascent.

Together, these insights—drawn from Kallir and the auction commentary—underscore how the 1917 embrace works occupy a defining place in Schiele’s late practice: images where tenderness, vulnerability, and selfhood converge with unusual clarity.