Egon Schiele:
Standing Nude (Stehender Akt), 1910
gouache and pencil with white heightening on paper
55.9 × 34.3 cm (22 × 13 1/2 in)
Auctioned at Sotheby’s in 2022 for USD 2,349,000
(Kallir d569)

In Stehender Akt, Schiele renders the nude with taut line, red accents, and a startling sense of presence. The red hair, elongated limbs, and flashes of gouache at the lips and chest give the figure a vivid immediacy, while the orange stockings and black shoes add a jolt of theatricality. Even at twenty, he was pushing the nude into new emotional territory — direct, distorted, and unafraid of vulnerability.

This was the year of his true breakthrough. Klimt’s influence lingers in the contour, but Schiele is already stripping away ornament and embracing the sharper, more urgent expressionism that would define him. Jane Kallir describes 1910 as a leap rather than a progression, and this sheet carries that sense of sudden clarity.

The white heightening plays a crucial role: it lifts the body forward, isolating it from the page and giving the figure a charged, almost electric presence. Barnaby Wright has noted how this device underscores both Schiele’s assertiveness and the model’s vulnerability — a tension that feels central to the drawing.

The sitter’s identity is unknown, as with many of Schiele’s early models. He drew whoever was available — patients of Dr. Erwin von Graff, or young people who drifted into his studio. Dr. Erwin von Graff, a gynecologist who allowed Schiele to draw in his surgery, quietly opened a door for the young artist; that access to real, unguarded bodies shaped the intensity we feel in Stehender Akt, where observation and vulnerability meet on the page.

Yet Schiele held an uncanny command over over his sitters. Albert Paris von Gütersloh painter, —close friend, and fellow founding member of the Neukunstgruppe —recalled how, at a quiet “stop,” they froze instantly, caught in a moment that felt outside of time. Stehender Akt carries exactly that sensation: a fleeting gesture held long enough to become something enduring.

The drawing first belonged to Dr. Oskar Reichel, one of Schiele’s earliest supporters, before returning to the artist and later entering the remarkable collection of Max Wagner, whose holdings formed the core of the Egon‑Schiele‑Archiv at the Albertina. The stamp on the verso is a quiet trace of that history.

For all its modest scale, Stehender Akt is a remarkably confident early work — a sheet where Schiele’s emerging voice is already unmistakable, and where the emotional truth of the figure still feels vivid and alive.