Egon Schiele:
Standing Man (Stehender Mann), 1913
Gouache, watercolor and pencil
48.2 × 31.8 cm
Auctioned at Christie’s in 2008 for GBP 1,700,500
(Kallir d1415)

This standing figure belongs to the charged, searching moment of 1913, when Schiele’s line had become taut and electric, and the human body served as his most direct instrument of thought. The man is shown mid‑gesture, as though caught in the act of pulling on a garment, the cloth cutting diagonally across the back and pulled sharply over the right shoulder, giving the pose its slight twist. The back is turned, the head angled away, and yet the sheet feels intensely present; the figure holds the space with a mixture of tension and vulnerability that is unmistakably Schiele. The sheet itself holds the pencil and colour with a clear, open surface that still carries the immediacy of the gesture.

The gouache and watercolor gather in thin, fire‑like touches around the clothing, while the pencil line breaks and resumes in quick, nervous strokes, a rhythm that belongs unmistakably to 1913. Even without the face, the figure feels personal, almost autobiographical, echoing the ragged, standing male studies he returned to repeatedly and the mood of the oil Begegnung, which appears behind him in Anton Josef Trcka’s 1914 portrait photograph.

That painting was one of the works in which Schiele placed himself within his own private mythology, sometimes even titled Selbstbildnis mit der Figur eines Heiligen, an encounter with a saint that reflected his growing sense of himself as a misunderstood, almost martyred figure. The experience of his arrest and imprisonment the previous year had sharpened this feeling: he believed he was suffering for the cause of art, and that belief shaped the deliberately emaciated bodies he drew in these years. The thinness, the rags, the exposed back — all echo the period when his allowance had been cut off and his own clothes had fallen to tatters, deepening the sense of an artist living at the edge of society, stripped down to the essentials of body and line. The weight rests quietly on the left leg, giving the figure its held, uneven balance, while the colour remains sparingly applied, concentrated in the garment and a few warm touches on the skin.

At this point it is helpful to recall Heinrich Benesch’s description of watching Schiele work, a rare first‑hand account that illuminates the extraordinary assurance behind drawings like this one: “The beauty of form and colour that Schiele gave us did not exist before. His artistry as draughtsman was phenomenal. The assurance of his hand was almost infallible. When he drew, he usually sat on a low stool, the drawing-board and sheet on his knees, his right hand (with which he did the drawing) resting on the board. But I also saw him drawing differently, standing in front of his model, his right foot on a low stool. Then he rested the board on his right knee and held it at the top with his left hand, and, his drawing hand unsupported, placed his pencil on the sheet and drew his lines from the shoulder, as it were. And everything was exactly right. If he happened to get something wrong, which was very rare, he threw the sheet away; he never used an eraser. Schiele only drew from nature. Most of his drawings were done in outline and only became more three-dimensional when they were coloured. The colouring was always done without the model, from memory.” Benesch’s words capture the physical certainty and uncompromising discipline that lie behind the jagged, searching contour of Standing Man.

A number of these insights resonate with the original Christie’s auction note, whose observations on the drawing’s tension, autobiographical charge, and connection to Begegnung remain woven into the understanding of the work here.

Schiele’s male figures of these years often carry this double charge: a body held in a moment of transition, and an image that feels as though it stands in for the artist himself. In this drawing the combination of jagged contour, abrupt gesture, and withheld identity creates a figure that is both specific and universal, a solitary presence shaped by the restless energy of 1913.