Egon Schiele:
Semi‑Nude Girl Holding Her Breast, Facing Right (Mädchen als Halbakt, sich die Brüste haltend, nach rechts gewandt), 1910
Gouache and charcoal on paper 45 × 31.3 cm
Auctioned at Sotheby’s in 2005 for 478,400 USD
(Kallir d542)

This 1910 study has a fragile, almost trembling immediacy. The young woman turns slightly to the right, her hand cupping her breast in a gesture that feels both protective and revealing, as though she is caught between offering herself to the artist’s gaze and shielding herself from it. Schiele renders her with a spareness that heightens the tension: the reddish hair pulled back, the pale, almost translucent skin, the faint outline of the lower body barely anchored to the page. The figure feels exposed not only physically but emotionally, and that exposure can unsettle the viewer before they realise why.

The handling is unmistakably Schiele at the moment he discovers the expressive force of the incomplete line. Gouache settles in thin, uneven patches across the torso, while charcoal defines the contours with a nervous, searching energy. White heightening along the shoulder and breast gives the body a faint inner glow, as if the light were rising from beneath the skin rather than falling onto it. The lower half dissolves into suggestion — a few strokes, a hint of fabric, a contour that refuses to resolve — leaving the upper body suspended in a field of bare paper. This incompleteness is not a lack but a choice: the drawing breathes in the space it leaves open.

And it is precisely this openness that can confront people. The pose is intimate, the body unguarded, the emotion hovering somewhere between vulnerability and defiance. Schiele is not interested in prettiness; he is interested in truth — the awkward, tender, unfiltered truth of a young woman seen at close range. The sheet belongs to the core of his early figure studies, where the line becomes a kind of emotional instrument, tracing not only the body but the tension of being looked at. Some may find it too raw or too strange, but it is unmistakably Schiele, and it holds its place with a quiet, unflinching honesty.