Egon Schiele:
Reclining Woman (Liegende Frau), 1916
Gouache, watercolor, and pencil on paper
48 × 31.6 cm
Privately owned — Auctioned in 2013 at Auctionata, Berlin — €1,812,500 (≈ $2.4 million)
(Kallir d1824b)

This drawing hits you with a strange mixture of absolute stillness and raw, anatomical calculation. When it appeared at auction in 2013, it did not just break financial records by fetching a staggering 2.4 million dollars; it shattered the idea of how a traditional nude should look. Painted in 1916, a year when the devastation of the First World War kept Schiele’s output incredibly low, this work had been hidden away for decades in a light-protected portfolio. Because it was shielded from the world for so long, the colors are remarkably luminous and intense. But instead of offering an easy, sensual image, Schiele forces you to look at a body that is completely contorted and cut off, breaking all the rules of traditional academic beauty.

The positioning of the woman is highly unusual and deliberately jarring. She is lying flat on her stomach—a posture Schiele rarely used for his female subjects. He heavily truncates her body, using extreme foreshortening that crams her legs into the background and pushes her face and upper body directly into your space. To make things more unsettling, the drawing has a bizarre history: it was originally published as a stark, black-and-white print in the Viennese journal Die Graphischen Künste. Only later did Schiele return to the original sheet, aggressively abusing his materials to add color before dating it 1916. He did not just paint the skin; he used a translucent, muddy brownish wash to mold the flesh, and then slashed across her back and shoulders with dense, opaque layers of red and green gouache. He used color like a scalpel, highlights screaming across areas of intense emotional and anatomical pressure.

There is a deep, psychological friction built into the very soul of this sheet. We are forced into a voyeuristic corner, looking down at a woman who is completely trapped within the borders of the paper. She offers no welcoming gaze, no soft curves, and no comfort. Instead, the radical color contrast and the violent foreshortening turn her body into a site of tension and silent endurance. It is an image that makes people intensely uncomfortable because it strips away all narrative safety nets. Schiele does not care about making a pretty watercolor for a collector’s living room; he wants to expose the brutal truth of a body under strain, isolated against the cold abyss of the blank paper.

Even the international expert Jane Kallir was stunned when she personally inspected this sheet to issue its certificate of authenticity, calling it one of the most spectacular Schiele watercolors to surface in modern history. But the real irony lies in its 2013 sale. Bidded on via a digital screen for millions, this hyper-intimate, raw physical object became a trophy in the high-stakes art market. Yet, despite the massive price tag, the work refuses to be domesticated. It remains a fierce, uncompromising witness to 1911–1916 Expressionism, proving that Schiele’s ultimate goal was never universal comfort—it was absolute, unfiltered honesty.