Egon Schiele:
Two Standing Nudes (Zwei stehende Akte), 1913
Pencil on paper (coloured by another hand)
48.5 x 29.6 cm
Auctioned at Christie’s in 2012 for 169,250 GBP
(Kallir d1382)

The drawings Egon Schiele produced in 1913 often show a major shift in how he viewed the human body. After his time in prison in 1912, he moved away from drawing child models and focused his attention entirely on adult figures. This sheet features his signature line work from that transitional period, but it also carries a fascinating marketplace secret that was uncovered decades later.

Fake Colors for Higher Prices

Schiele signed and dated this sheet in the lower right corner with his standard block lettering. Looking at the drawing, you see blocks of watercolor tinting the skin of the two figures. However, expert Jane Kallir discovered that Schiele never touched those colors. Someone else added them later.

In the early twentieth century, collectors and art dealers paid significantly more money for Schiele’s watercolors than for his plain pencil drawings. To make a quick profit, anonymous hands often took his black-and-white sketches and filled them in with unauthorized color washes. It shows the raw financial side of the early modern art market, where original studio drawings were altered just to push up their gallery value.

Radical Scissors

Even without the fake colors, the composition itself is incredibly bold. Schiele chose a very aggressive way to crop his models. He positioned the figures so that the edges of the paper cut off their heads completely. Their hands are missing too.

By removing faces and hands, Schiele stripped away all personal identity from the models. Your eyes are forced to look strictly at the shapes of the flesh and the curves of the torsos. While this style feels shocking, Schiele was actually building on a technique used before him by artists like Edgar Degas and Auguste Rodin, who also sliced up the human form to change how people looked at the body.

A New Way of Drawing

This headless presentation also connects to a larger stylistic change in Schiele’s workspace that year. Following a quick trip to Munich where he studied German Expressionist painters, his style became less flat. He started experimenting with three-dimensional volume.

Instead of focusing on the facial expressions or the emotional impact of the model, he used this new aesthetic distance to focus purely on unusual angles and geometric shapes. The paper eventually traveled through the collection of Oscar Ghez at the Petit Palais in Geneva before ending up in a Swiss private collection, carrying a mix of genuine avant-garde experimentation and early art market forgery.