Egon Schiele:
Woman with Hat and Veil (Frau mit Hut und Schleier), 1918
Black chalk on cream-coloured wove vellum
47.5 x 30 cm
To be auctioned at Karl & Faber, Munich
(Kallir d2221)

A veil partially conceals the face of a young woman, yet it does little to hide Schiele’s interest in her features. Drawn in 1918, the final year of the artist’s life, this elegant study belongs to a quieter and more restrained phase of his career. After decades in well-known private and museum collections, the drawing is now set to reappear on the market in Munich.

The Shift to a Classical Line

Schiele made this drawing in 1918, the year he died during the Spanish flu pandemic. His work from this late period shows a change from his earlier expressionist habits. Instead of using the tense, twisted bodies and knotted fingers seen in his younger years, Schiele used a quieter and more controlled approach to the human form.

Schiele devoted most of his attention to the woman’s head and hat. Below the shoulders, the drawing becomes increasingly economical, with only a few lines suggesting the rest of her figure. Everything that is not essential is reduced to a minimum. The result is a drawing that feels calm and deliberate, with the viewer’s attention returning again and again to the woman’s veiled face.

Visitors familiar with Portrait of Lilly Steiner (1918) and Portrait of a Girl (Hilde Ziegler) (1918) will recognize the same restraint. In each of these late works, Schiele achieves a remarkable presence with surprisingly few marks on the paper.

The Search for Jella Pollak

For many years, nobody seemed entirely certain who Schiele had drawn. Early gallery records suggested the subject was Schiele’s secretary, a woman known as Tontschi. Later researchers argued that the facial features matched his wife, Edith.

In her catalogue raisonné, Schiele scholar Jane Kallir identified the sitter as Jella Pollak. Born Jella Reif, she was a young art student who belonged to the social circle of the Schiele family. Archival papers confirm that Pollak exchanged holiday greeting cards and scheduled regular studio visits with the couple during the final months of World War I. The black chalk marks on her high hat, feather, and veil create a frame, yet the veil itself blurs the very features Schiele worked to document.

The Sabarsky Legacy

The long exhibition history of the drawing connects several private collections in Vienna and New York. The Neue Galerie in Vienna held the drawing in 1948 before it passed to the private collection of Dr. Viktoria Maria Künstler. The artwork left Austria when the Galerie St. Etienne acquired it for the American market.

The collectors Serge and Vally Sabarsky purchased the sheet in the winter of 1980. Serge Sabarsky was a Viennese refugee who fled the Nazi regime in 1938 and later introduced Austrian expressionism to the American public. This sheet remained inside his estate for decades and went on display at the famous Neue Galerie in New York, a museum Sabarsky co-planned before his death.

More than a century after Schiele drew her, the woman behind the veil remains slightly out of reach. The veil hides very little, yet it never fully reveals her either.