Egon Schiele:
Standing Nude Girl (Stehendes Nacktes Mädchen), 1911
Pencil on paper
50.6 × 33.9 cm
To be auctioned at Christie’s, New York, mid-November 2026
Estimate: USD 180,000–250,000
(Kallir d819)

Some drawings by Schiele are easy to admire. This is not necessarily one of them. At first glance, most viewers are likely to notice the girl’s apparent youth long before they consider the drawing itself. More than a century after it was made, Standing Nude Girl remains capable of provoking questions that extend far beyond art history. Schiele was twenty-one when he made this drawing.

A Figure at the Edge of the Page

One of the first things that stands out is how tightly Schiele positions the girl within the sheet. There is little room around her and her feet disappear beyond the lower edge of the page. The effect feels unusually direct. Rather than observing her from a comfortable distance, we seem to be standing close by, sharing the space between artist and model. Whether that proximity creates a sense of intimacy or confrontation may depend on the viewer.

The girl’s apparent youth is equally difficult to ignore. For many viewers, that observation shapes everything else they see in the drawing. Works like this have remained among the most debated parts of Schiele’s oeuvre, both during his lifetime and long after his death.

The discomfort some people feel is not necessarily about nudity itself. More often, it is the age of the model that becomes impossible to separate from the image. Even today, viewers continue to disagree about such drawings. Some approach them primarily as works of art, while others find the youth of the model impossible to look beyond. Neither reaction is difficult to understand.

Schiele was working in a Vienna very different from our own, and many of the young people who appeared in his drawings remain largely anonymous today. Yet historical context does not make the questions disappear. More than a century later, people still respond to these works on a deeply human level before they respond to them as art.

As with so many of Schiele’s models, we do not know who this girl was. The drawing survives; her name does not.

The Journey of the Drawing

The drawing passed through Galerie St. Etienne in New York, one of the galleries most closely associated with Schiele’s work in the United States.

Readers interested in placing this drawing within the broader context of Schiele’s works on paper may also wish to explore the collection of drawings by Schiele.

Known primarily from its catalogue entry in Kallir, it now appears in detailed photographs that offer a rare opportunity to look more closely at a drawing that has largely remained in the background of Schiele scholarship. We only know that, for a moment in 1911, she stood before the artist and became part of his story.