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Lot Essay
Towards the latter part of 1910 the nude as a subject in Schiele's art began to appear with increasing frequency. Fascinated by the expressive power of the human body to provoke and articulate emotion in the viewer, Schiele began to explore, through his own naked figure and that of others, the body as a unique manifestation of nature's life-force. Painted in 1911 Mädchenakt mit weisser Umrandung (Female Nude with White Border) is an accomplished watercolour belonging to this extraordinarily fertile and exploratory period in Schiele's art when many of his finest works were made.
Developing beyond the example set by his mentor Gustav Klimt, Schiele's nudes, though seldom portraits, are always depictions of an individual, never the idealised perfect and generic beauties that Klimt's women were. Schiele's incredible line delineates every nuance, defect or idiosyncrasy of his figures' outlines powerfully rendering a complete, wholly unique and distinct form. In 1910 the innate 'Expressionism' of Schiele's art grew more pronounced in his work and in the latter part of the year he began to work more frequently with adolescent and child models, many of whom he found living on the streets of Vienna. Often poor and underfed, the scrawny, angular, undernourished bodies of these models proved to be of great fascination to him as they lent themselves to the growing psychological intensity and emotional expressiveness of his art.
The rapid and intense way in which Schiele worked soon meant that, on any given day, as his friend Paris von Gütersloh recalled of the artist's studio at this time, there were always 'two or three smaller or larger girls in the studio; girls from the neighbourhood, from the street, solicited in nearby Schönbrunn Park, some ugly, some attractive, some washed, but also some unwashed. They sat around doing nothing... Well, they slept, recovered from parental beatings, lolled about lazily (which they were not allowed to do at home), combed... their closely cropped or tangled hair, pulled their skirts up or down, tied or untied their shoelaces. And all this they did - if one can call that doing something - because they were left to themselves like animals in a comfortable cage, or so they perceived it' (Paris von Gütersloh cited in exh. cat. Gustav Klimt-Egon Schiele: Zum Gedächtnis ihres Todes vor 50 Jahren, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna, 1968).
This congenial atmosphere of informality and openness was one that Schiele encouraged, for, like Klimt before him, it was the uninhibited, unselfconscious, instinctive and natural behaviour of these street urchins that he wanted to both capture and explore. The body, for Schiele, was merely a case or a housing, but one through which the unique inner emotion and life of the human spirit could be observed. It was for him essentially a landscape of the human soul and he rendered it as such.
In Mädchenakt mit weisser Umrandung Schiele appears to have eavesdropped on a young girl as she reclines languorously before him. As is common in his work of this time, Schiele has depicted this reclining nude vertically. In order to render this normally horizontal subject in such a way Schiele would often draw from a ladder looking down onto the figure stretched out beneath him. When the work was finished and he was satisfied he would reinforce the verticality of the composition, as here, by signing it in such a way as to indicate the work's vertical orientation.
As a reinforcement to the autonomy of the figure, Schiele also began, in many drawings of the period, a practice of differentiating the body from the background by brushing in a white 'halo' around the figure. Used as a way of isolating his figures from the blank sheet and emphasising the volumetric nature of their form, this technique was particularly effective on the brown packpapier that he favoured at this time and which he has used in this work. Emphasising the genius of the artist's line, the white 'body halos' that Schiele employed also lend the work a powerful abstract quality that reveals the material nature of the drawing and the process through which it has come into being. In stressing the practical and procedural nature of his art in this raw and open way Schiele may have been responding to the Oriental tradition of drawing in which an empty expanse of paper and raw brushwork are both incorporated into the logic of the picture and allowed to speak for themselves. In daringly blending these abstract elements into the representational logic of his drawing and in creating works which he regarded and presented as complete, Schiele, who was rumoured to have the finest collection of erotic Japanese prints in Vienna, was championing the art of drawing as a viable medium in its own right.
Developing beyond the example set by his mentor Gustav Klimt, Schiele's nudes, though seldom portraits, are always depictions of an individual, never the idealised perfect and generic beauties that Klimt's women were. Schiele's incredible line delineates every nuance, defect or idiosyncrasy of his figures' outlines powerfully rendering a complete, wholly unique and distinct form. In 1910 the innate 'Expressionism' of Schiele's art grew more pronounced in his work and in the latter part of the year he began to work more frequently with adolescent and child models, many of whom he found living on the streets of Vienna. Often poor and underfed, the scrawny, angular, undernourished bodies of these models proved to be of great fascination to him as they lent themselves to the growing psychological intensity and emotional expressiveness of his art.
The rapid and intense way in which Schiele worked soon meant that, on any given day, as his friend Paris von Gütersloh recalled of the artist's studio at this time, there were always 'two or three smaller or larger girls in the studio; girls from the neighbourhood, from the street, solicited in nearby Schönbrunn Park, some ugly, some attractive, some washed, but also some unwashed. They sat around doing nothing... Well, they slept, recovered from parental beatings, lolled about lazily (which they were not allowed to do at home), combed... their closely cropped or tangled hair, pulled their skirts up or down, tied or untied their shoelaces. And all this they did - if one can call that doing something - because they were left to themselves like animals in a comfortable cage, or so they perceived it' (Paris von Gütersloh cited in exh. cat. Gustav Klimt-Egon Schiele: Zum Gedächtnis ihres Todes vor 50 Jahren, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna, 1968).
This congenial atmosphere of informality and openness was one that Schiele encouraged, for, like Klimt before him, it was the uninhibited, unselfconscious, instinctive and natural behaviour of these street urchins that he wanted to both capture and explore. The body, for Schiele, was merely a case or a housing, but one through which the unique inner emotion and life of the human spirit could be observed. It was for him essentially a landscape of the human soul and he rendered it as such.
In Mädchenakt mit weisser Umrandung Schiele appears to have eavesdropped on a young girl as she reclines languorously before him. As is common in his work of this time, Schiele has depicted this reclining nude vertically. In order to render this normally horizontal subject in such a way Schiele would often draw from a ladder looking down onto the figure stretched out beneath him. When the work was finished and he was satisfied he would reinforce the verticality of the composition, as here, by signing it in such a way as to indicate the work's vertical orientation.
As a reinforcement to the autonomy of the figure, Schiele also began, in many drawings of the period, a practice of differentiating the body from the background by brushing in a white 'halo' around the figure. Used as a way of isolating his figures from the blank sheet and emphasising the volumetric nature of their form, this technique was particularly effective on the brown packpapier that he favoured at this time and which he has used in this work. Emphasising the genius of the artist's line, the white 'body halos' that Schiele employed also lend the work a powerful abstract quality that reveals the material nature of the drawing and the process through which it has come into being. In stressing the practical and procedural nature of his art in this raw and open way Schiele may have been responding to the Oriental tradition of drawing in which an empty expanse of paper and raw brushwork are both incorporated into the logic of the picture and allowed to speak for themselves. In daringly blending these abstract elements into the representational logic of his drawing and in creating works which he regarded and presented as complete, Schiele, who was rumoured to have the finest collection of erotic Japanese prints in Vienna, was championing the art of drawing as a viable medium in its own right.