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Lot Essay
Sitzende Frau mit schwarzen Strümpfen belongs to an extraordinarily fertile and exploratory period for Schiele. At age twenty-one, the young, precocious artist Schiele broke away from the prevailing Viennese style, which was epitomized by the stylized forms and decorative surfaces of Gustav Klimt, and developed his own radical, intensely personal form of Expressionism. Taking the human figure as his subject, Schiele infused his line with a potent and charged expression, isolating the body in empty spaces, while experimenting with bold, often unnatural color. The viewpoints that Schiele adopted in order to draw his figures, along with the poses that he asked them to take up, also reflect this growing sense that he had begun to study the human animal at this time with a growing sense of emotional detachment and a more dispassionate sense of curiosity and analytical scrutiny.
Painted in 1911, this deftly rendered work represents the greater refinement and consolidation of the stylistic breakthroughs he had achieved the previous year as well as his new command of the watercolor medium. Schiele devoted an enormous amount of time and energy to his works on paper at this time and was determined to master the wet-on-wet technique of the conventional watercolorist, whilst pushing the medium to higher, new limits. Whereas his use of color previously remained more bound to the underlying drawing, by the middle of 1911 he was able to find subtlety in his contrasts and less rigid tonal variations through the pigments. He also began to shift away from the bold, jagged, angular lines that had previously dominated his work to explore a softer, more delicate approach to form, rooted in color. A key element in this development lay in the artist’s work in watercolor, a medium he played with repeatedly during this period as he sought to understand and master its capricious nature.
Otto Benesch, the art historian and director of the Albertina in Vienna, recalled: “The beauty of form and color that Schiele gave us did not exist before. His artistry as a draughtsman was phenomenal. The assurance of his hand was almost infallible. When he drew, he usually sat on a low stool, the drawing board and sheet on his knees, his right hand (with which he did the drawing) resting on the board. But I also saw him drawing differently, standing in front of the model, his right foot on a low stool. Then he rested his board on his right knee and held it 0061t the top with his left hand, and his drawing hand unsupported placed his pencil on the sheet and drew his lines from the shoulder, as it were. And everything was exactly right. If he happened to get something wrong, which was very rare, he threw the sheet away; he never used an eraser. Schiele only drew from nature. Most of his drawings were done in outline and only became more three-dimensional when they were colored. The coloring was always done without the model, from memory” (Mein Weg mit Egon Schiele, New York, 1965, p. 27).
As with the majority of Schiele’s figure studies, the almost sculptural physicality of the young model’s body is contrasted against the void of the blank page surrounding her, the details of the setting subsumed by the artist’s need to capture the vital living nature of the human form before him. Reinforcing the isolation of his model on the page, Schiele emphasizes the strong meandering contours of her figure by introducing a subtle white “halo” of opaque heightener in places around the edges of her body, a technique he made frequent use of at this time. Radiating from the model like a shimmering current of electric light, Schiele often used this essentially abstract pictorial device in his early watercolors not only as a means of conveying energy, but also in a practical capacity, halting the flow of the thinned, liquid washes of watercolor from spilling across the rest of the page.
Painted in 1911, this deftly rendered work represents the greater refinement and consolidation of the stylistic breakthroughs he had achieved the previous year as well as his new command of the watercolor medium. Schiele devoted an enormous amount of time and energy to his works on paper at this time and was determined to master the wet-on-wet technique of the conventional watercolorist, whilst pushing the medium to higher, new limits. Whereas his use of color previously remained more bound to the underlying drawing, by the middle of 1911 he was able to find subtlety in his contrasts and less rigid tonal variations through the pigments. He also began to shift away from the bold, jagged, angular lines that had previously dominated his work to explore a softer, more delicate approach to form, rooted in color. A key element in this development lay in the artist’s work in watercolor, a medium he played with repeatedly during this period as he sought to understand and master its capricious nature.
Otto Benesch, the art historian and director of the Albertina in Vienna, recalled: “The beauty of form and color that Schiele gave us did not exist before. His artistry as a draughtsman was phenomenal. The assurance of his hand was almost infallible. When he drew, he usually sat on a low stool, the drawing board and sheet on his knees, his right hand (with which he did the drawing) resting on the board. But I also saw him drawing differently, standing in front of the model, his right foot on a low stool. Then he rested his board on his right knee and held it 0061t the top with his left hand, and his drawing hand unsupported placed his pencil on the sheet and drew his lines from the shoulder, as it were. And everything was exactly right. If he happened to get something wrong, which was very rare, he threw the sheet away; he never used an eraser. Schiele only drew from nature. Most of his drawings were done in outline and only became more three-dimensional when they were colored. The coloring was always done without the model, from memory” (Mein Weg mit Egon Schiele, New York, 1965, p. 27).
As with the majority of Schiele’s figure studies, the almost sculptural physicality of the young model’s body is contrasted against the void of the blank page surrounding her, the details of the setting subsumed by the artist’s need to capture the vital living nature of the human form before him. Reinforcing the isolation of his model on the page, Schiele emphasizes the strong meandering contours of her figure by introducing a subtle white “halo” of opaque heightener in places around the edges of her body, a technique he made frequent use of at this time. Radiating from the model like a shimmering current of electric light, Schiele often used this essentially abstract pictorial device in his early watercolors not only as a means of conveying energy, but also in a practical capacity, halting the flow of the thinned, liquid washes of watercolor from spilling across the rest of the page.