Standing Girl

Standing Girl is the largest known drawing from Egon Schiele’s short but prolific career. His life played out against the backdrop of Sigmund Freud’s studies of the mind and intense debates about the treatment of human sexuality in the arts. Characteristic of early twentieth-century Viennese art, this provocative sheet—actually brown wrapping paper—epitomizes the era’s decorative ornamentation and decadent eroticism. Schiele’s contours, at once graceful and awkward, create a momentary confusion between bodily mass and negative space, laying open the mysterious relationship between inward and outward realities. Setting the figure’s clawlike hands against her virginal, downcast eyes, Schiele struck a balance between corruption and purity.