In Egon Schiele’s 1911 Stehendes Mädchen in Weissem Unterkleid, a young girl confronts the viewer head-on with an inescapable gaze and impenetrable expression. She appears to have been interrupted in the midst of undressing, which is a subject Schiele revisited often, though he seldom achieved an expression quite so staggering. The figure of the young girl fills the page—red hair nearly grazing the top edge and feet just cropped from view—yet it is the magnitude of her psychological presence that is most arresting. Her jet-black irises, narrowed lids and furrowed brow convey an intensity of emotion that is at once intimate and hostile. One hand covers a portion of her face, and the other holds a garment against her body. These gestures of concealment, partnered with the sitter’s piercing gaze, position the portrait as not just a figurative rendering but an audacious expression of the inner psyche.
Schiele’s pencil line is confident and impassioned; it shifts seamlessly from bold, unwavering outline to delicate, frenzied detail. It has an energy and life of its own, as do Schiele’s swathes of gouache and watercolor, which somet.mes s fill their preceding pencil marks but oftent.mes s defy delineation. Most notably, color spills over the outline of the female figure, forming a white aura around her. This so-called “body halo” is consistent with many of Schiele’s early portraits. It grounds the figure pictorially on the empty page but also elevates her symbolically to the realm of the spiritual. It creates a phantasmic and haunting image, yet Schiele adorns the details of the young girl’s flesh with shocking dashes of red paint that ground her again in her corporeal existence and reveal her capable of life, death, desire and decay.
The existential and psychological weight of Schiele’s portraiture lives on in the work of figurative artists from the postwar period to today. The contemporary painter Alice Neel, for example, employs Schiele's uncensored honesty in her direct and even disquieting portraits (see fig. 1). The pale blue “body halo” in Neel's portrait of Andy Warhol is powerfully reminiscent of Schiele's Stehendes Mädchen in Weissem Unterkleid, as is the bright white heightening employed to bring the subject to the fore of the composition.
The Market for Schiele’s Women—Gouaches and Watercolors
The present work has a distinguished provenance. By the 1960s it had entered the collects
ion of Frederick and Ilona Gerstel, avid collects
ors of German and Austrian art who became particularly interested in Schiele after discovering his work in the 1950s–some 40 years after the artist’s death. In large part thanks to the devoted patronage of the Gerstels, Schiele came to be widely recognized as a master of Expressionism and one of the most skilled draft.mes
n of the twentieth century. By 1985 Schiele’s reputation was so fixed that the Gerstels lent Stehendes Mädchen in Weissem Unterkleid to The Museum of Modern Art, New York for public display.