Executed in 1912, Frau mit blondem Haar und blauem Gewand (Woman with Blond Hair and Blue Garment) exemplifies Schiele’s stylistic maturation as the artist grew increasingly confident in his line and colouration. Balancing bold pencil outlines with contours of concentrated pigment, the present work exhibits the artist’s mastery across multiple mediums.
The year 1912 proved a watershed period for Schiele, both personally and professionally. Having lived a peripatetic existence between Austria and Bohemia in the preceding months, Schiele and his partner Valerie ‘Wally’ Nezuil settled for a t.mes in Neulengbach, a small town just west of Vienna. The pair had met the year before, presumably introduced by Schiele’s teacher and mentor Gustav Klimt, and had grown increasingly close as their relationship progressed from that of artist-model to lovers. However, their unconventional artistic lifestyle and his use of local children as models drew criticism from the more conservative elements. When a retired naval officer’s daughter asked Schiele and his girlfriend Wally Neuzil to help her run away, the couple found themselves in a precarious position. Although they returned the girl to her parents, the father had already pressed charges against Schiele and the artist was briefly imprisoned. This experience – and particularly the loss of freedom and selfhood it entailed - had a marked effect on Schiele’s work.
‘From mid 1912 on, Wally’s flashing green eyes, generous mouth, and tawny hair (often pulled up in a headband) are instantly recognizable in Schiele’s drawings. She has now literally become real to him, and hence to us.’
Perhaps inevitably, Wally became an increasingly important presence in Schiele’s life, and accordingly, his work. Though the pair had been linked and living together since 1911, it seems the ordeals of 1912 cemented their relationship. Wally proved a devoted companion in those trying days, bringing the artist art supplies and small treats like fresh fruit while he was imprisoned. It is possible that she is the subject of the present work and certainly it displays a tenderness that is found most commonly in other depictions of Wally from this period (fig. 2). Where many of Schiele’s earlier depictions of models feature stark and angular bodies, often in confrontational or harrowing postures , the woman in the present work appears remarkably elegant and sensual. The blue fabric of her underskirt folds over her lower body in a comparatively decorous manner, as her high cut blouse draws the eye to her delicately delineated face. The woman’s demure gaze is cast downward with the sculptural lines of her face echoing the crook of her elbow to create a very real sense of intimacy.
The woman here is depicted in a confounding spatial arrangement characteristic of the artist’s work. Often while drawing, Schiele would perch above his models on a stool or ladder, situating himself in unique relation to his subjects. Schiele also made a habit of rotating his works ninety degrees before signing them, further abstracting the scene. As Otto Benesch recalled after watching the artist at work on such a sketch: 'his artistry as 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 the board on his right knee and held it at 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' (Otto Benesch, Mein Weg mit Egon Schiele New York, 1965, p. 25)
The works that followed his brief period of imprisonment reflect a shift away from the hard pencils and faint outlines of his previous drawings toward the softer leads and bolder lines seen in the present work. Schiele’s watercolours became less diluted and increasingly mixed with opaque gouache, resulting in heightened contrast between the thickly painted areas, as seen in the blonde woman’s hair and dark collar in the present work, and the delicate coloration of her lips and garment. As Kallir states, ‘The propensity to deposit a narrow band of colour along the principal edges of a form, observed already in 1911, became more pronounced: colour washes glide across the central surface and then accumulate in darker gullies along the periphery’ (ibid., p. 192). In the present work, the delicate application of colour lends subtle emphasis to the woman’s figure evoking the expressive quality that was central to Schiele’s modernity.
Never before seen at auction, the present work has been held in the same family collects
ion for more than sixty years, largely in the collects
ion of Carol Joyce, who acquired it from Galerie St. Etienne in 1961. Joyce was a textile designer and fixture of the artistic circles of New York in the second half of the twentieth century. Known to friends and family as a collects
or in the truest sense of the word, her home was filled with a wide range of works, each acquired out a sense of affinity for the individual piece, whether folk and Asian artworks or drawings of modern masters like Schiele and Kokoschka.