Hockender weiblicher Akt 1918

Egon Schiele made this drawing of a crouching female nude in 1918, probably in pencil. It's about line, really - how a few strokes can create so much volume. Look at the way he uses shading to sculpt the form, especially around the shoulder and back. You can almost feel the weight of her body pressing down. And then there's that foot, kind of splayed out like it's testing the ground. Schiele doesn't hide his process; you can see the searching lines, the places where he went over something again and again until it felt right. It's all there on the surface, like a map of his thinking. It makes me think of other artists who pushed the boundaries of representation, like, Paula Modersohn-Becker or even Käthe Kollwitz, who were interested in capturing not just the appearance of the body but the feeling of being alive, messy, and human. Art is this ongoing conversation, right? We're all just riffing off each other, trying to make sense of the world in our own way.