Kneeling Young Man 1908

Egon Schiele made this drawing of a Kneeling Young Man on paper, probably in 1908. The red chalk feels immediate, like he's working directly from life, but then again, what does that really mean? The drawing has these thin, spidery lines that remind me of Giacometti. Look at the way Schiele uses hatching and cross-hatching to build up the form, especially around the torso and legs. It's like he's mapping the body, but also leaving space for the unknown. And then there’s the missing hand on the left shoulder, where he begins to construct a second figure, only to abandon it. There's a kind of raw vulnerability in Schiele's work, a refusal to prettify or idealize the human form. It is as if he asks us to consider the tension between what we see and what remains hidden. Like Freud, Schiele was interested in exploring the messy, contradictory depths of the human psyche, even if that meant embracing ambiguity.