Standing Male Nude with a Red Loincloth 1914

Egon Schiele rendered this Standing Male Nude with a Red Loincloth with pencil and gouache on paper, and when you look at it, you feel like you can feel the making of it. That red loincloth, like a flame, anchors the composition. The body above seems caught in a moment of torsion, of anxiety almost, as he is drawing his hands over his head. I wonder if Schiele ever felt that he was also wringing out his own insides as he made this. The line is so present and insistent, full of a kind of manic energy. It reminds me a little of some of the psychological intensity you see later in Francis Bacon. There’s also a dialogue with the earlier Expressionist Edvard Munch, especially his raw, vulnerable figures. Artists are always riffing on each other, stealing ideas and making them their own! This is just such a great example of how the intensity of feeling gets embodied in the art object.