Sitting Semi-Nude with Blue Hairband 1914

Egon Schiele made this semi-nude with watercolour and pencil in 1914. It's a quick, loose piece. You can see the blue pencil lines running all over, mapping out the form, before he went in with the watery greens and pinks. For Schiele, like me, I think artmaking was a way of seeing the world, not just representing it. Look at the way he's drawn the robe, or whatever it is she’s wearing. It’s all these angular planes, like he’s X-raying the structure of the thing. The color's washed in, almost like an afterthought. Then there’s her face. Those eyes, like two blue marbles, staring right through you. And the mouth, just a slash of red. It's unnerving, but also kind of beautiful. You can see echoes of Klimt in the decorative quality, but Schiele strips away the ornament, leaving something raw and exposed. It's that tension, between beauty and ugliness, that makes his work so compelling. It's like he's saying, "Here it is, the world in all its messy, contradictory glory."