Nude with Blue Stockings, Bending Forward 1912

Egon Schiele made this watercolor and pencil drawing of a nude bended figure with blue stockings. Imagine him there, wrestling with the pose, trying to capture that awkward angle. It's like the figure is collapsing in on itself, a jumble of limbs and fleshy curves outlined with nervous energy. The colour is almost like an afterthought, a blush of pink here, a shock of blue there. That sienna-stained head; is it paint or dirt? Probably both! Schiele's lines aren't precious, they’re urgent, raw. He's not interested in idealizing the body, but in capturing its vulnerability, its strange beauty. You can see this urgency across Schiele's wider body of work, that need to get something down fast. Like a visual diary entry, where the messy truth is more important than perfect representation.