Seated Girl 1910

Egon Schiele’s ‘Seated Girl’ shimmers with delicate washes of watercolour and tentative pencil lines on warm paper. I can see the artist circling his subject, working over and over it, trying to find the right expression, the right pose. I can just imagine him grappling with the challenge of capturing the essence of this young girl. She sits there, perhaps bored, and Schiele is trying to pin her down, but she is still managing to escape him. That patchwork pattern is so curious, full of warm tones and an almost harlequin-like quality. The girl is like a little Pierrot. What was Schiele trying to do with the geometry of the garment against the girl's gentle expression? It’s a reminder that all artists are in conversation. Schiele must have been looking at the work of Gustav Klimt, while thinking about what Cezanne was doing, and that is what I, and you, are doing now.