Nude

Artist Egon Schiele (Austrian, 1890 - 1918)

Date1912

MediumCrayon drawing

DimensionsOverall: 17 1/2 × 10 1/4 inches (44.45 × 26.04 cm)

Credit LineGift of Richard S. Davis

Object number53-19

On View

Not on view

Collections

Modern Art

Terms

Gallery Label

During his brief but prolific life, Egon Schiele rejected the orderly conventions of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts where he studied, in favor of an art charged with psychological and sexual intensity. In 1912, the year this drawing was made, police arrested Schiele at his studio and seized more than 100 drawings, which they considered pornographic. This figure is not explicit, but does convey the sense of inner tension and discomfort characteristic of Schiele’s work. With her boyish haircut, small breasts, exaggerated thrust hip and awkward hand-to-chin gesture, she is an individual rather than an idealized woman, naked rather than nude. Schiele’s expressive line further reveals her vulnerability.

Provenance

Dr. Heinrich Schwarz (1894-1974), Vienna [1];

Richard S. Davis (1917-1985), Minneapolis, by December 1952 [2];

His gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1953.

NOTES:

[1] Heinrich Schwarz was an Austrian art historian best known for his work on prints and the integration of photography into art historical research. Schwarz was identified as a “non-Aryan” by the Nazi regime and removed from his position at the Belvedere Galerie in April 1938. He emigrated to Denmark in 1939, then Sweden, and finally to the United States in February 1940. From 1943-1954 he was a curator at the Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art. Schwarz acquired much of his private collection of paintings, drawings, prints and photographs from his father Louis Schwarz (d. 1930) during Louis’s lifetime. Heinrich Schwarz’s collector’s stamp (Lugt 1372) is on the verso of this drawing.

[2] Richard S. Davis was Chief Curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Art from 1946-1956 and served as the MIA’s director from 1956-1959. He was a strong advocate for modern art and displayed his own collection in his modernist home on Lake Minnetonka, which he commissioned from architect Philip Johnson. With thanks to Richard S. Davis, Jr. and the Davis family for sharing their memories of their father and his collection with the Nelson-Atkins.

Published References

Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele, the Complete Works (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1990), 587, (repro.).

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