Egon Schiele – Sitzender Männerakt

Egon Schiele (Tulln an der Donau, 1890 – Vienna, 1918)

Sitzender Männerakt (Seated Male Nude)

1910

Watercolor pencil, tempera and charcoal

Forced purchase 2021

The watercolor, signed “S 10”, well represents the artistic production of the Austrian artist in the year (1910) in which he abruptly distances himself from his style master Gustav Klimt, and takes a turn towards a rawer naturalism, characterized by an emphasized and tortuous linearism.
This is evident in the portraits of friends of the artist, and especially in the naked bodies represented through an aggressive and dramatic figurative distortion. Sexuality, always obsessively described alongside the anguish of loneliness, takes on very strong emotional tones.
Similar artworks of the same period are preserved at Leopold Museum in Vienna, which houses the largest collection of drawings and paintings by the Austrian artist. Despite his early death in 1918 at the age of 28, of Spanish fever, Schiele left behind a corpus of works that includes over 340 paintings and about 3000 between drawings and watercolors. The artwork represents an absolute rarity in view of the little presence of works by this artist in Italian public collections.