Culture shock …
Egon Schiele’s nudes are some of the most recognisable artworks in the world. Yet for all his overfamiliarity in our sex-saturated culture, he is still able to shock, as this confrontational work proves.
From above …
The woman is sleeping but she makes for a ferocious figure, with her powerful thighs and assertive black thatch. Working up a ladder to draw from above, Schiele has altered the perspective on the traditional reclining nude, so it’s hard to say if she’s lying back or falling through space.
Walk the line …
Created shortly before his death from Spanish flu in 1918 aged 28, it is Schiele at the height of his talent. The black line is supremely confident, as is the candid eroticism.
Too sexy …
Schiele’s Vienna was an intellectual and creative hotbed. It was also bound by stuffy bourgeois values. Ripping these open is part of the artist’s modus operandi. No hypocritical purveyor of naked ladies as high art, among other things this is a drawing about getting off.
Included in Egon Schiele/Francesca Woodman: Life in Motion, Tate Liverpool, to 23 September
