Standing Male Nude 1910

Egon Schiele made this Standing Male Nude with watercolor and pencil, and it's like he’s sketching his way into the form. The colors are translucent, like he's staining the paper rather than building up layers. There's this tentative quality to the lines, they don't seem totally sure of themselves, kind of feeling around for the right contour. Look at how he’s rendered the torso with these pinkish-red washes that bleed into the ochre of the paper, and that block of green, like an awkwardly placed loincloth. It feels provisional, like a work in progress. Schiele reminds me a bit of Francis Bacon, that willingness to depict the body in these strange, vulnerable ways. Both artists seem to be grappling with the messy, uncomfortable aspects of being human, and they're not afraid to leave the marks of that struggle visible in their work. For Schiele, like all of us, art is not about perfection, but about process and the search for meaning.