Nude with Blue Stockings, Bending Forward 1912

Egon Schiele drew 'Nude with Blue Stockings, Bending Forward' with pencil, watercolor, and gouache. Look at the scratchy, almost nervous lines that make up the body. Schiele really lets us see his working process. Those frantic marks somehow capture the vulnerability of the figure, don't they? The blue stockings are such a striking detail, a little splash of artificiality against the rawness of the naked body. It's all about the surface, isn't it? The paper, the way the watercolor bleeds into it. There's a tension between control and letting go. Notice the way the hair is almost like a dark cloud, smudged and chaotic. It's balanced by the almost diagrammatic lines of the body. That dark cloud of hair, is it a mask, a hiding place, or just pure, raw energy? Like his contemporary, Gustav Klimt, Schiele's nudes invite us to contemplate the body as a site of both beauty and unease.