Girl in Blue Dress 1911

Egon Schiele made this watercolor of a girl in a blue dress, we think in 1911, and it’s now in a private collection. Look at the way he layered those watercolor washes, building up the shadowy blues and blacks of the dress. You can almost feel him dabbing and swirling the brush, coaxing the image out of the paper. There’s a rawness to the lines, an immediacy that says so much about Schiele’s state of mind. I wonder if he was feeling a little like a voyeur when he made it. Or maybe he was trying to capture something fleeting, some kind of awkward energy. That single stroke of red under the dress—it's like a flash of rebellion, or maybe just a hint of what’s underneath the surface. He’s got so much in common with other painters like Munch, and even later, someone like Alice Neel. It reminds us that artists are always talking to each other, even across time, wrestling with similar questions about what it means to be human. Schiele leaves us space to feel the push and pull of it all, the uncertainty.