Egon Schiele

Friederike Maria Beer-Monti, Vienna & United States (acquired directly from the artist)
Joseph Hahn, United States (acquired from the above circa 1970)
Acquired by the present owner from the Estate of the above in 2011

Tull, Egon Schiele Museum & Ravensburg, Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, Egon Schiele. Der Anfang, 2013-14

Christian M. Nebehay, Egon Schiele, 1890-1918: Leben, Briefe, Gedichte, Vienna & Salzburg, 1979, no. 152
Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele: The Complete Works, New York, 1998, no. 1604, illustrated p. 534

Executed on cream coloured paper. T-hinged to a mount at two places at the upper edge of the verso of the sheet. The left edges have been unevenly cut. The sheet is slightly time stained with a faint mat stain as well as a couple of minor surface stains in the upper left quadrant and one small spot in the upper right quadrant. There are remnants of adhesive from a previous mounting visible on the verso with small corresponding staining at the extreme bottom left and right corners of the recto. There is a 4cm repaired tear running vertically at the bottom left edge of the sheet, as well as a small 1cm nick to the right of this tear. There are some very faint scattered creases but the work is otherwise in overall good condition.
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Viennese society member Friederike Maria Beer was the subject of multiple commissioned portraits during the mid-1910s, including Klimt's Bildnes der Friederike Maria Beer of 1916. She typically modeled wearing her finest clothing from the Viennese design studio Wiener Werkstätte, where she was a regular customer at the time.

This earlier pencil drawing underscores why Schiele in particular may be counted among the most influential draughtsmen of the modern movement, his contour drawings being the most readily identifiable of the entire Expressionist school. As Jane Kallir writes, 'Like the late medieval German artists Hans Holbein and Albrecht Durer—with whom he merits comparison—Schiele was a consummate master of line. Early on, he learned to work fast. His hated master at the academy, Christian Griepenkerl, gave timed exercises, and Schiele of his own volition often drew with a stopwatch in hand. His entire life was a search for the perfect line: the line that hits the target every time; the line that knows no eraser. This, however, does not mean that Schiele’s approach was doctrinaire or monolithic. Flexibility and spontaneity were essential to his quest. His contours could be flowing and elegant in the Jugendstil manner, primitive in the Expressionistic mode, clipped and jagged, spare and sensual, or intertwined with curlicues and scarlike hatchings. The best of Schiele’s drawings demonstrate a perfect accord among the artist’s hand, his perceptions of his subject, and the subject’s physical appearance' (Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1994, p. 14).