Lying Nude of Woman - SOLD

Lying Nude of Woman is a black and white collotype from the “Handzeichnungen”, a fine art portfolio by Egon Schiele.

This original print representing a sensual lying female nude in a relaxing pose, is realized with a sure touch.The original painting was realized by Schiele in 1917. Signed on plate “Egon Schiele 1917” at the lower-right margin in a box.

In excellent condition: as good as new, with a black cardboard passepartout, cm 58.6 x 42.2.

Handzeichnungen

Handzeichnungen is a beautiful collection consisting of 15 collotype prints after original watercolors and drawings by the Austrian artist, four of which are colored. Published by Verlag Eduard Strache, Vienna, Prague, Leipzig, in 1920, in an edition of 510 prints: the first group, numbered in Roman numerals I-X, were hand-signed by Schiele and included one of his original drawings. Our copy specimen is the number VI. The images were printed by Kunstanstalt, the specialist of collotypes, Max Jaffe in Vienna. The portfolio with the printed pages was printed by Gesellschaft fur Graphische Industrie, Wien VI.

Posthumous printed portfolios, such as our Handzeichnungen, are a continuation of the tradition that Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele helped to develop and popularize in Vienna in their lives. Schiele's hand captured all the different shades of the erotic, the intellectual, and the aesthetic.

The Collotype

This dichromate-based photographic process was invented in 1856. The gelatin plates required delicate preparation involving light exposure, washing, and drying. They were inked using a velvet or leather roller, and printed using a hand-proof process with a light-pressured press. Collotype plates could not be re-used: they were created in limited editions of extremely high quality. Lithography later replaced this process, which has now become a nearly lost kind of art.

Egon Schiele

Esteemed for his masterful draftsmanship, Egon Schiele is remembered for his precocious insights into human condition. Part of the first wave of Austrian Modernism, he was fascinated by the eternal tension between Eros and Thanatos, or Life and Death.

Life is synonymous with attraction, love, sexuality, and reproduction, whilst Death signifies distortion, disease, repulsion, and hysteria. His contorted lines, jarring contrasts, his disarticulated bodies, the flat areas of color, demonstrate an early adhesion to the Expressionist philosophy, driven forward by artists who were constantly frustrated with conventionality in all its forms. Schiele’s work embodied man’s disorientation in an absurd world, plagued by disease and war. It continues to be astonishingly relevant still today, not just because it helped to define Modernism, but also because it revealed the dark side of human condition.

 If You Would Discover More About Egon Schiele's Life, Click Here!