Reclining Woman in Underwear with Spread Legs, Masturbating, 1916/17

This drawing of a model in a permissive pose, her hand on her genitals, has a formal and motivic counterpart in a further drawing housed by the Leopold Museum (Female Head in Half Profile from the Left). Alice Strobl subsumed both works into a group of over ten drawings, most of which show women in permissive poses with spread legs, which Strobl associated with erotic Japanese woodcuts. Some of these works likely show the same model – the fashionable underwear with knee-length, ruche-trimmed pants, at any rate, features in at least three further renderings from this series. Klimt captured the draperies with curvy-whirling strokes and only fleetingly outlined the body’s contours. The area of the neck and shoulders, by contrast, was invested with a surprisingly precise outline which Klimt further emphasized through hatching. The artist also attached more importance to the model’s face, with its distinctive snub nose, than he did in other drawings of this series, and repeated it on the reverse of this work.

FS