Reclining Female Nude with Bent Right Leg, Propping Herself Up, 1910

Alice Strobl numbers this work on paper among a group of nudes and semi-nudes created between 1909 and 1910. In contrast to earlier depictions of especially slim models, the works from this group show that Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) now preferred curvier models who often posed for the artist in a relaxed manner. When rendering the models’ faces, Klimt now dispensed with any kind of idealization, as we can see in this nude study of a woman with a strikingly broad face and narrow eyes, who was possibly depicted in two further studies. Alice Strobl emphasized the compositional quality of this drawing from the Leopold Museum. According to Strobl, Klimt anticipated the oval shape of his 1913 painting The Virgin with this drawing’s conspicuous semi-circular form which is shaped by the continuous line of the back and left leg and is repeated in the edge of the bed visible behind it.

FS