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Description: umarmung (embrace) signed and dated 1917 gouache and black crayon on paper 43.5 by 29.5 cm., 17 1/4 by 11 5/8 in. Executed in 1917. Provenance Wolfgang Gurlitt, Munich Galleria Galatea, Turin Klaus-Bernt Hegewisch, Hamburg Sale: Sotheby's, London, 25th June 1986, lot 362 Acquired at the above sale by the present owner Exhibited Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Egon Schiele: Gedachtnisausstellung, 1948, no. 216 Linz, Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz, Egon Schiele, 1949, no. 178 Salzburg, Kunstlerhaus, Egon Schiele, 1950, no. 71 Munich, Galerie Wolfgang Gurlitt, Egon Schiele, 1957, no. 79 Heidelberg, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, 1962, no. 84 Turin, Galleria Galatea - Galleria d'Arte Contemporanea, Schiele, 1963, no. 40 Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, L'Espressionismo (XXVII. Maggio Musicale Fiorentino), 1964, no. 515 London, Marlborough Fine Art, Egon Schiele: Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings, 1964, no. 76, illustrated in the catalogue Hamburg, Kunsthalle, Experiment Weltuntergang: Wien um 1900, 1981, no. 226, illustrated in the catalogue Vienna, Osterreichische Galerie, Egon Schiele: Gemalde, Studien, Skizzen, 1990 New York, Gagosian Gallery, Egon Schiele: Nudes, 1994 Literature Michael Levey, ''Egon Schiele'', in Lugano Review, Lugano, 1965, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 100 Rudolf Leopold, Egon Schiele: Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings, London, 1973, p. 438, illustrated Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele: The Complete Works, London, 1998, p. 597, no. 2126, illustrated Towards the end of 1913 and during the following year, Schiele drew and painted the first of his erotic representations of a recumbent nude couple. In these works the proportions of the figures were exaggerated to create an intense, expressive effect, which differed greatly from that pertaining to the artist's work, for example, from 1910. Following his brief spell of imprisonment in 1912 for the alleged dissemination of indecent drawings, Schiele reduced some of the sexual expliciteness typical of these earlier portraits. During this same period he also became increasingly interested in depicting his sitters in a more sculptural way, focusing on the volumetric play between the two figures. Schiele's interest in the dynamics of the couple and his preoccupation with three-dimensional form is particularly evident in the present work from 1917, executed some five years after his first important depictions of couples locked in loving embraces. This powerful gouache is a study for the artist's major oil Umarmung (Liebespaar II), painted the same year (Fig. 3, Osterreichische Galerie, Vienna). Rudolf Leopold notes that the composition of this work may have been inspired by the two lovers in Oskar Kokoschka's oil The Tempest, painted in 1914 (see: H.M. Wingler, Oskar Kokoschka, Salzburg, 1956, no. 96). This richly wrought study focuses its vision, in contrast to the final painting, on the lovers' upper bodies and does not portray their lower legs or the sheet on which they lie in the oil painting version. Additionally, the woman's hair is tied up in a bun in the present study, whereas in the oil her dark hair flows out around her. Jane Kallir writes of the nudes from 1917: '[They] seem to inhabit a painterly universe of their own; though they are no less realistically modeled than the portrait subjects, they are not as constrained by the tug of the real world. The creation of an independent painterly world in which allegory might thrive is, again, one of the principal concerns of Klimt during his last years, a problem which he never entirely resolves. Schiele, on the other hand, comes closer to a resolution in these paintings, and the 1917 nudes anticipate the thematic concerns of the 1918 allegorical cycle' (J. Kallir, op. cit., 1990, p. 335).