Three Standing Women

Three Standing Women, painted in 1918, represents Schiele's most mature approach to the multi-figure composition — a confident formal control that contrasts with the rawer intensity of his earlier figure works. By 1918 Schiele had achieved significant recognition: his works sold well, he had exhibited at the Vienna Secession's landmark 49th exhibition earlier that year (where he replaced the ailing Klimt as the central figure), and he had developed a wider range of subjects and compositional ambitions. The three-figure arrangement allows Schiele to study the relationship between bodies in space, their proximity and individuality, without the psychological extremity of his earlier confrontational single figures. Tragically, 1918 was also the year of his death — he succumbed to the Spanish flu pandemic in October at the age of twenty-eight, just three days after his pregnant wife Edith. This canvas, held by the Leopold Museum, belongs to the final chapter of one of the most compressed and intense careers in the history of Expressionism.

The three-figure composition demonstrates Schiele's late command of the vertical canvas format. Figures are close in tonality but differentiated through costume detail and posture. The handling is more assured and less gestural than earlier works, with contained brushwork and resolved passages.