Schiele was born in Lower Austria in 1890. A protégé of Gustav Klimt, he became a major figurative painter of the early 20th century. He started to study art in Vienna when he was 16 years old – during the same period and in the same place where Freud promulgated his revolutionary insights about sexuality, which he proclaimed the pervasive basis of human existence.

During his life, the artist, whose vision of sexuality was far ahead of his contemporaries, was even imprisoned for his dissolute lifestyle and his drawings, which were considered pornographic. Fortunately, prison didn’t cure him; on the contrary, it made him more obscene.

Schiele’s works have a unique ability to provoke and intrigue. His perception of the female body is pushed to the extreme, causing a most proximate corporal awareness. Schiele did not objectify women, he was delighted by their rough unembellished corporeality. The twisted shapes of bodies he depicted are meant to be vivid, not frozen in objectively sexy poses.

Now, what on Earth can be more sexy than the rough materiality of woman’s body?