Woman with Slipper (Frau mit Hausschuh)

Woman with Slipper (Frau mit Hausschuh) by Egon Schiele is a defining charcoal drawing from the Austrian Expressionist movement, executed in 1917. Created near the end of the artist’s prolific, yet brief, career, this piece exemplifies Schiele’s masterful, psychologically charged draftsmanship. The choice of charcoal on paper allows for the stark contrast and rapid, decisive line work that characterizes his approach to the human figure.

This work isolates the subject, presenting a female figure in a moment of intimate introspection, likely in a private, domestic setting suggested by the title's reference to the slipper. Schiele utilizes his signature technique of emphasizing angularity and expressive contour lines, rendering the figure with an unsettling combination of rawness and formal elegance. The sparsity of the background focuses all attention on the emotional state and physical structure of the woman, a common characteristic in the artist’s intense studies of vulnerability and self-exposure.

The period of 1917 saw the global trauma of World War I, a context that fueled the emotionally intense and often disturbed psychological explorations central to Austrian modernism. Schiele, as a leading figure of this era, frequently transformed traditional portraiture into investigations of anxiety and existential isolation. The expressive power inherent in his drawings, such as Woman with Slipper (Frau mit Hausschuh), cements his legacy as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Today, high-quality prints of Schiele's most famous drawings are frequently available through museum and public domain collections, making his unique vision accessible to a wide audience.

This important drawing resides in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where it serves as a critical example of how the Expressionist period elevated the medium of drawing from preparatory sketch to finished, emotionally resonant artwork.