In 1909, Egon Schiele actively sought contact with the painter Max Oppenheimer, who was five years his senior. Along with Oskar Kokoschka, he was one of the leading representatives of Viennese Expressionism and Schiele would fing the decisive turning point from Art Nouveau to Expressionism through his work. Jane Kallir's catalogue raisonné lists a series of only three watercolors as important artistic testimonies to this friendship, a friendship that lasted for many years and was formative for both sides. Created while working together in Schiele's studio in the winter of 1910/11, Schiele attained an expressive power in these works that show Max Oppenheimer in black tails that is unique of his gentlemen portraits. Despite the amount of material, which is unusual for Schiele, the black tailcoat only leaves the expressively shaped and colorfully accentuated hands uncovered, and in the other two watercolors also the face of the sitter, Schiele achieved an expressionist power through the unusual image section and the exaggerated poses that only compares to his self-portraits. Reduced to a minimum, our watercolor shows only the lower half of his artist friend's body, severely cropped on all sides, and lets his right hand reach into the format from above as if it was cut off. A bold trick that confidently sets the deep black of the body in a tailcoat almost like an abstract line structure in the format. This is where Schiele's exceptional graphic mastery becomes apparent, his flair for format, the relationship between painted and unpainted areas, and the contrast between colored and blank paper. Is it red paint or blood that Schiele drips from his artist friend's hand onto the deep black of the tailcoat? Probably an allusion to the agonizing existence of the artist, who can be recognized by his stigmata, corresponding to the self-sacrificing suffering of Christ. This imagery is disturbing and almost programmatic for the exceptional expressionist Egon Schiele, who put everything into his art, with almost every one of his drawings painfully permeated by a maximum of expression. With an art committed to the theme of life and death, the young artist died of the Spanish flu at the young age of 28. [JS]