Seated Woman with Bent Knees[a] is a 1917 painting in gouache, watercolor, and black crayon on paper by the Austrian Expressionist artist Egon Schiele.

Schiele's wife, Edith, served as the model for Seated Woman, which utilizes a limited color palette, empty background, and sharp, edgy lines.

Like many of Schiele's other works, the piece employs a distinct style that subverts conventional representations of beauty and instead blends an ugly, distorted feeling with a sensual and erotic aesthetic.

[6] Blatant eroticism, for which he drew a high amount of contemporary criticism,[5] was featured in tandem with twisted human anatomy and jagged lines.

[1] The expressiveness of the piece's lines and marks were achieved by Schiele's application of "fairly dry, scumbled paint" and usage of "stiff brushes and different amounts of water in each area".

[5] Schiele's work came to be categorized as part of the Austrian Expressionism movement, which rejected conventional portrayals of beauty and instead predicated its pictorial language through elements of ugliness and exaggerated emotions.

"[1] In this vein, Schiele "studied and staged the poses of his models to the extent that ultimately he achieved a deformed and even grotesque effect", disrupting the dichotomy of beauty and ugliness.