Two Standing Female Nudes, the Left One with Raised Arms

• Study for The Girlfriends II
• Gustav Klimt (1862–1918)
• 1916/17
• Pencil on Japanese paper
• Leopold Museum, Vienna

The two figures all show slender, stretched proportions. Gustav Klimt was greatly impressed by the Spanish painter El Greco when visiting Toledo, Spain in 1909. El Greco, a sixteenth-century Mannerist painter, abandoned the ideal proportions and lifelike depictions of the Renaissance and used unrealistic and exaggerated human forms. El Greco is known to have inspired many Expressionist and Surrealist artists in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.