Standing Male Nude belongs to the final years of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s short career. The figure is described with a few economical strokes of the pen; the breadth of the shoulders, the curve of the back and the weight of the legs are carried by the contour, giving the body a sculptural presence on the sheet.

The male nude occupied Gaudier-Brzeska throughout this period. His visits to the London Wrestling Club from 1912 prompted a series of studies of wrestlers, a subject to which he returned in drawings, sculpture and printmaking. Writing to Sophie Brzeska after seeing the wrestlers in December 1912, he dwelt on their large shoulders, powerful necks and firm thighs. The physical type clearly interested him, and these features recur throughout his studies of the male body.

In Wrestlers (c.1914) the two bodies are locked together until limbs and torsos form a single pattern. The present drawing is quieter but founded on a similar understanding of the body. In both works Gaudier-Brzeska concentrates on the shoulders, back and legs, dispensing with detail in favour of the long contours that give the figure its weight and stance.

Gaudier-Brzeska had received little formal artistic training. Much of his education instead took place in museums, above all through looking and drawing. After settling in London in 1911, he absorbed an unusually wide field of influences, from the sculpture he encountered at the British Museum to Renaissance art and the new languages of Cubism and the European avant-garde. His drawings could change character accordingly. Some are heavily worked and angular; others, including the present sheet, depend upon the speed and economy of an almost calligraphic line.

Drawing and sculpture were closely connected in Gaudier-Brzeska’s practice. On paper, as in stone, he was concerned with mass, balance and the relation of one form to another. A shoulder or thigh is not merely outlined but treated as the edge of a volume. This sculptural understanding of the figure gives even his most economical drawings their sense of solidity.

By 1913 Gaudier-Brzeska was at the centre of the emerging London avant-garde. His friendships with Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis coincided with a period in which his work became increasingly concentrated in form; the following year he would become associated with Vorticism and BLAST. Standing Male Nude, however, remains rooted in observation. Its strength lies in the directness with which Gaudier-Brzeska moves from the body before him to the essential lines of the figure.

Gaudier-Brzeska was twenty-two when the drawing was made. Less than two years later, in June 1915, he was killed in action in France, aged twenty-three. The brevity of his career has inevitably shaped his reputation, but works such as Standing Male Nude also show how quickly his draughtsmanship had developed. There is nothing tentative about the sheet; the figure has been captured with the turn of the shoulders, the clasped hands, the long sweep of the back and the weight of the legs. Gaudier-Brzeska needed little more.