Egon Schiele, Richard Nagy Gallery

Richard Nagy's gallery has said that they don't want millions of people rushing to see their show of Egon Schiele's drawings of women - it's only a small second-floor space on New Bond Street after all, and 50 fragile pictures crowd the walls. But don't let that dissuade you from seeing one of the shows of the year.

Schiele instantly summons up consumptive young women, déshabillées, angular, all the colours of livid bruises. His pencil marks are as sharp as the malnourished women's ribs. This show, however, shows why he was able to turn tawdry subject material into transporting art.

The works, executed between 1910 and his death, aged 28, in 1918, begin with the pictures which define him: Reclining Nude in Violet Stockings (1910) lies with her legs open and her head cut off (by the page). This realistic approach is all the more shocking for its rejection of the Classical nude, with their comely bellies, breast and thighs and depilated crotch. If Ian McEwan's hero of On Chesil Beach was put off his wife by a stray pubic hair, Schiele's drawings would have caused him to be committed. The beauty is in the unsparing detail.

One of the best early pieces is Woman With Homunculus (1910). A stumpy orange figure clings to a woman in stockings facing away, her head turned to look obliquely over her shoulder at you. As well as the erotic charge of the coquettish woman, the rendering of her skin, with broad blunt grey watercolour strokes, is almost Cubist in the way it catches a hundred different rays of light hitting her. Another masterwork is 1912's Reclining Woman and Standing Nude, where one woman in red bloomers lies across the page while another leans over her. The use of space, one woman disappearing behind another in three dimensions, rivals Cubism once again, without any of its distortions.

These are all well-established facets of Schiele's genius - the realism and the eroticism, the fleshy pallor and the gaudy clothes and the bony splayed hands. There is sensuality but not much human sensitivity, or at any rate much of a connection between model and artist - the women are anonymous and their faces are frequently clown or doll-like, blobby or deformed, as if he hated them or just couldn't be bothered.

For all the (visually) decapitated women, there is a sensitive streak in the crayon and charcoal line drawings of the last couple of years of his life, before the Spanish flu took his wife and, three days later, him. He uses the same techniques as in his gouache and watercolour pictures, depicting etiolation and undress as ever, making inventive use of space and foreshortening, but the pictures feel all the more direct, his thoughts and intentions visible in the thickness and the weight of the lines.

These pictures extend his emotional range beyond "sexy" and "indifferent". Women's eyes start to express feelings, especially in Edith Schiele (née Harms) (pictured above: private collection, courtesy of Richard Nagy Ltd, London), a picture of his wife from 1918, with a softness under the scribbled pile of hair and above the barely sketched body. Although he is no Raphael in drawing, Schiele brings out his tenderness in these lines. He still captures the erotic instant, but here are humour, mischief, sympathy. We see Schiele looking at women in many more ways than we are used to.

The earlier nudes are undoubtedly what he will be remembered for, but this exhibition makes a good claim for Schiele the human as well as a great claim for Schiele the artist.

• Egon Schiele at Richard Nagy Gallery, 22 Old Bond Street, until 30 June
• Find books about Egon Schiele on Amazon