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After spending several years in Italy, mainly in Rome and Naples, where he studied Renaissance portraiture, Christian Schad (1894–1982) moved to Berlin in 1929, the art capital of the time. It was in the stimulating atmosphere of a modern metropolis that he created his most important portraits: the cool radiance of his female portraits in particular, coupled with psychological penetration and a flawless surface, became his trademark; his images of women became the ideal of beauty for an entire epoch.

In Half Nude, Schad paints his partner at the time, Maria Spangemacher, known as Maika. He depicts her in the ambience of a Paris hotel room on the Boulevard Raspail, lying naked and wearing only a red and white necklace. In an elegant pose with her arm behind her head, the high-class extra from the Tobis film company bears the gaze of the audience with professional composure. Almost every vein is captured with meticulous precision. Schad's virtuosity is at its height here, and contributes significantly to the apt characterisation of his painting style as 'cuttingly sharp'. Schad painted the picture from a photograph of the model without any preliminary sketches