Last week, as temperatures in New York City rose into the mid-60's for the first time this year, I took advantage of the springtime weather to walk across the Park and view the exhibit of Egon Schiele portraits now on view at the Neue Galerie on Fifth Avenue at 86th Street.
The show, which takes up the museum's entire third floor, is much larger than I had anticipated and provides an extensive overview of the artist's work in the portrait genre throughout the entire course of his abbreviated career. The installation has been neatly divided into three separate galleries. The first contains "Family and Academy" and "Fellow Artists"; the second, "Sitters and Patrons"; the third is shared by "Self Portraits," "Eros" and "Lovers."
The works in the "Academy" section represent some of the earliest available examples of the artist's precocious talent. Though mostly done in the stiff traditional manner of late nineteenth century art school exercises, they nevertheless indicate that even at an early age Schiele possessed a flair for portraiture. What's not noted often enough in discussions of the artist's work, but is readily apparent here, is that he had an uncanny ability to capture the whole personality of his sitters, most particularly the females, in his depiction of their eyes. In general, the portraits of family members are disappointing in their lack of innovation. The exception is the late (1916) portrait of Johann Harms, Schiele's future father-in-law. This is a stunning expressionist work that captures in monumental fashion the full dignity of the man even in the relaxed, almost indifferent pose he has assumed. No doubt the painter wished to make a good impression on the family into which he was marrying. In contrast to the family likenesses, those Schiele completed of fellow artists, such as Karl Kakovsek, demand the viewer's attention. Especially striking are the portraits of Webern and Schoenberg. So great were the talents of Klimt and Schiele that one is sometimes tempted to forget that during these artists' times Vienna was also the musical capital of Europe. In the same manner that members of the Secession were introducing modernism into the Austrian visual arts, so too was the the twelve-tone school incorporating it in its revolutionary musical compositions.
In looking at the portraits of "Sitters and Patrons" shown in the second gallery what most forcefully strikes the viewer is Schiele's fidelity to his vision of the subject's character. If he was at all worried what his clients would think of the manner in which he represented them, the artist certainly never let it show in his work. The likenesses of Erich Lederer, Dr. Erwin von Graff and Eduard Kosmack, while they display sympathy and even affection for their subjects, are unconventional to say the least. Here Schiele gives free rein to his expressionist impulses. One persistent motif can be seen in the depiction of the subjects' hands with their elongated skeleton-like fingers. An exception is the portrait of Chief Inspector Heinrich Benesch, the artist's loyal friend and devoted patron, which fully displays the high regard in which Schiele held the man and the warm sentiments he felt toward him.
In the third gallery, the "Lovers" section is a bit of letdown. For some reason, Schiele seems always to maintain a distance from those with whom he was most intimate. This is especially notable in the large full length portrait of his wife Edith standing stiff and unattractive in a striped dress. One can only speculate what longing for bourgeois respectability led Schiele to abandon the effervescent Wally for such a plain woman. Much more interesting are the self-portraits. While artists inevitably reveal something of themselves in every work they create, nowhere can this be seen as openly as in the visions of their own likenesses. Schiele's are particularly revealing. He clearly sees himself as an actor taking on a number of widely differing roles, none more telling than that of a martyr in his 1914 drawing of himself as St. Sebastian pierced by the arrows of the unappreciative philistines all about him.
Not surprisingly, the section which received the most attention from viewers at this exhibit was that of "Eros." The Neue Galerie deserves credit for including these controversial works in the first place. Some, such as Observed in a Dream (1911), are so graphic in their representation of the erotic as to be almost pornographic. These works, though, are not so much about the sexual fantasies of a young man (Schiele was still in his early twenties when he created most of them) as they are about shocking the middle class sensibilities of the Viennese society to which the artist desperately wished to belong even while flouting the hypocrisy of its staid conventions.
Apart from the main exhibit, in a small room not much larger than a walk-in closet, are the works Schiele created during his short sojourn at Neulengbach Prison in 1912. Although he was only there a total of seven days, the self-pity expressed in the handful of portraits of himself he completed there would suggest he was serving a much longer term. Unlike his other self-portraits, these were done without the aid of a mirror and thus demonstrate how fancifully he envisioned his condition. As it was, Schiele was very lucky to have escaped with so light a sentence. One must wonder, though, what long term effects this escapade had upon his psyche. How deeply did it cause him to question the unconventionality of the artist's lifestyle he had been living up to that point?
The exhibit continues through April 20, 2015.
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