What Egon Schiele would have achieved had he lived beyond his twenty-eighth year is a matter to keep art historians up at night. When he died of Spanish influenza in 1918 he had already accomplished an astonishing amount: some three thousand drawings as well as paintings and sculpture of sufficient merit to position him as the heir to the late Gustav Klimt as Vienna’s preeminent artist. Whether Schiele would have mellowed into a grand establishment presence or continued as Vienna’s delinquent wild child is open to question-and there is certainly evidence to support both suppositions.
Above: Self-portrait with Peacock Waistcoat, Standing by Egon Schiele (1890-1918), 1911. Collection of Ernst Ploil.
In 2005 the Neue Galerie staged a rich exhibition of Schiele’s nudes that suggested, in its inevitable focus on his obsessive eroticism, the latter course, while its new exhibition of the artist’s portraits gives us a slightly more mellow Schiele, at least in his late portraits such as those of Arnold Schoenberg (1917) and Johann Harms (1916). And yet even these works, though they introduce a new measure of humanity, still portray the human figure as a tightly wound, slightly anguished marionette.
The Neue Galerie is well positioned to give Schiele his due, having its own great collection and having borrowed from far and wide to assemble the 125 works that it has divided into six groupings: fellow artists, sitters and patrons, lovers, Eros, and self-portraits. Interestingly, the museum has added another element to the exhibition: what it describes as “a special display highlighting a traumatic and pivotal period in Schiele’s life: his arrest and imprisonment in the spring of 1912.” Schiele was accused of what we would call “corrupting the morals of a minor” by displaying erotic work in his studio when the young girls who modeled for him were present. Though his jail time was brief, the artist was clearly undone by the experience, and it will be interesting to see how the exhibition interprets its effect on the late work.
Egon Schiele: Portraits • Neue Galerie, New York • October 9 to January 19, 2015 • neuegalerie.org
