One of the most distinguished pieces of The Neue Galerie’s collection is Gustav Klimt’s Adele Bloch-Bauer I, an innocuously looming portrait of the wife of one of Klimt’s greatest benefactors, sitting pleasant and unforgettable. Schiele, as a protégé of Klimt’s, uses gold-bronze in but one piece of the curated set ‘Egon Schiele: Portraits.’ His Gerti Schiele (1909) reminisces upon his fledgling, though far from naïve, years under and alongside Klimt.
The selection of haunting self-portraiture makes up the exhibit’s most striking work from the artist’s oeuvre. Schiele’s ghoul-like features, angular, distorted and forcefully erotic stances, and jagged, fierce anatomical renditions of himself are seductive, yet withholding in their abstraction of realistic form.
In the hands of Schiele’s subjects, in the attenuation and grotesque angularity of the features of even Schiele’s most delicate sitters, is the denotation of the resilience of the artist’s commitment to his contentious style. The exhibited work maintains the characteristic perverseness in its depictions of rendezvous, spanning the gamut from scandalously sensuous to pornographically erotic.
As the exclusive venue for this exhibition, the first in an American museum to be curated solely of Schiele’s portrait work, The Neue Galerie has included a display, like a shadow-box room of memorium, dedicated to the period of Schiele’s imprisonment, one which informed his life, his outlook, and his artistic output greatly. There are approximately 125 works in the exhibit, including paintings, drawings, and sculpture. The gallery, which boasts the United States’ finest and most impressive collection of Schiele’s work, has devoted the entirety of its third level to this exhibit.
Images courtesy of the Neue Galerie
Egon Schiele: Portraits is on until January 19. For more information on The Neue Galerie Museum for German and Austrian art, its current exhibits, and more, visit here.