BWW Reviews: The Rough Magic of EGON SCHIELE: PORTRAITS

The paintings of Egon Schiele are unmistakably the work of a keyed-up, over-aggressive young man: edgy, excessive, grotesque. And irresistible. With portraits that shift from gruesome to delicate and back again, Schiele established himself as one of the most blisteringly distinct artists in turn-of-the-century Vienna--only to have his career cut short, at age twenty-eight, by the 1918 Spanish Influenza Pandemic. So in reality, the Neue Galerie doesn't have to do all that much to make Egon Schiele: Portraits a striking show: we are already dealing with a painter who lived tumultuously and died young and whose range of stylistic effects is borderline unbelievable. Schiele's images of bourgeois women and children radiate charm and steely intelligence, his renderings of fellow artists tempered sympathy, his erotic nudes a controlled chaos. As the artist described himself, "I am the noblest of the noble and the humble of the humble. I am human--I love death and I love life."

While Schiele could have survived a tossed-off exhibition, Egon Schiele: Portraits is anything but. There is much lucidity and logic to organizer Alessandra Comini's presentation, even though the ordering of the 125 works on display is not strictly chronological. The exhibition begins with the hyper-traditional portraits that Schiele completed as a Vienna art student between 1906 and 1908. These early works look more like etchings of classical busts than like responses to living, breathing people; by 1909 Schiele had had enough, and had declared his allegiance to artists such as Gustav Klimt and composers such as Arnold Schoenberg. The connections are there for all to see. In the same gallery as the student days exercises are assured paintings of Schiele's avant-garde comrades, including Schonberg himself--works that break off and fade out and nonetheless seem fully realized. The Klimt influence is apparent mostly in works that Comini has passed over (including Schiele's intricate, parti-colored landscapes) and emphasizing the two artists' differences is probably for the best anyway. While Klimt scenes such as The Dancer (1916) and Lady with a Fan (1917) seem to be composed of tapestries and mist and walls of precious stones, Schiele's contemporaneous Portrait of an Old Man (1916) appears to be built out of scratchy wood and crumpled newspaper.

With its studies of doctors, officers, wives, and children, the next gallery shows Schiele reining in his idiosyncrasies a bit--after all, a commissioned portrait is a commissioned portrait. He was forced to innovate in closer quarters: like nothing else, the results show that he is a master artist, not just a master provocateur. The most remarkable here include Austrian Soldier with a Pipe, with its coal-like textures and sleeping-animal energy; Portrait of a Woman, which weaves together loveliness, softness, sadness in its flowing lines and large, soft eyes; and Standing Boy in a Striped Shirt, with its model's juxtaposed patterns, contorted arms, and oblique gaze. There are strong emotions in these: the emotions of weathered soldiers and of emaciated boys, not of the visionary, sophisticated Schiele. In yet another of these miniature masterpieces, Portrait of Two Infants, Schiele captures the parallel gazes of two babies--each infant wrapped in drapery, each one staring forward, their eyes immense with reaction and oblivion.

All of these paintings could be the work of a less controversial artist. As it turns out, Schiele landed in jail in 1912, mostly because he was a nuisance to public morals, and documented the entire experience in small paintings and in journal entries riddled with question marks and exclamation points. Comini has brought together some of these resources in a small gallery and has reprinted Schiele's "prison diary"--actually a composite, much-revised, somewhat unreliable document--in the exhibition catalog. That diary delivers the much-vaunted Schiele personality, yet the matter-of-fact prison images have little clear connection to Schiele's most-vaunted artistic styles.

Then, in the final large room, Schiele absolutely becomes Schiele. Here are allegories, self-portraits, and erotic nudes, though the central position is occupied by a meticulous multicolored portrait of Schiele's wife. Where space and depth are concerned, Schiele continued to cultivate new and discomfiting effects: the personages in some of the multi-figure paintings could be nestled into subterranean hollows or slotted into ancient walls, never to emerge though oddly at peace. Then there are the erotic nudes--each one explosive, none of them particularly erotic unless you're a Tim Burton fetishist. As formal exercises, though, they are perversely ingenious. Skeletal fingers, mossy hair, leathery skin, spots of furious red, and manipulations of space and depth that Schiele nowhere else matches all elevate these works. Yet with one exception, the figures themselves come off as stupid and dead. That one exception is Schiele's mistress, Wally Neuzil, who is depicted in different poses but always using lacy, agitated lines, always with a gaze both distant and expectant.

Naturally, there are criticisms to be made of any artist as florid and, frankly, as pretentious as Schiele sometimes was. (I also imagine that the earthy, caustic Schiele would have smirked at mostly positive reviews like this one. Look at that, the establishment has nice things to say.) So here are a bunch of negatives: The more conservative works Schiele created--which include the crepuscular Portrait of an Old Man and the gold-toned, sculptural Portait of Gerti Schiele--are also among his most suggestive, capable of making his late-phase symbolism look desperate and amateurish by comparison. The incarceration paintings--which could have been ravishingly claustrophobic, like Baudelaire in gouache--are one of this show's few outright disappointments. And the self-portraits, though in so many ways central to Schiele's mission, involve a lot of posturing and barely any of the intricate psychology that emerges from his other sitters. Ego-wise, he was too big not to fail. But outweighing such work-by-work reservations are the overwhelming seductions of Egon Schiele and his portraits, taken all together: those troubled outlines, those morbidly astonishing colors, that vision of modernity that sprouted into such luridly wondrous life in a mere twenty-eight years.

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