On April 13, 1912, 21-year-old Austrian painter Egon Schiele—just three years out of the academy but already one of Vienna’s reigning artists—was arrested in the village of Neulengbach on charges of public immorality and seduction of minors. Schiele’s provocative portraits of prostitutes, street urchins, and mistresses—the latter no more infamous than the nubile, flame-haired Wally Neuzil—placed him at the forefront of the Vienna Secession movement, but earned the damning of provincial neighbors, who disapproved of his casting local children as models. While awaiting trial, Schiele nevertheless continued to create (thanks to a cache of watercolors snuck in by a patron), documenting his 24-day imprisonment in a series of prison cell scenes and tormented self-portraits.
It is these pictures, on view from October 9 at the Neue Galerie’s latest survey of the artist, Egon Schiele: Portraits, that become an entry point into Schiele’s work, emphasizing the recurrent motifs in his most challenging tableaux. In Prisoner!, a loose pencil sketch of an unshaven and wild-eyed Schiele buried beneath a dark blanket, his hands are missing, alluding to the townspeople’s crusade to keep him from making art. (At his trial, the judge burned a drawing in a theatrical display of censorship.) Elsewhere in the show, amputation as a symbol of repression resurfaces in Seated Male Nude (Self-Portrait), illustrating Schiele’s own sense of sin as he struggled between desire and restraint at a time when that so-called “solitary vice”—masturbation—was thought to induce insanity.
Divided between four rooms with groupings that include “Eros” and “Allegorical Self-Portraits,” the exhibition offers an in-depth primer certain to convert audiences previously unfamiliar with the Expressionist master. For the devout, a selection of Schiele’s most explicit and technically accomplished nudes juxtaposed against a traditional portrait of his wife Edith (by Schiele standards, exuberant in a candy-striped pinafore) probe at the contradictions that characterized a brilliant career cut short. (He succumbed to the Spanish flu in 1918, two years shy of 30.) Most striking of all is how the many faces of Schiele—some writhing in agony or euphoria, others impassive in their gaze—feel radically modern. Reconsidering these images with the contemporary portraiture they’ve influenced, from the jewel-toned Romantics of Elizabeth Peyton to the nocturnal dandies of Hernan Bas and even the monochrome rockers of Hedi Slimane, reveals why Schiele remains as relevant as ever.
Egon Schiele: Portraits is on view at the Neue Galerie in New York from October 9 to January 19
Neue Galerie New York
1048 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028
MAP![]()
Egon Schiele's Self Portrait with Peacock, Waistcoat, Standing, 1911. Photo cou
It is these pictures, on view from October 9 at the Neue Galerie’s latest survey of the artist, Egon Schiele: Portraits, that become an entry point into Schiele’s work, emphasizing the recurrent motifs in his most challenging tableaux. In Prisoner!, a loose pencil sketch of an unshaven and wild-eyed Schiele buried beneath a dark blanket, his hands are missing, alluding to the townspeople’s crusade to keep him from making art. (At his trial, the judge burned a drawing in a theatrical display of censorship.) Elsewhere in the show, amputation as a symbol of repression resurfaces in Seated Male Nude (Self-Portrait), illustrating Schiele’s own sense of sin as he struggled between desire and restraint at a time when that so-called “solitary vice”—masturbation—was thought to induce insanity.
Divided between four rooms with groupings that include “Eros” and “Allegorical Self-Portraits,” the exhibition offers an in-depth primer certain to convert audiences previously unfamiliar with the Expressionist master. For the devout, a selection of Schiele’s most explicit and technically accomplished nudes juxtaposed against a traditional portrait of his wife Edith (by Schiele standards, exuberant in a candy-striped pinafore) probe at the contradictions that characterized a brilliant career cut short. (He succumbed to the Spanish flu in 1918, two years shy of 30.) Most striking of all is how the many faces of Schiele—some writhing in agony or euphoria, others impassive in their gaze—feel radically modern. Reconsidering these images with the contemporary portraiture they’ve influenced, from the jewel-toned Romantics of Elizabeth Peyton to the nocturnal dandies of Hernan Bas and even the monochrome rockers of Hedi Slimane, reveals why Schiele remains as relevant as ever.
Egon Schiele: Portraits is on view at the Neue Galerie in New York from October 9 to January 19
Neue Galerie New York
1048 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028
MAP
Egon Schiele's Self Portrait with Peacock, Waistcoat, Standing, 1911. Photo cou