Curated by Renée Price
Put together for the first time, the more than 150 paintings and drawings by Egon Schiele amassed in the collections of Neue Galerie cofounders Ronald Lauder and the late Serge Sabarsky amount to a comprehensive survey of the short-lived rebel’s work. The staged gawkiness of Schiele’s naked bodies—ready for sex or painful self-reflection—not only fit perfectly into the world of Klimt and Freud, but offer a Janus-faced mirror of Viennese art, looking backward to the grimacing busts of Messerschmidt and forward to the kinky body-art performances of Nitsch. And there’s another Schiele, too, whose landscapes resemble exquisite mosaics, at once echoing turn-of-the-century Viennese decorative arts and anticipating Hundertwasser’s patchwork-quilt villages.
