Egon Schiele
Bruce said that it ain’t easy to create art. Egon Schiele proves it. The Neue Galerie is the most pretentious place that ever let me in the door. It’s little adjunct lunchroom, "Cafe Sabarsky," also gets points for pretention. I’ve searched the reviews and I can’t find a local who has anything negative to say about Sabarsky, so take this for what it’s worth…. I don’t think two wieners should cost ten dollars, even if served in a tomato sauce in which a week old potroast has been gently decomposing. An avocado, crab, and tomato salad should have more than three neatly cut halves of cherry tomatoes, the avocado should be ripe, and if one is paying sixteen dollars, one might expect more than two tablespoons of crabmeat. A $3.50 coke might reasonably be more and different from an eight ounce bottle, chilled, served with a little glass with the legend "1/4 liter" etched into the lip. But heck, we’re on vacation, tourists in this large sophisticated city, so who are we to point out shortcomings? As for portion size, if we ate smaller portions we wouldn’t be such fatties. Still, there was a vendor on the sidewalk outside the Cafe Sabarsky who had wieners for sale at two dollars each, softdrinks at a fraction the price, and a Central Park atmosphere that was just as special as the Cafe Sabarsky room in the large house on the corner of Fifth and 86th that houses Neue Galerie.
"Less than Klimt." Sounds like a ska band, and it’s all I could think of as I looked at Schiele’s drawings. Art deco and Wiener Werkstätte graphics usually delight me. But viewing the Schiele exhibit today all I could see was his imitative side. He had his chops, no doubt. Trained with the best of them. Mark Woods posts a beautiful Schiele, "Autumn Tree in Movement," today. But as we wandered through the Neue Galerie, we were treated to dark depressing and derivative work, work that was less austere and beautiful than self absorbed and crippled. Schiele had his cubist moments, ripping off Picasso and the boys, but his favorite source of inspiration was his Wiener Werkstätte mentor, Gustav Klimt. A lot of Klimt’s work is highly erotic. Schiele’s attempts to emulate that are self absorbed and boring. He was an artist entirely of his period, he died young in the 1918 flu epidemic, and I think he never found his own voice, his own idiom. By the twenties or the thirties his work might have flowered, bloomed, borne fruit. Alas he died before he had a chance to do his best work.
Didn’t help that we followed the Schiele exhibit with a visit to the Guggenheim, then a visit to the Van Gogh drawings at the Met.