You can visit the perfidy of Egon Leo Adolf Ludwig Schiele until January 15th at the Neue Galerie in New York City. The works of the most important and passionate drawer of the XX century has been carefully curated by Alessandra Comini to convey the progress of his live and artistic production through his most eloquent genre: the portrait.

The Neue Galerie was founded by the heir of the Estée Lauder empire, and it is entirely dedicated to the Austrian and German art of the XX century. The Galerie, which favorite painter is undoubtedly Gustav Klimt puts now a fine ray of light on his protégée and enfant terrible of the Seccesionists. Mr. Ronald Lauder, president of the Neue Galerie, ex ambassador of the United States in Austria, and president of the World Jewish Council is the person to blame for this extraordinary exhibition. Mr. Lauder bought his first Schiele at fourteen years old for six hundred hilarious dollars. He confesses that in order to paint like Schiele you have to have some kind of fire in your stomach. We can attest that the William Starr Miller house where the museum sits it’s engulfed on flames.

One hundred and twenty five drawings and paintings go through the four vital and creative ages of Egon Schiele. There is only one wall dedicated to those tentative drawing from the Fine Arts School of Viena where he could have shared class with Adolf Hitler only if he’d have been accepted. These charcoals on paper are skillful exercises of drawing from life where we can already appreciate an unusual talent in marking the psychological traits of the models, however these drawings in their disciplined style do not allow us to guess the incestuous relationship held with his younger sister Gerti, nor the profound impact produced by the progressive maddening of his father. He stubbornly refused to treat his syphilis and dropped dead the year before Egon entered the academia.

We know that the furious genius of Egon was already shaking in class by breaking and often times challenging the orthodoxy. At some point one of his professors shouted to Egon: “Schiele your bringing the Devil into my class!”. However we know that he was certainly developing his morbid style aside from the academia. In front of the big mirror brought from his parents house to Vienna, Egon, in nude veritas, used to get naked and obsessively portrayed himself with continuous and fast strokes, reflecting his mental states and avoiding any other motivation.

Egon’s name is just one letter away from the Latin voice “ego” and whose surname comes from the Germanic verb “schielen” that could be translated as “to squint”. His activity consists of turning towards himself to scrutinizing his own self and the storm of his passions. He shows up unannounced in the studio of Gustav Klimt, the most important painter of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and showing his drawings to the master cries “Do I have talent?”. Klimt answers “Viel zu viel” perhaps perceiving the tormented nature of the drawing he said “Much too much”. Klimt takes Egon as his protégée and introduces him to the Seccesionists and the eroticism of the Art Nouveau and the decadent vanity of the last years of the Habsburg Empire. Klimt’s influence enchanted Egon for a while and ended up breaking all previous inhibitions on him.

He draws feverishly moved by a strong dissatisfaction. His self portraits are very abundant because hiring the model is affordable (we can find two of the most prominent self portraits of this period in the exhibition) but he also portrays prostitutes and lost kids from the streets. The obscenity of these portraits is not in the reddened genitalia the ribald scorn or in the lust of his models, but in the author’s repulsion to his own sexual urges. In his correspondence Egon confesses that his greens represent the rottenness arising from beneath the skin of gaunt and dry characters. In fact is the way he represents the hands what gives continuity to this period. The collection of hands gathered in the Neue Galerie from 1906 to 1915 is univocally morbid. These hands are disproportionately long and sinewed with dry crooked fingers. They are very important in the composition but Egon’s genius is on the faces. The very introspective exercises of desperation that used to bring him to the limit with his father’s madness were also training him to get access to the inner psychology of his models. He was able to pick up their worst mental traits and draw them with unique dexterity. That way he extracts the bloodless indifference of Mime van Olsen, the haughtiness of Ida Rossler, the scared repression of Frau Dr. Horowitz, or the sallow sufficiency of Max Oppenheimer.

He’s thrown into jail, the Great War bursts, gets married, and gets drafted. Imagining horrors is over when the material reality of things brings bigger horrors. He’s accused of corrupting minors and thrown into jail for a month where Egon experiments an intense new angst. Back in Vienna he resolves painting himself heavily covered by a black cloak and looking like a hermit with an ascetic and compassionate eyes. Schiele dumps the model and lover that Klimt gave him, a woman that faithfully accompanied him during this whole period, and married the little bourgeoisie of the young and inexperienced Edith Harms. Edith’s portrait presides the last room of the exhibition. In it we appreciate a blushed young woman full of candor and expectation, deprived of any malice and sophistication. There are no greens on her skin and her hands are proportionate and fleshy.

Schiele portrays his father in law next, with empathy and sympathy in a tridimensional space instead of the white emptiness of the previous period. This old man rests his head in a big strong hand. The director of the Staatsgalerie of Viena commissions a big portrait to him where Schiele insists in this new pictorial and compositive style. Schiele redefines the way he portrays his models by getting access to a sentimental pallet that he didn’t know before.

The exhibition offers abundant examples. “Seated woman, 1918” looks admiringly to the spectator. “Dr. Othmar, 1917” is the first time we find an honest smile of happy discovery. Edith gets pregnant and Schiele finished “The Family” in which the body of Schiele surrounds Edith’s while she surrounds the one of her newborn. Preserving his acute insight on the character’s psychology, Schiele physically protects the body of Edith showing alert and fear. Edith is worried, and the baby between her legs is all loving neediness. That child was never born and leaves us wondering what would have been of this untamable talent if he wouldn’t have abruptly died at the age of twenty eight.