Live hard. Die young. Leave enough lurid evidence for novelistic retellings of a life cut short at age 28 by the influenza pandemic that swept Europe at the close of WWI. Le Bohème, in this case, is Egon Schiele [1890–1918]. Best known for his emaciated, erotic nudes and self-portraits, he is now the subject of an exhibition of the landscape paintings made throughout his brief career. Schiele’s landscapes, many in watercolor that rarely leave their archival tombs, have remained largely unknown until recently.

”Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes,” currently on view at Neue Galerie, presents over 60 of these works spanning the Austrian artist’s brief career. Painted from observation as well as from memory and photo and postcard reference material (included in the show), these fantastical pictures often bring nature into the townscape, and create portraits of trees and flowers, sometimes at the micro level. Schiele was drawn to nature from an early age, having made detailed drawings from his imagination in early sketchbooks. When he took up painting as his profession at age 16, his first attempts were scenes of his hometown Tulin. A generous selection of these demonstrate the artist's early command of visualizing and recording the world around him through drawing.

In Wilted Sunflowers (Autumn Sun II), (1914, above), a sizable painting in oil on canvas, a close view of a large plant in decline examines the minuscule changes in its vitality, from leaves just turning brown to the last stages of its seed heads and dark crumpled leaves. The ground is patterned with a living carpet of brighter floral motifs—a nod to his first mentor Gustave Klimt (later disavowed by Schiele). On a luminous background, patterned in a series of horizontal bands, the autumnal moon, low in the sky, signals the close of daylight. This mesmerizing depiction of sunflowers can be read as a metaphorical take on the Hapsburg dynasty in decline.

In Schiele's mature work, along with his portraits, nudes, and self-portraits (right), he often returns to the landscape as a palliative to an existential crisis based on a prefiguring of WWI. He writes in a notebook, “At present, I am mainly observing the physical motion of mountains, water, trees and flowers. One is everywhere reminded of similar movements in the human body, of similar impulses of joy and suffering in plants.” Just as he wrote, the show is likewise interspersed with portraits and nudes, in oil on canvas as well as watercolors and graphite drawings on paper.

In scenes of forested towns, the life cycle of earth, sky and water become Schiele’s main subjects. Among these is the majestic Town among the Greenery (The Old City III), (1917, top), which was restored from a disintegrating state last year. In this mythic scene, seemingly drawn from the artist’s reimagining of the Medieval town of Krumau, the surrounding forest invades the town’s steep alleyways, with small trees populating its cul-de-sacs.

Fire escapes that resemble his childhood drawings of trains give a sense of an imposed structure and small figures engaged in daily life take a lesser position in the pecking order. A nearby pencil drawing, Krumau Town Crescent, (1916), demonstrates Schiele’s fascination with architectural form as well has his exceptional draftsmanship, along with a postcard of Krumau, gridded off for enlargement. 

Schiele did not, however, create a utopian alternate to what he actually observed. Two of these townscapes, brooding and introspective, project a sense of doom about the future, yet are hauntingly luminous. Stein on the Danube, (1913, below left) takes a Godly perspective over a Medieval town’s church (stein) on the riverbank, crowded in by the pointed roofs of surrounding houses, with verdant planting fields across the river. The town’s angular structures are echoed by a distant village; the surrounding green fields are echoed by a small tree at the lower left corner. Its pendant, Stein on the Danube Seen from the South, (1913, below right), which views the same town from the opposite bank, could hardly be more different. As in  the Sunflowers above, Schiele employs the vigorous construct of horizontal bands to define the river, the townscape, and the sharply terraced fields beyond the church. The monochromatic scheme is broken intermittently by strands of deep green. As a pair, these paintings, from a private collection, are sublime in every way.

This exceptional exhibition, which occupies the Neue’s third floor galleries, is encyclopedic in organization and content. In a hallway adjacent to the galleries is an illustrated timeline, which includes photos of Schiele’s family and art world cohort, that sheds light on the entire oeuvre of this magnetic and mysterious artist.

Continuing through January 25, 2025 at Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue (at 86th Street), New York, NY Info
Admission is free on First Fridays: December 6 and January 3, from 5 to 8 pm Info

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