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.
I think your "ideas" about Schiele are your dim, ego-based perceptions. And in light of the Jiddu quote you end your "About" section with, it seems you're a bit of a hypocrite. Stop quoting peoples words who you have no intimate understanding of. And while you're at it, stop looking at art.
Posted by: | October 28, 2005 at 11:10 PM
Dear anonymous,
I'm SURE my ideas about Schiele are my "dim ego-based perceptions." As Jiddu Krishnamurti once wrote, "I want to change. I see that I am terribly unhappy, depressed, ugly, violent, with an occasional flash of something other than the mere result of a motive; and I exercise my will to do something about it. I say I must be different, I must drop this habit, that habit; I must think differently; I must act in a different way; I must be more this and less that. One makes a tremendous effort and at the end of it one is still shoddy, depressed, ugly, brutal, without any sense of quality. So one then asks oneself if there is change at all. Can a human being change?"
Instead of change, what do I find? A picky hypercritical demon within that finds voice in invidious comparisons among artworks, distinctions between "good art" and "bad art," a voice that rants about a curator's choice to dish up shit and call it ice cream. Yet, if I stop looking at the lesser works of less talented artists, if I have a tendency to suspect a gallery and it's publicists of attempting to turn straw into gold in the light of day and I can see that they have failed in the attempt, in not speaking up I will have been less true to my own feelings than I would prefer. Neue Gallerie didn't show much, if anything by Schiele that was not derivative and wrought in mediocrity. That finer work exists I have no doubt, but I saw only a few pieces that day that gave a hint of this. Confused? Re-read this bit from Krishnamurti. Re-read it remembering it really is all about you and not about me at all.
"We must create immediately an atmosphere of freedom so that you can live and find out for yourselves what is true, so that you become intelligent, so that you are able to face the world and understand it, not just conform to it, so that inwardly, deeply, psychologically you are in constant revolt; because it is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man who conforms, who follows some tradition. It is only when you are constantly inquiring, constantly observing, constantly learning, that you find truth."
Posted by: fp | October 29, 2005 at 08:12 AM