[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: June 2, 2008]
The Klimt show at the Neue Galerie, drawn from the collections of the museum's two founders, is not clearly billed as a show of Klimt drawings; but that is pretty much what it is.
Yes, there's a reconstruction of his atelier, a nicely furnished room which reflects very little sign of any artistic activity - no paint on the floor, for heaven's sake. And the great Adele portrait still hangs in company of a few other Klimt paintings.
Most of the exhibit, however, is given over to several rooms of works on paper. Many of them are either preparatory studies for a later painting, or quite arguably related to a later painting, and the curator has usefully provided small reproductions of the paintings alongside the drawings. Despite some academic drawings of male torsos executed in his youth, there's not much mistaking Klimt's predilection for the female form: preferably nude, lying down if possible, and ideally masturbating.
It's quite a sexy show, and if his subject matter seems obsessive, well I suppose one just has to think of Cezanne painting the same mountain over and over again. One man's peak is the next man's mons pubis.
A good scattering of photographs too, and a sad sketch of the dead Klimt by Egon Schiele. It hadn't particularly occurred to me before that Klimt died so young, and apparently suddenly. At fifty six, of a stroke. In photos taken just a year earlier, he is a bundle of strength and energy in his rather fetching blue smock.
The show runs through the end of June. It's a good opportunity, too, to view jewely from the Vienna Werkstätte, some of it owned by Klimt's clients and circle. I am no critic of jewelry, but there are several pieces I coveted. I even thought I might take up smoking to justify possession of a gorgeously decorated tobacco case. This runs through September 1.
More about that, but little about Klimt, at the museum's web-site.
I might also mention a small exhibit at Lori Bookstein which I stumbled across by chance (I had meant to see John Dubrow's paintings, but was unwittingly too late). The late Anne Tabachnick had a quirky, fragmented approach to still lives, scattering her stuff about the canvas, and being unafraid of leaving parts of the surface bare. Although flowers and small pieces of sculpture are depicted, one also finds wine racks and bicycles. Also lots of blocks - well, she calls them "boxes", but they look like childrens' building blocks to me: perhaps they emphasize the sheer thing-ness of the stuff depicted in the non-naturalistic, somewhat flat pictorial space, reminiscent of Matisse.
Even her self-portrait seems somehow unfinished. The face selectively colored.
Through June 28, and you can preview some of it here.
