The Neue Galerie has a small “focus” exhibition on Oskar Kokoschka — just seven paintings and, in a separate gallery, 40 works on paper. To me, it illustrates the perils of placing a good but not great artist among his more impressive confreres and surroundings.
The seven works, all portraits, hang in a wood-paneled gallery that’s also home (at the moment) to two fine Schiele landscapes and five vitrines filled with silver, glass, jewelry and other decorative arts by Dagobert Peche, Koloman Moser and, above all, Josef Hoffmann. Many are dazzling.
Just across a threshold is the center gallery, filled with Klimts, including the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I that cost the Galerie’s maestro, Ronald S. Lauder, $135 million. It’s flanked by the two Georges Minne sculptures, Kneeling Youths, that were given to the Neue Galerie by Bloch-Bauer’s heirs in 2007. They, like the painting, had been restituted by Austria to Maria Altmann and her relatives, in 2006. The youths had been displayed near the portrait in Austria all those decades ago, before World War II, and both the narrative and the juxtaposition remain compelling today.
With all that competition, if you were simply visiting the Neue Galerie, not specifically for the Kokoschka show, you might miss his paintings.(His Rudolf Blumner, 1910, is at left.) The fact that they are hung high, over furniture, doesn’t help.
Kokoschka’s works on paper struck me as more interesting, more emotional, rawer — sometimes graphic, sometimes expressionistic. They made me wonder if the paintings might have held up better in a room of their own.
None of this is meant to discourage visitors to the Neue Galerie.
Upstairs, the permanent collection galleries are filled, as usual, with more treasures. The current selection consists of works whose content is viewed as relevant to today’s economic and social conditions, the signage says. Think George Grosz, of course, and Otto Dix. But the wonderful Christian Schad is there with two nudes (and not beautiful bodies, by any means — one is of an obese woman, from the belly up, just as graphic — if easier to look at — as Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping. That’s the work that sold a little over a year ago for $33.6 million. One wonders what it would fetch today.)
In a neighboring gallery are landscapes and scenes by Kandinsky, Munter, Kirchner, Marc, Pechman, and more.
The Neue Galerie also has a gallery that satisfies ordinary curiosity: photographic portraits of the many of the artists whose work is on display. It’s a wonderful addition.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Neue Galerie