Lauder selects and collects Euro classics
Frequenters of the Neue Galerie know what to expect from this jewel-like museum on 86th Street: fine and decorative art from Germany and Austria and a highly elegant café to boot. At the moment, however, visitors will find a somewhat different installation celebrating the museum’s 10th anniversary. Until April 2, 2012, key works from the personal collection of the museum’s cofounder, Ronald S. Lauder, will fill the museum’s two floors of exhibition spaces.
Egon Schiele, “Mime van Osen” (1910), watercolor, gouache and crayon on paper.
How to install artworks ranging from 3rd century BCE Celtic buckles to Joseph Beuys’ felt-wrapped cello? Lauder’s personal tastes—which concentrate on medieval art and armor, French modernism and German postmodernism, along with the usual turn-of-the-century German/Austrian art—make for some intriguing juxtapositions.
In a large room dominated by medieval armor, the dome-like brow of Cézanne’s self-portrait peers over a row of rounding helmets. (This entertaining moment recalls Bonnard’s comment that Cézanne painted as if he wore a suit of armor. In fact, Cézanne’s obsessive contours play nicely off of the knurled metallic surfaces.) Nearby, a horse’s ornamented helmet contrasts with the busy tidiness of a nearly contemporaneous painting by Albrecht Altdorfer (ca. 1480–1538).
The rest of the installation, however, is more conventional, with works by modern masters clustered in separate rooms. Seurat’s monumental, velvety conté crayon drawings highlight a small room of works on paper by Degas, Van Gogh and Cézanne. Another gallery’s dimmed lighting enhances the delicate exoticism of figure drawings by Klimt and Kokoschka and the bruised electricity of two dozen Schiele watercolors.
In another room, the dyspeptic corporality of figure paintings by Otto Dix, George Grosz and Christian Schad contrast intriguingly with disembodied abstractions by Kandinsky and Klee—but here I kept returning to the sturdier eccentricities of some Max Beckmann paintings and Kurt Schwitters collages.
Most inviting was a gallery dominated by School of Paris artists. Matisse and Picasso are both represented mainly by works on paper, but Matisse’s “Backs”—his series of four 6-foot-tall bronze reliefs—line one wall: what simpler, more powerful wrestling with art’s irreducible elements? Several Brancusi sculptures poignantly echo a small gouache by the artist depicting his studio. Also on hand is Kandinsky’s large, symphonic painting, “Composition V” (1911), an appealing mixture of free-form engineering and psychic eruption.
A final room showcases postwar German art. Admittedly, this isn’t my cup of tea. I found the works by Gerhard Richter and Beuys solipsistic and diagrammatic and those of Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz turgidly self-indulgent. (If Dix and Schad had already perfected a kind of ironic alienation—smoothed by craft—the younger generation chiefly cranks the volume or multiplies the dangling implications.)
Still, there’s something uniquely unsettling about Sigmar Polke’s large painting, “Japanese Dancers” (1966), whose prancing, half-naked figures, recorded in weathered, distancing Ben-Day dots, conjure a moment that’s desirous but denying, sophisticated but blinkered.
Sampled enough alienation? Head down to that café and sink your teeth into some Klimt torte.
The Ronald S. Lauder Collection
Through April 2, 2012, Neue Galerie New York, 1048 5th Ave., 212-628-6200, www.neuegalerie.org
