06 Apr 2018

Klimt and Schiele: Drawn

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Reviewed by David Curcio

Gustav Klimt drew snaking lines that wend silently around the sheet as if of their own accord, creating curves and warm hollows, ruffling hair and defining pubic patches in loops like the path of a blind animal. Yet his figure studies are too authoritative to capitulate wholly to eroticism.

Egon Schiele, the world's first punk, was 28 years Klimt's junior - the same number of years he was to live before dying of Spanish Flu with his pregnant wife. His studio was a gathering place for delinquent youths. A charge of seducing a minor and exhibiting smut accessible to children lead to many of his drawings being seized and destroyed. The judge even burned one in court.

"Klimt and Schiele: Drawn" at the MFA brings a hundred drawings from the Albertina in Vienna by the Byzantine decadent and his obstinate protegé, the latter who seemed to know that he was not long for this world, and answered by producing writhing, angular nudes, eternally mangled, sickly, disabled.