Play Land

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2026

Play land

On “Noguchi’s New York” at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation & Garden Museum.

What is New York’s greatest unrealized work of art? An argument can be made for Riverside Playground. This sprawling sculptural landscape, designed for what today remains an unremarkable hillside in Manhattan’s Riverside Park, between 101st and 105th Streets, would have occupied an indeterminate zone between art and recreation. An assembly of ramps, steps, sandpits, covered rooms, and climbing mounds, sloping from the curving heights of Riverside Drive down to the promenade, it would not have been your typical artwork or sculpture park. Nor would it have been another playground of swings and seesaws. Instead, this landscape of brick, concrete, asphalt, grass, and water was designed to pose more questions than answers. It might have seemed archaeological, temple-like, as though it were a subterranean stratum discovered below the urban surface. Its Upper West Side neighbors in their classic sixes did not know what to make of it.

Developed over four years in the early 1960s in a partnership between the architect Louis Kahn and the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, this contoured, contested ground very nearly broke ground before going broke itself. The project was officially titled the Adele Rosenwald Levy Memorial Playground, named after a founder of the Citizens Committee for Children and daughter of the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. Supporters donated $600,000 to the city in her honor for what was then a $1.1 million project. The outgoing mayor, Robert F. Wagner, even signed the initial construction contracts. Then the incoming mayor, John Lindsay, killed the playground with the help of his new parks commissioner, Thomas Hoving. While citing escalating construction costs, the savvy “Republican Kennedy” was fulfilling a pledge made to voters who opposed the plan. They feared it would attract teenagers from the housing projects to the east.

Isamu Noguchi (1904–88) thought of sculpture in a way that was often out of step with his times but that can now seem more in line with our own. “Noguchi’s New York,” an exhibition currently on view at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York, argues that the artist saw little distinction between object and landscape and favored what we might now call the immersive experience.1 Through his interactive work, he blurred the lines between sculpture and spectator. The environment created its own sculptural shape—in particular, for him, the forms and figures of New York. “I’m really a New Yorker,” he once said. “Not Japanese, not a citizen of the world, just a New Yorker who goes wandering around like many New Yorkers.” Such wandering meant that Noguchi was as comfortable casting portrait busts of Buckminster Fuller as he was designing stage sets for Martha Graham or carving a sunken garden for Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza. All of these projects are now among the fifty-some works and proposals on display at the museum overseeing his legacy.

Isamu Noguchi, Riverside Playground Model, 1965, Plaster & paint, Noguchi Museum. Photo: Kevin Noble.

Noguchi was nearly a native-born New Yorker himself. His American mother, Leonie Gilmour, was a committed bohemian educated at New York’s progressive Ethical Culture School (then named the Workingman’s School) and later at Bryn Mawr College and the Sorbonne. She met Isamu’s father, Yone, when the Japanese poet was living on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive. He took out a classified ad looking for editorial help. She answered it. Following a brief affair, Yone returned to Japan. Leonie pursued him west, giving birth to Isamu in Los Angeles. Two years later, she moved to Japan with her young son, finding intermittent work as a teacher, editor, and translator. Yone had named their toddler Isamu, meaning “courage,” but by then he had taken a Japanese wife and was largely absent from the future sculptor’s upbringing. During her Japanese sojourn, Leonie also gave birth to a daughter, Ailes Gilmour. This time the father was an unknown Japanese man. Nevertheless, there must have been something about that Gilmour girl. A pioneer of the American Modern Dance movement, Ailes became a founding member of the Martha Graham Dance Company, where her half brother later created Graham’s most celebrated set designs.

In 1917, Leonie sent Isamu back to the United States—on his own—to continue his schooling. The unaccompanied minor rolled into a work-camp school in Rolling Prairie, Indiana. At the time known as Sam Gilmour, Noguchi was taken under the wing of the school’s founder, Edward Rumely. Their relationship continued after the school shut down over Rumely’s pro-German sentiment. Through a grant from Rumely, Noguchi then continued east, eventually arriving at Columbia University to study medicine.

Noguchi’s sudden upward trajectory was a remarkable reversal of fortune for a drifting, interracial child born out of wedlock, but Leonie was outraged at her son’s preprofessional turn. She encouraged him to study sculpture. Noguchi enrolled in night classes at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School on East Tenth Street, where he studied bronze casting. Eventually he dropped out of Columbia and interned with Gutzon Borglum, who said he would never amount to anything as an artist. (Noguchi soon eclipsed this sculptor of Mount Rushmore.) In 1927, a grant took Noguchi to Paris, where he apprenticed with Constantin Brancusi and learned the art of stone crafting. As an artist later known for his Eastern influences, Noguchi was almost exclusively Western trained.

Curated by the Noguchi Museum’s Kate Wiener, the exhibition picks up as Noguchi first returns stateside in 1929. Here an early selection of portrait busts from the 1930s might seem to be an odd choice to introduce a show about the sculptor’s New York. But in fact they help underscore the social quotient in much of his work. Noguchi’s art was not meant to be inert. It was designed to engage its observers. “If sculpture is the rock,” he once wrote, “it is also the space between rocks and between the rock and a man, and the communication and contemplation between.” (Hayden Herrera’s excellent 2015 biography of Noguchi is appropriately titled Listening to Stone.)

From an early age, Noguchi surrounded himself with artists, mentors, patrons, and paramours. He could be part Horatio Alger and part Rudolph Valentino. One story has him jumping out of Frida Kahlo’s bed and scurrying up a tree and over a rooftop to escape Diego Rivera.

Noguchi thrived in New York’s urban tableau. Where they could not appear in person, he crafted the people around him as portrait busts. Working out of his MacDougal Street studio in Greenwich Village, Noguchi in rapid succession sculpted busts of the art dealer J. B. Neumann (1932, Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum), the dancer Michio Ito (1926, Noguchi Foundation), the journalist Clare Boothe Luce (1933, on loan from the Henry Luce Foundation), the art critic Murdock Pemberton (1931, Noguchi Foundation), the muralist José Clemente Orozco (1931, Noguchi Foundation), and the futurist Buckminster Fuller (1929, cast ca. 1965, Sharp Museum, Southern Illinois University Carbondale).

What is most remarkable in all this is Noguchi’s startling range of materials and finishes. As was reflected later in his easy movement between metal and stone, or representation and abstraction, or lampshades and playground design, Noguchi was not beholden to any particular medium or manner. Instead he found expression in the materials themselves. His bust of the comely Luce appears in classical marble; the clotted Neumann is in mottled plaster; meanwhile, the resplendent Fuller—Noguchi called him a “messiah of ideas”—radiates in polished chrome.

Isamu Noguchi, R. Buckminster Fuller, 1929. Bronze, chrome plated. 3 1/4 x 7 7/8 x 10 in. Photo: Kevin Noble. © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

“Noguchi’s New York” then takes us through the artist’s many city commissions. A display about his 1930–40 stainless-steel reliefs of heroic journalists, crafted for the entrance of the Associated Press Building at Rockefeller Center, leads on to more than one gallery of his unrealized or destroyed installations: ceiling designs for the Time & Life Building and 666 Fifth Avenue, sculpture gardens for Lever House and the Museum of Modern Art, and playgrounds for the United Nations Headquarters and the Bronx Zoo. Here the city planner Robert Moses plays the role of the exhibition’s bogeyman, but, as we have seen with Riverside Playground, Moses was not Noguchi’s only antagonist.

Isamu Noguchi, News (Associated Press Building Plaque), 1938–40. Photo: Miguel de Guzmán & Rocío Romero.

Noguchi could shift scales with ease. A plan for a contoured landscape might do double duty as a bronze wall relief. Stage-set collages could inspire the forms of freestanding aluminum sculpture. A slate statue of a bird might reappear as a plexiglass chess piece. The museum matches these works with the blueprints, letters, photographs, and articles that surrounded each commission. Here the innovative playground designs come forward the most. Could there be some psychological reading of Noguchi, abandoned by his father, designing play spaces within sight of his father’s old Riverside Drive address? To envision these designs better, the museum commissioned new hand-drawn animated films, directed by Nicolas Ménard and Jack Cunningham, that feature children swinging and sliding on play equipment. (I would have liked to have seen these playful videos up front, rather than buried at the back of the exhibition, and more features in general for the museum’s younger visitors.)

Isamu Noguchi, Stage Set Collage, ca. 1946, Chalk & colored paper on paper, Noguchi Museum. Photo: Kevin Noble.

There is much to be said for reviving some of Noguchi’s unexecuted urban proposals, particularly Riverside Playground. After all, Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park, which Louis Kahn designed for the southern tip of Roosevelt Island in New York’s East River in the early 1970s, was only built five decades later, opening in 2012.

Even if Noguchi’s playgrounds are never realized, his influence has nevertheless set the standard for successful public design, though it is largely unacknowledged. After all, just a few years after thwarting his plans in Riverside Park, John Lindsay and Thomas Hoving promoted their own open-ended play space—featuring ziggurats, tunnels, and water courses—for Central Park’s Adventure Playground. That innovative precinct on West Sixty-seventh Street, underwritten by the Estée Lauder Foundation, was designed in 1966 by Richard Dattner, but it might as well have been a smaller, toddler-sized version of Noguchi’s Riverside Playground.

Half a century on, the Diller–von Furstenberg Family Foundation funded Little Island, on tulip-shaped piers above the Hudson River. For this artificial landscape of undulating hills and surprise assembly spots, Heatherwick Studio closely followed Noguchi’s urban sensibility.

Two years ago, after the institution banned employees from wearing keffiyehs and other political paraphernalia, Palestinian agitators attempted to disrupt the Noguchi Museum. Activists defaced the walls. Staff members resigned. The museum refused to back down. It is noteworthy that Noguchi in life worked with the state of Israel. Between 1960 and 1965, he created his first realized earthwork for the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum.

Through its permanent collection, with its indoor and outdoor spaces and parts in between, the Noguchi Museum continues to be an uncompromising memorial to the artist. One of his rock-garden sculptures contains the artist’s ashes. The sale of Noguchi’s Akari lanterns, which still generates millions of dollars annually, helps keep the lights on for the small institution. This museum Noguchi opened across the street from his studio in 1985 remains an oasis of calm in a bustling corner of Long Island City—a living testament to Noguchi’s New York.

1. “Noguchi’s New York” opened at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, Queens, New York, on February 4 and remains on view through September 13, 2026. 

Escape Artist

THE NEW CRITERION, May 2026

Escape artist

On “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds,” at the Jewish Museum, New York.

The Nazis wasted no time in denouncing the artist Paul Klee (1879–1940). On February 1, 1933, less than a month after Hilter’s ascendance, the periodical Die Rote Erde (The Red Earth) published a hit piece on the Düsseldorf Academy and its fifty-three-year-old instructor:

Then the great Klee makes his entrance, already famous as a teacher at the Bauhaus. . . . He tells everybody he has pedigree Arabian blood in his veins, but is actually a typical Galician Jew. He paints in a crazier and crazier way, he bluffs and baffles, his students goggle and gape, a new, unheard-of art makes its appearance in the Rhineland.

Born in Switzerland to a German father and Swiss mother, both musicians, Klee was not Jewish, Galician or otherwise. It made no difference. Within the year, Klee lost his academic post. The Gestapo raided his apartment in Dessau and seized six baskets of papers. Finally Klee was forced to relocate to Bern, the city of his birth. He lived out his final decade in Swiss exile.

Elusive, idiosyncratic, and wide-ranging, Klee’s work today might seem decorative and anodyne. Clement Greenberg was right to observe in 1957 that “almost everybody, whether aware or not, was learning from Klee.” The artist’s inventive and experimental mode, occupying a liminal space between depiction and description, became part of the post-war visual vocabulary. You can see his influence in artists from Jackson Pollock to Keith Haring.

The Nazis well understood his subversive encoding. Klee connected his art to child-like design, primitive symbolism, and parodic marginalia. He advocated for the sort of free-form line the Nazis looked to flatten. Identifying himself with the social outcast—at times the Harlequin, at others the Jew—Klee faced down the scourge of anti-Semitism by association. Occasionally he even made this association explicit. He deployed symbols such as the Star of David in his compositions. More than a decade before his persecution by the Nazis, as the artist went up for a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart, in October 1919, the press denounced him as “Paul Zion Klee.”

This history helps explain why the Swiss German artist now appears in “Other Possible Worlds,” a major retrospective at the Jewish Museum of a hundred works that focuses on Klee’s final decade.1 “He was not Jewish,” writes Mason Klein, the museum’s senior curator emeritus and the organizer of this exhibition, “but he might as well have been, given his particular denunciation by the National Socialists in 1933 in Germany.”

Paul Klee, Revolution of the Viaduct, 1937, Oil on cotton, Hamburger Kunsthalle. © 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

At the center of this presentation, and an impetus for the exhibition, is a selection of drawings from a rarely seen cycle of some two hundred works that Klee produced in 1933—a furious assembly created in response to what he called the “Nazi Socialist revolution.” Lost for decades, the works on paper were only rediscovered in 1984 by the Klee cataloguer Jürgen Glaesemer at Bern’s Paul Klee Foundation. In 2003, the art historian Pamela Kort presented them for the first time through four exhibitions in Germany and Switzerland.

Composed in wild scribbles of pencil and chalk, these drawings are expressive and explicit. In title and substance they take dead aim at the false verities of the Nazi regime: “He” a Dictator Too! (Auch “ER” Dictator!) features a man pointing down at an exclamation point; Child Murder (Kindermord), an attack on a domestic scene; Crawling Man (Kriechender), a quivering figure on all fours; Accusation in the Street (Anklage auf der Straße), a man directing a crowd’s attention; and Violence (Gewalt), a laughing stick-figure who shoots scribbles into a screaming, crouching victim.

The drawings, here on loan from the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, are different from the reserved and finely wrought designs we might expect from an artist who otherwise spun his compositions like intricate spiderwebs. Klee showed the series over dinner in the summer of 1933 to the sculptor Alexander Zschokke and the art historian Walter Kaesbach, both Düsseldorf colleagues, and Zschokke later recalled he thought the cycle missed its mark:

The start of the cycle was a drawing with a few pencil strokes, not very straight, that looked like a child’s drawing, helpless. I must confess that this beginning . . . had a somewhat comic effect and appeared not to remotely match the seriousness of the situation in which the artist found himself.

At the Jewish Museum, with a selection of work extending as far back as 1903, “Other Possible Worlds” reveals how, in the 1933 cycle, Klee was revisiting his graphic origins in illustration and satire. A selection of etchings from his series Inventions (Inventionen), of 1903 and 1905, here on loan from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, hints at his admiration for the caricatures of William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier. Virgin in the Tree (Jungfrau im Baum) presents an aging female nude sprawled out across dead branches. The Hero with the Wing (Der Held mit dem Flügel) features a figure with broken wings and heavy feet rooted in the earth. Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank (Zwei Männer, Einander in Höherer Stellung Vermutend, Begegnen Sich) depicts Wilhelm II and Franz Joseph groveling down to one another. An example from another series, this one an illustration from 1911 for a chapter of Candide, dispenses with the modeled, sculptural effects of these early prints in favor of a simpler, more scribbled style later echoed in the 1933 cycle. “Satire must not be a kind of superfluous ill will,” Klee once said, “but ill will from a higher point of view. Ridiculous man, divine God.”

Other Possible Worlds” lays out a wide sampling of Klee’s circuitous output. At times it feels too wide. The exhibition attempts to be both a focused display and a retrospective survey and never quite delivers enough of either. A through line is not always apparent in the offerings. The exhibition also gives short shrift to Klee’s many formal innovations as it pursues his symbolic meanings. Klee’s creative processes of monoprinting and oil transfers, for example, freed his line from the artist’s controlling hand as he avoided a grand manner in favor of rhythmic ramblings. Coming from a musical background, Klee created visual sonorities that could be contrapuntal—semiautonomous points and counterpoints. One abstract watercolor here, from 1922, is titled Overture (Ouvertüre) (1922, collection of Alexander Berggruen). By never quite connecting the dots, Klee took a “line for a walk,” as he famously called his compositional style.

There are, nevertheless, some peripatetic highlights here. One is Chosen Boy (Auserwählter Knabe) (1918, anonymous loan, courtesy of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum), of a child surrounded by a halo of dreamlike geometrical forms. In its selection, the Jewish Museum has also sought out works with explicit Jewish references. Harlequin on the Bridge (Arlequin auf der Brücke) (1920, Museum Berggruen, Neue Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin) is a symbolic self-portrait in which the artist-figure straddles a river beneath a Jewish star.

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920, Oil transfer & watercolor on paper, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. © 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Angelus Novus (1920), on loan from the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, is a mothlike apparition that has taken flight through its afterlife as something of a cultural icon. Purchased by Walter Benjamin in 1921, the work inspired the German Jewish philosopher of the Frankfurt School to call it the “Angel of History.” In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” of 1940, Benjamin writes of this figure,

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Months after writing these lines, Benjamin was himself caught in the whirlwind. As he attempted to flee over the Pyrenees from Vichy France to Spain, he committed suicide after his arrest at Port Bo. Before his failed escape, Benjamin entrusted this drawing to Georges Bataille by hiding it in Paris’s Bibliothèque nationale, where Bataille was employed. When he was able to retrieve it, Bataille passed it to Theodor W. Adorno, who sent it on to Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem per Benjamin’s wishes.

As a postscript to these fraught iterations, the arrival of this work in New York for the current exhibition was delayed by Iran’s bombardment of Israel. At the time of the exhibition opening, the work could not travel to the airport for transport, at least to the satisfaction of its insurers. So it has been represented here at first by facsimile. What was meant to be the highlight loan of this exhibition took on additional meaning for the Jewish Museum and its director James S. Snyder—who, from 1997 through 2018, was the head of the Israel Museum.

Klee’s art aligned him at times with Dadaism, Expressionism, and Surrealism. Still, he was not an obvious adherent to any one group. “The Munich expressionists laid claim to him, the Zürich Dadaists hailed him, and to the French surrealists, he was a kindred spirit,” writes Klein.

In 1921, Klee joined the Bauhaus as an instructor. He taught there for ten years, following the school through its 1925 move from Weimar to Dessau. During his demonstration lectures, it is said he painted with his left hand while writing with his right. That same decade his art toured the United States along with work by Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, and Alexej von Jawlensky as part of Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four). As moma’s Alfred Barr noted in 1930: “Nothing is so astonishing to the student of Klee as his infinite variety.”

By the early 1930s, Klee had left his Bauhaus post, was facing down Nazis, and had begun to show the degenerative effects of fatal scleroderma. In his work, his gossamer line became thicker and murkier. His output intensified and his symbolism became more explicit as he painted through the catastrophe. Mask: Red Jew (Maske Roter Jude) and Your Ancestor? (Dein Ayn?), both 1933 works on paper from private collections, leave little doubt as to the state of affairs. Revolution of the Viaduct (Revolution des Viadukts) (1937, Hamburger Kunsthalle), the painting that appears on the cover of the exhibition catalogue, turns Nazi marches into jackbooted abstractions. Meanwhile Struck from the List (Von der Liste Gestrichen) (1933, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern), with a black X slashed across a face, becomes his latest self-portrait as Klee dedicated himself to “serve Beauty by drawing her enemies.”

Still, he found time to take flight. A series of angels, from 1939 and 1940, make up the final series in the exhibition—here, transformed into the avenging angels of war.

1. “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds” opened at the Jewish Museum, New York, on March 20 and remains on view through July 26, 2026. 

X-Ray Visionary

THE NEW CRITERION, April 2026

X-ray visionary

On “Egon Schiele: Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff,” at the Neue Galerie.

The portraits of Egon Schiele (1890–1918) really get under the skin. “Skinned hares” is how Schiele’s model Liliana Amon (1892–1966), in fact, described his figures in her autobiographical roman à clef, Barrières, some two decades after the artist’s untimely death. “That can’t be! These people have no skin,” the book declares, concluding, “Egon saw the world in a special way; he saw it, so to speak, under the skin, and painted in green, blue, and red.”

Just how the Austrian artist went from painting reserved landscapes at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna, where he had been accepted in 1906 at the age of sixteen, to the flayed figures of his final decade is now the focus of a small but convincing exhibition at the Neue Galerie.1 Amon is the catalyst for the story. Living with the young artist, pregnant with another man’s child, she connects through Schiele with an obstetrician who takes her on as a charity case. That doctor is Erwin von Graff, a surgeon and gynecologist twelve years older than Schiele and the focus of the exhibition. A champion of the promising artist, Graff becomes a subject for a now well-known portrait and a conduit for an unsparing new line of subject matter for Schiele. With forty works from 1910 to 1918 centered around the Graff portrait, a sizable oil on canvas that lends its name to the title of this exhibition, these results are now gathered together in a one-room gallery off the second-floor permanent collection. The show has been organized by Renée Price and Janis Staggs, the museum director and curatorial director, respectively, of the Neue Galerie.

The Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff (1910), listed as coming from a private collection as well as being part of the Neue’s “extended” collection, makes frequent house calls to Eighty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue. We last saw it in “Living Landscapes,” the Schiele exhibition I reviewed in these pages a year ago (see “Schiele’s living dead,” January 2025). The portrait has appeared some half dozen times on the walls of the Neue Galerie since Ronald S. Lauder opened his museum for German and Austrian art in 2001. Its image is unsettling, even confounding, but recent research into Schiele as well as the life of Dr. Graff now paints a newly penetrating picture of the arresting work, the output that surrounded it, and the figure it portrays. This show is a “portrait” in more ways than one.

Egon Schiele, Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff, 1910, Oil on canvas, Private collection.

The painting first presents to us as an affliction of unknown origin. The gaunt doctor stands straight, staring back at us, in front of what we might take to be a wall of glazed white hospital tile. The atmosphere is clinical and blinding. The light of the painting washes out his short-sleeve surgical shirt and vest and nearly everything else surrounding him in white. Against the glare, what we see is Graff’s dark, exposed flesh—his thin face, piercing eyes, furrowed brow, and bony hands holding up his mottled right arm as though to keep it sanitary before examination. His fingernails appear to fall from his skin. A bandage is wrapped around the end of his right ring finger.

What are we to make of this skin? The blistered arms and cut finger? Is this a trustworthy doctor? Is this even sanitary? Writing about the painting in the 1970s, the Schiele scholar Alessandra Comini suggested the Graff appears as the “shrunken-headed cadaver in a state of rigor mortis,” his bandage a “grim joke.”

Graff seems burned, even irradiated. New research suggests that he was. Graff is now known to have experimented with the then-new technology of the X-ray at a time before the effects of its long-term use were well understood. Exposed to high doses of radiation, like other doctors and scientists of his time, he developed radiodermatitis. The effects of this skin condition can be closely matched to the scorched appearance in his portrait.

Now at the Neue, two studies for the portrait appear alongside the final painting, both here from private collections—one a trio of head studies in profile in charcoal on paper, the other closer in composition to the painting in pencil, charcoal, and wash on paper. Both studies are more academic and far less expressionistic than the final work. In the doctor’s burnt limbs, we can then say that Schiele grasped his future. Moving beyond the sentiment of the Jugendstil and his role model Gustav Klimt, with his luxuriant emphasis on surfaces, Schiele looked instead to the subcutaneous depths of modern life.

From here on out, this exhibition argues, Schiele’s portraits would be peeled raw. Through the clinical window provided by Graff, Schiele found a new direction for his own artistic experiments. “Schiele really came into his own as an artist in 1910, the year he completed the portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff,” says Price, who views the painting as “one of the most important works in the extended collection of the museum.” She continues: “This is where Schiele really becomes Schiele.”

As Schiele became Schiele, Graff became a key patron and protector. It was a connection that continued through the day of the artist’s death eight years later. Graff, to start, saw Amon through to a healthy birth. He also arranged for her child’s adoption while convincing her to move out of the artist’s studio. As Schiele gave his portrait to the doctor as an expression of his gratitude, their relationship extended beyond the indigent young mother. Through a special arrangement, Graff also provided Schiele with access to other expectant mothers and newborn infants within his clinical orbit—subjects that make up most of the remaining works in this exhibition.

We can only speculate as to the exact nature of how Schiele encountered these figures and gained their acceptance as models, often in radically exposed and vulnerable positions. Neither Graff nor Schiele ever detailed the circumstances of their collaboration. Perhaps Schiele followed Graff on his rounds or took up a position in his operating theater. The results were not the remote clinical perspective we find in, say, Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic. Instead, we encounter models who appear close-up, cropped, and intimately engaged with the artist.

We know Schiele composed with swift intensity. Over his brief ten-year career, he created an astonishing three hundred paintings and three thousand works on paper. A few dashed lines of his models in pencil, crayon, or charcoal on paper could be filled in later with watercolor. For his unsparing observations, he drew on whatever inexpensive media was at his disposal. Crumpled brown paper appears in several works. He further cropped his figures in harsh and unsparing perspectives, exposing them in a new light. Confronted by naked and contorted bodies, Schiele employed his own penetrating vision.

His Newborn Baby of 1910, in gouache, watercolor, and black crayon on paper, here from an anonymous lender, serves as an example of Schiele’s new perspective on the human form. The baby twists on his back to the point where his head is out of the frame of the composition. Close examination of the paper reveals how subsequent owners attempted to fold and matte the work so that it would appear more centered. The Neue exhibition suggests that Schiele intended the work to be off-center. Seated Male Nude with Extended Arm, a watercolor, gouache, and black crayon on paper from the Neue Galerie collection, is similarly disjointed, with its twisted right arm, bent head, and brown skin that appears to tear away from the spine. So too is Pregnant Woman (1910), from an anonymous lender, with her green face and belly disconnected from her hands and feet.

Egon Schiele, Seated Male Nude with Extended Arm, 1910, Watercolor, gouache & black crayon on paper, Neue Galerie. Photo: Hulya Kolabas.

The results of Schiele’s renderings are unsettling and often off-putting. Our initial reaction can be to tie the hospital gown and quickly shut the door. In all, some twelve drawings of pregnant women can be ascribed to the Graff clinic, along with Schiele’s portraits of newborns, sick women, and stillbirths.

Today these can seem sensationalist, exploitative—and probable evidence of a hipaa violation. In his time, Schiele connected his vision to the contorted forms of the Northern Gothic and its symbols of life, death, and renewal. In his penetrating stare, the flesh of a man, the bark of a tree, and the rooftops of a town might all call for mortification.

In the irradiated figure of Graff, Schiele also saw a modern figure for his own salvation. The catalogue for this exhibition, written by Elisabeth Dutz, the chief curator of the graphic-art collection at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, makes a deep study of Graff and documents his long career in Austria and the United States. An auxiliary doctor at Vienna’s Second University Women’s Hospital at the time of his first acquaintance with Schiele, Graff became an accomplished gynecologist and surgeon. He was also a cellist, a handball player, and someone who could prepare an “exquisite Italian risotto,” according to Dutz. He spent time teaching at the University of Iowa and maintained an office on New York’s Park Avenue. A comprehensive list of his publications and lectures from 1901 through 1939 give some indications of his fields of expertise, concluding with papers on the “Etiology of Prolapse,” “Bilateral Uretreovaginal Fistula: Successful Implantation of Both Ureters into the Bladder Seven and Eleven Months Following Total Hysterectomy,” and “Tubal Sterilization by the Madlener Technique.”

Despite these professional accomplishments, it was Graff’s visionary relationship with Schiele that today most defines him for us—a fact that Graff himself seems to have recognized as he collected the artist’s work, brought him into the trust of his patients, and attended to Schiele’s own life and death.

One of the final objects in this exhibition is Schiele’s death mask. A victim of the flu pandemic of 1918, the artist died three days after watching his sick and pregnant wife pass away. One of his last acts was to draw his fevered wife on her deathbed. Days later, just hours before Schiele’s own demise, Graff paid the artist a house call, most likely to administer a palliative dose of morphine. Schiele’s final vision was of the doctor who first inspired him eight years before.

1. “Egon Schiele: Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff” opened at the Neue Galerie, New York, on February 12 and remains on view through May 4, 2026.