Art in NYC: Obsession-Nudes by Klimt, Schiele, Picasso at The Met Breuer
Erotic watercolors, drawings and prints from The Met’s Scofield Thayer Collection on view July 3 – October 7, 2018
An exhibition of about fifty works by the grand masters of the Vienna Secession movement Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele together with the early works by Pablo Picasso dives deep into artists’ obsession with male and female bodies. Bequeathed to The Met Museum in 1925 by Scofield Thayer, the collection is now coming on view for the first time. Thayer, a wealthy American publisher, and poet, collected the works in the early 1920s.
Klimt, while highly acclaimed in Austria, was mostly unknown to the American public. Schiele and Picasso were just starting to get attention and recognition in America. Thayer used some reproductions of the artworks in his avant-garde literary magazine Dial and for an exhibition at the Montross Gallery in New York in 1924. However he didn’t find much interest for them in his native Massachusetts.
His collection was assembled when Thayer was traveling between Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. It is an opening into the hidden obsession and fascination with the nude bodies, the emotions of the struggling souls and the complexity of desire. Don’t judge; just observe and contemplate.
