Like Keats, Hank Williams and Kurt Cobain, the Austrian painter Egon Schiele was an artist who never made it out of his 20s. He succumbed to the Spanish flu in 1918 at the age of 28, leaving behind a last, tortured sketch of his pregnant wife, made a day before she died in the same epidemic.
But for someone whose cheerless credo was “All things are living dead,” Schiele squeezed a lot out of the few years he was given. On Thursday, the Neue Galerie, a temple to German Expressionism, opens “Egon Schiele: Portraits,” the first American exhibition to focus on Schiele’s portraiture.
