“Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections”

Reclining Nude Facing Right

Photograph: Private Collection, New York, Courtesy Neue Galerie New York

It’s hard to believe there was a time when Gustav Klimt could be described as “little known,” as he was by an underwhelmed New Yorker art critic in 1959, who dismissed the fin de siècle Austrian painter’s first, posthumous U.S. solo show as a sentimental medley of “allegory, mild eroticism and good old German romanticism.” Klimt’s meteoric rise in popularity during the 1960s and 1970s owes much to the initial two certified stateside Klimtomaniacs: Neue Galerie cofounders Ronald Lauder and Serge Sabarsky, whose extensive collections are featured in this lovingly researched exhibition of paintings, drawings and ephemera. (It’s billed as the artist’s first American museum retrospective, though that promises more than the show delivers.)

Indeed, the Neue Galerie’s aim, at least in part, seems to be to rekindle Klimt’s cult appeal. Gauging from the number of people standing reverently in front of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), things are going according to plan. This profoundly strange portrait is a virtuoso demonstration of Klimt’s idiosyncratic, beloved combination of ultrastylized byzantine ornamentalism and cool—bloodless, really—portraiture.

In his drawings (which outnumber paintings 12 to 1 here), one can trace Klimt’s evolution from conventional 19th-century academy artist to visionary, socially connected leader of the Vienna Secessionist pack. As in Reclining Nude Facing Right (1912–13), a red-and-blue pencil sketch of a masturbating woman rendered in an undulating, electric lines, they convey a passion absent in, or excised from, his paintings. The galleries are chockablock with biographical objects like the artist’s caftan and a reconstruction of his Vienna studio, but it’s the drawings alone that inject some real life into the Klimt legend.

—Anne Wehr