Egon Schiele

With a line snaking out the door on Saturday afternoon and a crowd in the darkened third-floor room where films about the artist were being screened, “Egon Schiele” may be the closest this jewel-box museum comes to a blockbuster. Drawn from the holdings of the museum’s cofounders, Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky (who cut his collector’s teeth on the artist and whose eye for Schiele’s work was impeccable), the exhibition highlights the stunning, brief efflorescence of Schiele’s gift as a draftsman with a generous selection of drawings. They are buttressed by a small selection of paintings, motley ephemera, and a hefty catalog. Hair, hands, and haunches, rendered in manic detail, predominate in the works on paper, from wispy pencil- or charcoal-only studies of family and friends (circa 1910-12) to more detailed portraits, laced with color, of fellow army officers, collectors and their families, and artists and writers (during the war years). On canvas, a sooty dusk envelopes the wan figures and lone trees, as if the artist picked up his brush only when his mood bottomed out. The works’ naked emotion, in no way sentimental, offers a direct line to the artist’s psyche that, in its pendular swings, was a microcosm of a society undergoing turbulent change.