"Portraits of an Age" Exhibit at Neue Galerie

Each time I go to the Neue Galerie (5th & 86th St.), I'm struck cold, forbidding grandeur of the space. Formerly a private residence, the space has been transformed into a museum that showcases German and Austrian art of the early twentieth century. There is nothing friendly or gemütlich about the Neue Galerie, from the front desk staff to the grim guards. But they have an amazing collection of Klimts and Schieles, as well as some stunning furniture, silver, and decorative arts. (And they have one of the few A+ restrooms in the city).

Their current exhitibit is a collection of photographs from 1900 to 1938. Greeting you at the top of the narrow, marble stairs is Nähe's portrait of Gustav Mahler from 1904 (taken in the Vienna State Opera); it's one of my favorite images of Mahler. There's one room of photographs from before WWI that look more like 19th-century paintings than photographs; the other rooms show portraits, self-portraits, and "snapshots" from the twenties and thirties. The sudden modernity of these images--so different from the fin-de-siecle portraits--is shocking and familiar (a lot of it looks like classic fashion photography).

The feeling that always strikes me when studying images of people from the Weimar Republic years is of overwhelming, impending doom -- a sense of dancing, painting, building, loving, as fast as you can because time is short. Some of that sense comes from a romaticisation of the period (Isherwood, Cabaret), but I always wonder when I look at these images "did this person survive the War? or this person? or this one?" There is no way, I think, for someone in the early part of the 21st-century to look at these images without seeing what came next, what shattered so many lives. The images are more than art--they are history; they have survived, and they're amazing to see, despite the acres of cold marble and wrought iron railings.