CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/9/2018

Provocateurs of the human body in 'Klimt and Schiele: Drawings'

Gustav Klimt's Portrait of a Woman in Three-Quarter Profile (Study for the Beethoven Frieze: Lasciviousness) (1901) is reproduced from Klimt and Schiele: Drawings, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's superb new oversized collection of 60 drawings by these radical fin-de-siecle Viennese painters and friends. "Both were provocateurs in the depiction of the human body," curator Katie Hanson writes, "challenging conventions and expectations in portraits, nudes, and allegories. The body as a coherent whole was not a given, nor was its beauty or inherent virtue or vice. Klimt was not interested in all bodies equally, declaring, 'There is no self-portrait of me. I am not interested in myself as a "subject for depiction" but rather in others, above all women.' For Schiele, all bodies including his own were subject to appraisal: 'The figure is after all the most essential, and what gives me the greatest satisfaction, the human body.'"