| The Met Breuer,
July 3–October 7, 2018 |
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At The Met Breuer this summer, the exhibition
Obsession: Nudes by Klimt, Schiele, and Picasso from the Scofield Thayer Collection will
present a selection from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Scofield
Thayer Collection of some 50 erotic and evocative watercolors, drawings,
and prints by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Pablo Picasso, whose
subjects, except for a handful, are nudes. The exhibition will provide a
focused look at this important collection and mark the first time this
brilliant group of works are being shown together; it also marks the
centenary of the death of Klimt and Schiele.
Egon Schiele, Girl (1918), donated to the Met by Scofield Thayer.
An aesthete and scion of a wealthy family, Scofield Thayer (1889–1982) was co-publisher and editor of the literary magazine the
Dial
from 1919 to 1926. In this avant-garde journal he introduced Americans
to the writings of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Arthur
Schnitzler, Thomas Mann, and Marcel Proust, among others. He frequently
accompanied these writers’ contributions with reproductions of modern
art. Thayer assembled his large collection of some 600 works—mostly
works on paper—with staggering speed in London, Paris, Berlin, and
Vienna between 1921 and 1923.
Gustav Klimt,
Reclining Nude With Drapery (c. 1913), donated to the to the Met by Scofield Thayer.
While he was a patient of Sigmund Freud in
Vienna, he acquired a large group of watercolors and drawings by
Schiele and Klimt, artists who at that time were unknown in America.
When a selection from his collection was shown at the Montross Gallery
in New York in 1924—five years before the Museum of Modern Art opened—it
won acclaim. It found no favor, however, in Thayer’s native city,
Worcester, Massachusetts, that same year when it was shown at the
Worcester Art Museum. Incensed, Thayer draw up his will in 1925 leaving
his collection to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He withdrew from
public life in the late 1920s and lived as a recluse on Martha’s
Vineyard and in Florida until his death in 1982.
Pablo Picasso,
Three Bathers Reclining by the Shore (1920), donated to the Met by Scofield Thayer
Obsession: Nudes by Klimt, Schiele and Picasso from the Scofield Thayer Collection is
organized by Sabine Rewald, the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Curator for
Modern Art in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a
catalogue published by The Met.
An essay by James Dempsey, instructor at the Worcester Polytechnic
Institute and an authority on Scofield Thayer, discusses the collector’s
professional and private life. In her essay, Sabine Rewald discusses in
depth the works of the three artists and also examines Thayer’s
purchases between 1921 and 1923, as documented in invoices.
Evocative and often highly erotic works on paper by Gustav Klimt, Egon
Schiele, and Pablo Picasso are presented along with new details about
Scofield Thayer (1889–1982), the unusual and complicated man who
collected them. Thayer was a wealthy publisher, poet, and aesthete who
led an intense public life that included the editorship of the prominent
literary journal
The Dial and friendships with literary
luminaries such as e. e. cummings. In the 1920s, Thayer went on an
art-buying spree in London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, acquiring
approximately 600 works of art. Among these are particularly provocative
drawings and watercolors by Klimt, Schiele, and Picasso, at a time when
these works were little known or appreciated. This book showcases 52 of
the rarely seen works—which have now taken their place as modernist
erotic masterpieces—and presents them within the context of the
collector’s remarkable life and tempestuous times.
Great review, LOTS of images
