Exactly 100 years ago, Gustav Klimt’s iconic portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, now enthroned in the Neue Galerie and possibly the most famous painting in New York, was exhibited in Vienna between two soulful and sinewy sculptures by the Belgian artist George Minne. Today, after a tumultuous century of world wars and totalitarian regimes, the two sculptures have turned up on the Upper East Side at the Neue Galerie. There, once again, they flank the ethereal Frau Bloch-Bauer.

All three works had belonged to her family before they were confiscated by the Nazis. Two years ago, after the Klimt portrait was finally “restituted” to her descendants, they sold it to the Neue Galerie. Now they have donated these two sculptures.

Strictly speaking, these depictions of slender, kneeling youths do not really belong in the Neue Galerie, which is consecrated to German and Austrian art. But beyond the poetic justice of their restitution, there is the potent fact that Minne and Klimt, the former’s slightly older contemporary, were very much part of the same cultural milieu, that of Symbolism, whose rarefied high-mindedness informs the work of both artists.

Born in Ghent in 1866, Minne died at Laethem-Saint-Martin in 1941. He was well connected with some of the leading lights of the Symbolist movement. An early member of Les XX, the foremost Symbolist chapter in Belgium, he befriended painters such as James Ensor and Fernand Khnopff, as well as the poets Emile Verhaeren and Maurice Maeterlinck.

The Symbolist mood is clearly dominant in Minne’s two sculptures at the Neue Galerie. Carved from single blocks of marble, these two male forms are rendered with a twisting, prickly angularity. They are so thin as to appear almost, but perhaps not quite, physically impossible. Their gaunt heads, with close-cropped hair, are bowed downwards, such that it is difficult to get a good look at their introspective faces. Otherworldly in the extreme, they shun the gaze of the viewer. They appear conceptually to be depictions of two different beings, but in their spiritualized elevation, the specifics of human life have fallen away from them and become irrelevant.

In conceiving these sculptures, Minne’s foremost inspiration was surely Rodin, the man who rediscovered the robust corporeality of the Renaissance and the Baroque. Into his variations of Baroque and Renaissance themes, however, Rodin injected a major difference. Those earlier sculptures were instinct with a powerful sense of Christian and classical mythology, not to mention a humanism founded in Neo-Platonism. Rodin’s creations are entirely secularized, and their humanism is of a post-revolutionary kind, tinged with socialist universality.

Minne’s two sculptures at the Neue Galerie display a telling variation on the themes of Rodin. Though the Frenchman was a part of the Symbolist movement and though he shared its idealized approach to the human form, he exhibited a muscularity and a vigor that few of his contemporaries chose to imitate.

Specifically, the figures depicted by Minne, no less than those that populate the paintings of Klimt and Egon Schiele, seem to have undergone a starvation diet. Unlike Rodin’s works and like most of Symbolism, these two kneeling youths are universal, or at least general, without being humanistic. Their very thinness suggests an almost medieval mortification of the flesh. What provides their leaven of generality is a vague spirituality — a secularized spirituality, if you will — transfigured into moody, aestheticized attitude.

In his reverence for this attitude, Minne, like so many of his Symbolist brethren, presumes to transcend humanity at large through a distinctly elitist, even Nietzschean notion of life. It is one to which only they can belong who, in their hypersensitivity, have been initiated into the cult of art.

From a purely artistic perspective, Minne’s two young men exhibit the same limitations that characterize the sculptures of Rodin and the other symbolists. Attitude, of one cast or another, creeps in unawares and gains the upper hand over the claims of sculptural form. As a result, in Minne, as in Rodin, there is a literary quality imparted to the stone he carves; ultimately, he has insufficient faith that the purity of sculptural form can ever be its own reward. The result is a charming pair of period sculptures that are more aesthetic than artistic.