Egon Schiele (1890-1918) is a young person’s artist. Ronald S. Lauder, whose collection has been coupled with that of Serge Sabarsky for the current show of approximately 180 works at Neue Galerie, started collecting Schiele’s art when he was only 14 years old.

That Schiele appeals to the adolescent is not surprising. The artist, who died of influenza at 28, did not get very far past puberty himself. His subjects are sex and loneliness or, in the recurring theme of masturbation, a combination of both. Almost always in Schiele’s art, there is a sense of imminent, threatening change – a stirring in the wiry line and the restless surface – not only in the flesh but also in the trees, buildings, hair, and clothes.

His angst-ridden paintings and drawings are often of skeletal, colorless, and isolated figures that look as if they were made of crumpled paper or carved out of stone. Their rustling, nervously agitated flesh is ghostly, waxy, and wan. Their bodies are elongated, as if stretched to the breaking point; their pale skin is scratched green and red, as if rotting or scraped to bone. Naked and vulnerable, they are full of mistrust, anger, yearning, or fear. Fixed to their roughened grounds, they telescope raw, adolescent emotion.

Schiele’s reputation is much larger than that of his oeuvre. Painters as diverse as Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, Lucien Freud, Philip Pearlstein, and Alice Neel have followed, either heavily or gingerly, in his footsteps; as have (according to convincing essays in the Neue Galerie catalog) the artists Nan Goldin, Vanessa Beecroft, and Tracey Emin, as well as the performers David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and James Dean. (As in Messrs. Bowie and Jagger, there is an element in Schiele of the performer and the exhibitionist. And as in Dean, there is the pervasive air of a young rebel without a cause.)

If you have never seen a large grouping of Schiele’s works the Neue Galerie show is a worthwhile place to start. In terms of paintings, it does not compete with MoMA’s 1997 Schiele retrospective (there are fewer than 20 oils at the Neue Galerie), but there are enough, especially in light of the more than 150 drawings, to provide an overview of his strengths and weaknesses.

The chronological exhibition begins with a death mask of the artist and a small survey of moody oil paintings – landscapes, allegorical paintings, and self-portraits – from 1907-15. (These works surround vitrines filled with photographs, catalogs, and other ephemera and artifacts, including the artist’s postcards and letters.) Dark and brooding, the paintings’ dry and washy or thickened and syrupy surfaces are tonal and too often static. Schiele used color as a tint rather than as an emotional force. There is actually something surprisingly timid in his over-the-top Expressionism.

The artist never fully developed as a colorist or a draftsman, and his forms, especially the figures, which remain eerie characters rather than individuals, betray these inadequacies. The result is that they never rise above a strange combination of fashion illustration and academic expressionism. In “Conversion” (1912), one of the best paintings in the show, a grouping of figures, coiled as if in the womb or a shell, merge with their spiraling environment. Here is a feeling for the whole that is lacking in many of the pictures, in which the figures seem isolated from one another and lost or floating within the rectangle.

The exhibition then starts over with a chronological, closely hung survey of drawings. These include academic studies, numerous portraits, accomplished fashion illustrations, and nudes, in which the glowing genitals, swollen and bright red, look as if they belonged to baboons in heat. Some of the self portraits make the artist’s head appear to be on fire.

Schiele had a knack for throwing things in the public’s face, for shocking them by exposing his subjects or himself. His work still has the capacity to shock. Almost every one of his works – whether a self portrait, landscape, portrait, or a nude with her knees up and her legs splayed – feels like a visceral extension of the artist. And it is the raw, in-your-face, adolescent subjectivity that cares not one bit for what you think that is disturbing, not the eroticism (for his work, no matter how sexually charged, is never beautiful enough to be truly erotic).

Schiele’s work has been charged with accusations of vulgarity. Certainly it is vulgar. Yet it is vulgar not in subject but in its lack of completion, in its unashamed commitment to remain loud, unrefined, and unformed. This is what appeals to artists today. In our youth-obsessed age, the act of merely expressing yourself as an artist (especially if you are brash and young) can be more appealing than the arduous task of creating a fully developed work of art.

Goethe said that every first novel is an autobiography, and there is a sense in Schiele that he never got beyond that first stage in his short life. He never surpassed the searching, undeveloped phase normally referred to as “finding yourself.”

Until February 20 (1048 Fifth Avenue at 86th Street, 212-628-6200).