Egon Schiele died young. His landscapes are forever old.

NEW YORK — Like his portraits of people, Egon Schiele's landscape paintings are rarely pretty but often striking. Relatively early in his tragically short career — the Austrian artist died of influenza in 1918 at age 28 — the young painter moved on from sketching idylls of nature and quaint village scenes to create autumnal views of spindly trees, dying flowers and cityscapes stuffed with habitation but almost always devoid of people. These are not the works for which he is most famous, even revered, but an exhibition at the Neue Galerie suggests that they were animated by the same obsessions that make Schiele's human figures feel so utterly exposed, both naked and nude — raw, vulnerable yet unashamed.

" Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes ," curated by Christian Bauer, assumes a natural tension, even an opposition between landscape and portraiture. The two terms are so fundamental to the basic categories of painting that they live on in the terminology of cellphones and digital cameras: Landscape is a horizontal format, portrait mode is vertical.

Very quickly, you see Schiele break those rules and others when he paints the world around him. Flowers and trees define a vertical world, often pushing past the upper bounds of the canvas or paper. The two bodies in the 1914 painting "Man and Woman I (Lovers I)" are laid out horizontally, amid a landscape of twisted sheets and a carpet of earth. In repeated views of the same church tower in the town of Stein, Austria, the white form pushes upward, as if it is a stake hammered into the ground, the hills, the sky and the waters of the Danube.

Bauer argues that the connection between Schiele's images of people and his images of places is not simply a shared expressionist sensibility. Rather, they are both deeply symbolic, and share a fraught language of intensely meaningful personal symbols. Living and dead flowers, especially sunflowers, exist in the same space, suggesting perhaps something maternal or regenerative in life. Trees in autumn hint at mortality, menace and solitude, as do many of the people the painter memorialized.

One can never be sure whether Schiele is anthropomorphizing nature in his landscapes or mapping the body as a natural, earthy phenomenon in his portraits. The success of this small but engaging exhibition is that, by the time you reach the end, the distinction between the two kinds of painting has mostly vanished.

Schiele gives an animist twist to the Christian landscape in which he grew up. Forest shrines pop up like mushrooms; church towers have primal, phallic energy. "Every tree has its face," he wrote in a 1910 letter. "I recognize its kind of eyes, its kind of arms, its components, its organism."

Read a little further into the artist's writing and you detect the familiar intellectual stew of fin de siecle Vienna, a Nietzschean brew with Wagnerian levels of desire for connection and transcendence. Schiele had a young man's delirious mix of confidence and scorn, an obsession with inner truth and the false masks and deceit of society.

"Everybody is envious of me and deceitful; former colleagues look at me with dissembling eyes, in Vienna there is only shadow, the city is black, everything is done by recipe," he wrote in another letter the same year.

But if Schiele spoke the language of Vienna, he preferred to live and work outside it.

That led him to towns like Stein, and Krumau, where his mother was born. Those places inspired but didn't seem to enchant him, and he rendered their picture-postcard quaintness with a ferocity that seems to channel his hostility to the big city.

The thickness of paint in a 1912 image, "Krumau Townscape (St. Vitus's Church With Houses) (Meadow, Church, and Houses)," doesn't seem to be about foregrounding paint as a medium, or giving the two-dimensional image a sculptural surface. Rather, it is argumentative and vehement, insisting that this vision of the world isn't one among many — no mere opinion about what this church, meadow and sky look like — but the absolute truth of pure subjectivity.

One senses the same vehemence in a striking self-portrait made in 1911, in which the artist has surrounded his great shock of dark hair with a nimbus of white light, like a halo, and rendered his hands with an angularity that makes them look like weapons. He is dressed as a dandy, in a peacock waistcoat, and unlike his images of other people, he stands straight.

Schiele rarely affords the same supreme self-confidence to his trees. One of the most powerful images in the Neue show is the 1913 "River Landscape With Two Trees," both of which, like the young artist, seem just a bit older than saplings. Around them the landscape is barren but for a few small, brilliantly colored flowers, like a dapper young man in a city he imagines hostile to him.

Humans and vegetable life grow by different means and mechanisms. We are animals, and our bodies are cooked up mostly whole in the womb, wobbly at first and last. But our minds are more arboreal, putting out green shoots tender to frost and wind. Some sprigs last, many don't. Some emotions are spindly and fragile, others covered in a carapace of old bark.

The two trees in the river landscape share a common delusion. They have everything they need to thrive: open land, sun, water in the distance. Unlike the buildings in Schiele's townscapes, they are not crowded together, nor are they fighting off the encroachment of weeds or the forest's edge. But they seem utterly miserable, like so many young people living with isolation and desire.

A photograph from 1918, of Schiele on his deathbed, puts this in perspective. You can't see his work without wanting to know what it would have looked like in 1928, or 1968. He was an extraordinary artist with at least a few revolutions in him, revolutions that never came. He never got old, yet he was always old, or perhaps he didn't live long enough to be young.

Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes Through Jan. 13 at the Neue Galerie, New York. neuegalerie.org .