Neue Galerie New York
In 2006, Ronald S. Lauder paid a reported $135 million for Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, making it the most expensive painting ever sold at that time. He did not hang it in his home. He placed it in a museum he had built to honor a dead friend -- a small, exquisite gallery at the corner of 86th Street and Fifth Avenue dedicated entirely to early twentieth-century German and Austrian art. The Neue Galerie New York is not the Metropolitan, not the Guggenheim, not the Museum of Modern Art. It is something rarer: a museum with a singular obsession, housed in a mansion that matches the intensity of its collection.
Two Friends, One Vision
The museum began as a conversation between Lauder, the billionaire heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune, and Serge Sabarsky, a Viennese-born art dealer whose gallery on Madison Avenue had become New York's leading destination for Austrian and German Expressionist work. They met in 1967, just before Sabarsky opened his gallery at 987 Madison Avenue. Lauder was a frequent visitor and client. Over the years, the two men discussed opening a museum to showcase the finest work from the period they both loved -- Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Klee. When Sabarsky died in 1996, Lauder resolved to build the museum alone, as a tribute. The Neue Galerie opened on November 16, 2001, five years after Sabarsky's death, in a building that would have delighted him.
The William Starr Miller House
The museum occupies the former William Starr Miller House, a Louis XIII and Beaux-Arts structure that anchors the corner of Fifth Avenue and 86th Street. Selldorf Architects handled the complete renovation, transforming a private mansion into gallery spaces while preserving its architectural character. The second floor holds Austrian art and decorative objects -- Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele, and the artisans of the Wiener Werkstatte. The third floor is devoted to German movements: Der Blaue Reiter, Die Brucke, the Bauhaus, with works by Kandinsky, Klee, Kirchner, Feininger, Dix, and Grosz. Downstairs, Cafe Sabarsky -- named for the co-founder -- evokes the atmosphere of a Viennese coffeehouse, outfitted with Josef Hoffmann lighting fixtures, Adolf Loos furniture, and banquettes upholstered in a 1912 Otto Wagner fabric. A Bosendorfer grand piano in the corner hosts cabaret and chamber music performances.
The Lady in Gold
The museum's crown jewel arrived through one of the most dramatic art restitution cases of the twenty-first century. Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I had hung in the Austrian State Gallery in Vienna for decades after being seized from the Bloch-Bauer family by the Nazis. Maria Altmann, Adele's niece, fought a protracted legal battle against the Austrian government that reached the U.S. Supreme Court before an Austrian arbitration panel ruled in her favor in 2006. Lauder purchased the painting from Altmann, and it has been on display at the Neue Galerie since July 2006. The story became the 2015 film Woman in Gold, starring Helen Mirren as Altmann. For visitors who come knowing nothing of this history, the painting is simply stunning -- Klimt's gold-leaf portrait of a Viennese society woman rendered with an almost Byzantine intensity.
A Museum Mile Jewel
Since its opening, the Neue Galerie has mounted a succession of ambitious exhibitions that would be the envy of institutions many times its size. A 2014 show on the Nazis' infamous "Degenerate Art" campaign was the first major American museum exhibition on the subject since 1991. Retrospectives have covered Richard Gerstl, Alexei Jawlensky, and Koloman Moser -- artists who rarely receive solo treatment in the United States. An exhibition exploring Vienna's golden age between 1900 and 1918 drew works from collections worldwide. The museum sits on the Museum Mile, that stretch of Fifth Avenue between 83rd and 105th Streets where New York concentrates its cultural wealth. Among these larger neighbors, the Neue Galerie holds its own by doing one thing with extraordinary focus. It is not a museum that tries to be everything. It is a museum that knows exactly what it is.
From the Air
Located at 40.7813°N, 73.9603°W on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 86th Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan. The museum is part of the Museum Mile -- the Metropolitan Museum of Art is visible just two blocks south, the Guggenheim three blocks north. Central Park stretches west from Fifth Avenue. Nearest airports: KLGA (LaGuardia, 6 nm northeast), KTEB (Teterboro, 10 nm west).