Neue Galerie

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Neue Galerie New York

The Neue Galerie New York (German: "New Gallery") is a museum of early twentieth-century German and Austrian art and design located at 86th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City. It is one of the most recent additions to New York City's famed Museum Mile, which runs from 83rd to 105th streets on Fifth Avenue in the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

The museum was first conceived by two close friends, museum administrator and art dealer Serge Sabarsky and entrepreneur and philanthropist Ronald S. Lauder. They met in 1967, just before Sabarsky opened his first gallery. The Serge Sabarsky Gallery opened at 987 Madison Avenue in 1968, and almost immediately earned a reputation as New York’s leading gallery for Austrian and German Expressionist art. Lauder was a frequent visitor and client. Both Sabarsky and Lauder enjoyed a passionate commitment to the art of this period, and they dreamed of someday opening a museum space to showcase the very best of this work. When Sabarsky died in 1996, Lauder chose to carry on the task of creating Neue Galerie New York, as a tribute to his friend.

The collection of the Neue Galerie is divided into two sections. The second floor of the museum houses works of fine art and decorative art from early twentieth-century Austria, including paintings by Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. The third floor exhibits various German works from the same era, including art movements such as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), Die Brücke (The Bridge), and the Bauhaus. Featured artists on this floor include Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Lyonel Feininger, Otto Dix, and George Grosz.

The museum also contains a bookstore, design shop, and two Viennese cafés, "Café Sabarsky" and "Café Fledermaus", both of which are operated by restaurateur Kurt Gutenbrunner.

The museum is housed in an elegant Louis XIII/Beaux-Arts structure located on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 86th Street. Commissioned by industrialist William Starr Miller in 1914 from the New York-based architecture firm Carrère and Hastings, it was subsequently occupied by Grace Vanderbilt, the wife of Cornelius Vanderbilt III, and then by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research before being purchased by Lauder and Sabarsky in 1994. The building was fully renovated by German architect Annabelle Selldorf and restored to its original state before the Neue Galerie opened.

In 2006, Lauder purchased Klimt's painting Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I on behalf of the Neue Galerie. Citing a confidentiality agreement, Lauder would only confirm that the purchase price was more than the last record price of $104.2 million US for Picasso's 1905 Boy With a Pipe. The press reported the price for the Klimt at US$135 million, which would make it at that time the most expensive painting ever sold.^[1] It has been on display at the museum since July 2006.

[edit] Past exhibition

Van Gogh and Expressionism opened March 22, 2007, and ran until July 2, 2007. It explored the crucial influence of Vincent van Gogh on German and Austrian Expressionism. More than 80 paintings and drawings were on view, including a number of major canvases by Van Gogh, as well as important paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Alexei von Jawlensky, Franz Marc, Vasily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, and others. This exhibition, organized by curator Jill Lloyd, the well-known scholar of Expressionism, filled all the gallery spaces in the museum.