In a rare convergence of cultural forces, the Neue Galerie New York and its significant collection of 20th-century Austrian and German art will merge with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2028, both institutions announced on Thursday.
The Neue, which the cosmetics heir Ronald S. Lauder opened in 2001, most famously features the gold-flecked Gustav Klimt portrait known as the Woman in Gold. Once the Neue merges with the Met, the largest museum in the country, it will be renamed the Met Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie and referred to as the Met Neue.
“This represents an enormous opportunity,” said Max Hollein, the Met’s director and chief executive, who for 20 years has served on the Neue’s board. “It allows us to be the custodian, not only of an enormous amount of very important works of art, but also of a place with profound integrity and beauty and vision.”
Lauder said the merger aimed to preserve the Neue’s jewel box character beyond his tenure as co-founder, president and chairman. He added that he was reassured by how the Cloisters, the Met’s medieval art branch, has maintained an independent identity.
“Somehow I don’t think I’m going to live to 120,” said Lauder, 82. “I want to make sure that after I’m no longer there — whatever happens — the Neue Galerie will stay the Neue Galerie.”
To create an endowment that has been estimated at $200 million for the long-term care and preservation of the Neue, Lauder and his daughter, Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer, plan to make a substantial gift. They are also donating 13 Austrian and German paintings from their personal collection to the combined institutions.
Those works include Klimt’s large-scale portrait “Die Tänzerin (The Dancer)” (circa 1916-18); Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Die Russische Tänzerin Mela (The Russian Dancer Mela)” (1911); and Max Beckmann’s “Galleria Umberto” (1925). Their promised gifts also include Klimt’s “The Black Feather Hat” (1910), and works by Otto Dix, George Grosz and Franz Marc.
“This is an area where the Met’s collection is not very strong,” Hollein said. “If you look at Vienna 1900, Berlin 1920s — this was really the epicenter of the development of the avant-garde and it’s important to have a broad and deep collection there.”
Asked if he had stipulated certain protective conditions in the merger, Lauder quipped, “Only about 30 pages.”
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Will the Met be able to borrow artworks to display in its flagship Fifth Avenue location? “For an exhibition perhaps, but not certain pieces,” Lauder said. Those exceptions include the Woman in Gold, formally titled “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” (1907), which Lauder bought privately in 2006 for $135 million.
“‘Adele Bloch-Bauer’ stays where it is,” Lauder said. “It is our Mona Lisa.”
Hollein, who is Austrian, has known Lauder since he was a teenager. When Lauder served as U.S. ambassador to Austria for a year in the 1980s, he became friendly with Hollein’s father, the prominent postmodern architect Hans Hollein, and his mother, Helene Hollein, a fashion designer. Over time, Lauder said he came to admire Max Hollein’s stewardship of museums like the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and several institutions in Frankfurt.
“When I started working on the Neue Galerie, one of the first people I spoke to was Max,” Lauder said. “He was with us almost from the beginning.”
The Neue Galerie, at 86th Street and Fifth Avenue, is the Met’s neighbor. Hollein also likened its Beaux-Arts 1914 mansion environment to one of the Met’s period rooms, providing a holistic experience that makes a visitor “travel in time.”
Most of the new endowment for the Neue has already been raised thanks to an undisclosed lead gift from Marina Kellen French, a Met board member, and contributions from other trustees including Candace K. Beinecke, Daniel Brodsky and Blair Effron.
It is unclear what the museum merger will mean for the Neue’s founding director, Renée Price, who earned a total compensation package of about $922,000 in the 2024 fiscal year, according to the most recently available tax forms.
“The next couple of months will allow us to work on the operational structure,” Hollein said. “How we are going to run this and who is going to be in charge of what — we’ll address that a bit later.”
Price, for her part, said she envisioned the merger as “a collaboration.”
“If I can put it in musical terms, it’s like we play chamber music and the Met has a powerful orchestra with a big choir,” she continued. “We can make music together.”
Lauder has had a long tenure as a trustee at the Museum of Modern Art, but he has also built a relationship with the Met. In 2020 he gave 91 pieces of arms and armor to the Met, whose Arms and Armor galleries were then named after him. (In 2013, Lauder’s brother, Leonard A. Lauder, gave the Met his collection of 78 Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures, valued at more than $1 billion.)
“My feeling towards MoMA does not change,” Ronald Lauder said. “It’s a museum I love, and I care very, very much about it.”
Lauder began collecting Austrian art while still a teenager in the late 1950s and a decade later became a client and friend of Serge Sabarsky, a longtime New York dealer in Austrian and German art. To create an intimate museum like the Morgan Library or the Frick, they in 1994 purchased a Beaux-Arts mansion, designed by Carrère & Hastings, which was then renovated by the architect Annabelle Selldorf.
The resulting Neue Galerie has become known almost as much for the Wiener schnitzel and Sacher torte in its Café Sabarsky as for the Klimts, Schieles and Beckmanns on the gallery walls.
It will close for planned infrastructure renovations on May 27 and reopen to the public in the fall with a 25th anniversary exhibition. Café Sabarsky, whose marble-topped tables were imported from Vienna, will remain intact.
“What many people do is go see the exhibition and come down to the Cafe Sabarsky to have a delicious coffee,” Lauder said. “As Serge said, ‘If you don’t have good coffee, you don’t have a good museum.’”
