The Neue Galerie, a private museum in New York’s Upper East Side run by collector Ronald S. Lauder, will merge with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, making yet another major expansion of the latter institution’s modern art offerings.
The New York Times reports that the merger will take place in 2028 and that the Neue Galerie will now be known as the Met Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie, or the Met Neue for short. (The latter institution is located in a townhouse at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 86th Street, about a five-minute walk from the Met.)
The Neue Galerie is known for its deep holdings of German and Austrian modernist art, including masterpieces by Gustav Klimt, at least one of which is worth more than $100 million. Speaking to the Times, Lauder said that some of his museum’s holdings could be exhibited at the Met’s Fifth Avenue base, but “not certain pieces.” Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), which Lauder bought for an astounding $135 million, is one such work that will stay at the townhouse. Lauder called it “our Mona Lisa.”
The Met will need to gather $200 million for an endowment to steward the Neue Galerie, which Lauder and his daughter, Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer, will reportedly give some funds toward, as well as 13 works from their collection. Those works include a prized Klimt, as well as paintings by the German Expressionist painters Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Beckmann, as well as Neue Sachlichkeit artists Otto Dix and George Grosz.
