Ajay Suresh via Wikimedia Commons
It’s the end of an era — and the start of a new one — for one of the Upper East Side’s most beloved cultural fixtures. A long-anticipated arrangement, unveiled this week, will rewrite the future of Museum Mile.
Advertisement
The Neue Galerie — Ronald S. Lauder’s private museum devoted to early-20th-century German and Austrian art — will merge with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2028, the two institutions confirmed Thursday in a joint announcement. The combined institution will be renamed the Met Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie, or simply the Met Neue Galerie, joining the Met Fifth Avenue and the Met Cloisters as the third location under the Met’s umbrella.In an interview with The New York Times, the 82-year-old Lauder framed the deal in candid succession-planning terms. “Somehow I don’t think I’m going to live to 120,” he told the paper, adding that he was reassured by the way the Met has stewarded the Cloisters — its medieval branch in upper Manhattan — while letting that institution retain its distinct identity.
Under the agreement, the Neue’s historic home — the William Starr Miller House, a 1914 Beaux-Arts mansion at 1048 Fifth Avenue and 86th Street — will be folded into the Met along with the museum’s endowment and broader assets, subject to regulatory approvals. The Neue’s exhibitions, staff, design and book shops, and the famed Café Sabarsky will all continue under the new arrangement, with a Special Advisory Board chaired by Lauder overseeing the transition. Klimt’s gilded Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I — the museum’s most iconic work, which Lauder bought privately in 2006 for $135 million — will stay in the townhouse, and the Met is barred from moving it to its flagship Fifth Avenue galleries.
The deal also brings a substantial expansion of the collection. Lauder and his daughter, Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer — herself a Met trustee — plan to donate 13 paintings from their personal collection, among them a large-scale Klimt portrait of a dancer, an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Expressionist canvas, and Max Beckmann’s “Galleria Umberto.” Promised future gifts include a second Klimt and works by Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Franz Marc. An endowment estimated at $200 million is being assembled to steward the museum into its next chapter, with a lead gift from Met trustee and longtime Neue supporter Marina Kellen French and additional contributions from trustees including Candace K. Beinecke, Daniel Brodsky, and Blair Effron.
Advertisement
Met director and CEO Max Hollein, a Vienna native who has sat on the Neue’s board for two decades, told the Times the merger fills a longstanding gap in the Met’s holdings, pointing to Vienna around 1900 and Berlin in the 1920s as periods where the encyclopedic museum’s collection has been comparatively thin. He has known Lauder since his own teenage years — Lauder served as U.S. ambassador to Austria in the 1980s and became friendly with Hollein’s parents, the postmodern architect Hans Hollein and fashion designer Helene Hollein.The operational picture beyond the merger is still being worked out, including the role of Renée Price, the Neue’s founding director, who has led the museum since its opening. Price told the Times she envisions the partnership as a collaboration, likening the Neue to chamber music and the Met to a powerful orchestra and choir.
The Neue was already scheduled to close for the summer beginning May 27 for a renovation of its 1914 building, which was designed by Carrère & Hastings and later renovated by architect Annabelle Selldorf. It will reopen in the fall with a 25th anniversary exhibition. Café Sabarsky — whose marble-topped tables were imported from Vienna — will remain intact, in keeping with co-founder Serge Sabarsky’s old maxim that a museum can’t be a good museum without good coffee.
Have a news tip? Send it to us here!
