Neue Galerie – New York, United States

Neue Galerie hosts the cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder’s collection of early 20th century German and Austrian art and design. It is hosted in the magnificent former mansion of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbuilt and includes a superb Viennese café where you can have real Austrian/German lunches and brunches.

Outside: The museum is hosted in the former Vanderbuilt mansion, one step away from Central Park on Fifth Avenue and 86th Street, in the area known as Museum Mile. The building was completed in 1914 by Carrère & Hastings, also architects of the New York Public Library. It is a New York Landmark and is one of the most distinguished buildings on Fifth Avenue. Architect Annabelle Selldorf restored the house to its original state, while adapting it to museum standards.

Inside: The collection is on two floors. The second-floor galleries are dedicated to art from Vienna circa 1900, including arts of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Richard Gerstl, and Alfred Kubin, and decorative arts and furniture created at the Wiener Werkstätte and by celebrated architects Adolf Loos, Joseph Urban, and Otto Wagner.
The third-floor galleries feature German art representing various movements of the early 20th century: the Blaue Reiter and its circle (Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Gabriele Münter); the Brücke; the Bauhaus; the Neue Sachlichkeit.
The highlight of the collection is Klimt’s portrait “Adele Bloch-Bauer I”. Commissioned by a wealthy Jewish industrialist, it was seized by the Nazis in 1938 and only restituted to the industrialist’s niece in 2006 after a battle with the Austrian government. Within months of its return, Lauder snapped the picture up for the then-record sum of $135m. Now the shimmering gold portrait is framed by two George Minne sculptures, as it once was in the Bloch-Bauer household. The wall on which it hangs, protected by a glass case, is covered with plaster made to the same formula used in Vienna at the time. In the same room, you can also admire one of my favorite Klimt “The Dancer.”

Art is not the only attraction at the Neue Galerie. The Café Sabarsky is the reproduction of a Viennese café from the décor to the menu. With its period objects, including lighting fixtures by Josef Hoffmann, chairs by Adolf Loos (see the originals upstairs), German-language newspapers hanging from the wood-paneled walls, and banquettes that are upholstered with a 1912 Otto Wagner fabric, this is a piece of Vienna in New York. A grand piano graces one corner of the Café. For a real lunch à la Viennese, you should have the Palatschinken (smoked trout crêpes) and a Weisswurst, the Bavarian sausage with potato salad. And of course your dessert should be a slice of Sacher Torte, an Apfelstrudel, or the Milchrahmstrudel, the white cheese and raisin strudel.
Given the erotic subject matter on display, children are not allowed to visit the Neue Gallerie. After all, this is still America! (Last visited 05/2007)