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.
Max Hollein, the Met’s director, told the Times that his museum’s collection does not have deep holdings of Austrian and German modernism from the turn of the 20th century, and the merger was one way to help change that.
“This is an area where the Met’s collection is not very strong,” he 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.”
Lauder, whose brother the late Leonard A. Lauder has an entire modern art research center named after him at the Met, has previously patronized this institution, having provided 91 objects to the museum’s vaunted arms and armor department in 2020. He is also one of the world’s most prodigious collector, appearing on each edition of ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list since 1998. In the past few years, he has made headlines for appearing in the Jeffrey Epstein files and for his support of Israel, which led pro-Palestine protestors to demonstrate at the Museum of Modern Art board, where he is honorary chairman.
The Neue Galerie merger comes as the Met continues its years-long effort to build a new wing for modern and contemporary art. Long in the works, the plan is set to finally come to fruition in 2030 with the creation of a fresh set of galleries designed by architect Frida Escobedo. Created at a cost of $550 million, the new wing will span a massive 126,000 square feet.
The Met currently operates one other annex, the Cloisters, a space Medieval art located in Fort Tryon Park. During the 2010s, it briefly operated another, known as the Met Breuer, in the former home of the Whitney Museum. (The building is now the headquarters of Sotheby’s.)
