New York’s the Neue Galerie has announced it will merge with The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2028. The institution will be renamed to the Met Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie, known as the Met Neue Galerie. The merger, announced Thursday, was arranged to ensure that the museum and its collection remain intact when its founder, cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, will no longer be around.
“This represents an enormous opportunity,” said the Met’s director Max Hollein, who has also served on the board of the Neue for 20 years, in an interview with the New York Times. “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.”
The Neue Galerie was established in 2001 and is devoted to early 20th-century Austrian and German art and design. The collection is made up of works belonging to Lauder, the estate of Serge Sabarsky, and the museum itself. Highlights include Gustav Klimt’s masterpiece Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1903–07), otherwise known as the Woman in Gold; as well Egon Schiele’s Town among the Greenery (1917); and Max Beckmann’s Self-Portrait with Horn (1938). Works by Oskar Kokoschka, Josef Hoffmann, and Otto Wagner are also included, as are many figures associated with the Bauhaus including László Moholy-Nagy, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Oskar Schlemmer.
An endowment, estimated around $200 million, has been established to preserve and care for the Neue Galerie by Lauder and his daughter, Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer. They have also donated 13 paintings from their personal collection to the combined museums, including Die Tänzerin (The Dancer) (1016–18) by Gustav Klimt, Die Russiche Tänzerin Mela (The Russian Dancer Mela) (1911) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Galleria Umberto (1925) by Max Beckmann.
Stipulations surrounding the merger indicate that while the Met may borrow artworks from the Neue to display in their flagship Fifth Avenue location, Klimt’s Woman in Gold must remain where it is. Lauder refers to the piece as his museum’s Mona Lisa.
The Neue will close on May 27th as planned to undergo infrastructure renovations, and will reopen this fall with an exhibition celebrating its 25th anniversary.
