New York City: Neue Galerie (December 2017)

Neue Galerie New York - Klimt Paintings Are Stunning
My spouse and I visited the Neue Galerie on a Saturday afternoon in early December 2017. The museum is open from 11:00 am until 6:00 pm on Thursdays through Mondays (closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays). Admission costs $20 per adult (with discounts for seniors and students), and you can pay by credit card. On select Fridays between 6:00 pm and 8:00 pm, admission is free. Complimentary audio guides are available, as are group tours on most days at 3:30 pm.
The Neue Galerie occupies the William Starr Miller House at Fifth Avenue and 86th Street on the Upper East Side. The museum occupies a six-story Louis XIII/Beaux-Arts townhouse completed in 1914 to house the industrialist’s family, but after their deaths, it was occupied by a Vanderbilt relative and later, the site of a Jewish institute. The collection is organized on the upper two floors of the museum, reachable by either a central grand spiral staircase beneath an atrium roof, a decorative side staircase, or by modern elevator. The museum also contains an excellent bookstore, design shop, and two Viennese cafes. (Cafe Sabarsky is located on the street level, and Cafe Fledermaus is located a level below. Restaurateur Kurt Gutenbrunner operates both restaurants, in addition to others in the city including Wallse, Blaue Gans, and the Upholstery Store.) The ground floor offers a coat/bag check, with restrooms on the basement level. You must pass through a metal detector/security check in order to enter the building.
The Neue Galerie focuses on early twentieth-century German and Austrian art and design. It was opened in 2001 by art dealer and museum exhibition organizer Serge Sabarsky, and cosmetics entrepreneur, philanthropist, and art collector Ronald Lauder. The top (third) floor of the museum features rotating exhibits of German works from art movements such as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), Die Brucke (The Bridge), the Staatliches (State) Bauhaus, the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), and applied arts from the German Werkbund (Craftsmen). The second floor contains decorative arts and fine arts from the Wiener Werkstaette (Vienna Workshop), as well as the most important area, a room that features several paintings by Gustav Klimt. The most famous painting in this room is the stunning “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer”, which Lauder acquired from Maria Altmann in 2006 for a reported $135 million dollars, the most expensive painting ever sold! (Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds star in the 2015 movie “The Woman In Gold”, which chronicles Altmann’s life and her quest to regain her family’s painting of her aunt, which was located hanging in Vienna’s Belvedere after it was repatriated from the Nazis who had looted it from the family during the second World War.) Another large portrait of Adele hangs in this room, along with a painting of a semi-nude dancer that echoes its colors and style. Several Klimt landscapes are also displayed.
We enjoyed seeing the Klimt paintings in the main gallery, but the rest of the small museum showcased artists and art movements with which we were unfamiliar. Because we spent only one hour at this museum, we felt that the admission price was a bit high; however, we were willing to pay it to see the Klimt paintings that we had heard so much about.













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