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.
