On your right, look for a pale limestone mansion with a steep slate mansard roof and ornate ironwork at the entrance, a Fifth Avenue townhouse dressed with unmistakably European manners.
This is the Neue Galerie, but the building started life in nineteen fourteen as the William Starr Miller House, a grand Louis the Thirteenth and Beaux-Arts mansion. In plain English: French-inspired aristocratic flair, polished for New York money. What makes it interesting is not just taste, but translation. A very New York mansion now carries the art of Vienna and Berlin... and a good deal of exile, memory, and stubborn affection.
The museum grew out of a friendship between Serge Sabarsky and Ronald Lauder. Sabarsky was born in Vienna, fled Europe, and at one point even worked in a circus troupe before becoming one of New York’s great dealers in Austrian and German Expressionism. Expressionism, if that term feels slippery, means art that bends color, line, and form to show emotion rather than calm reality. Lauder met him in nineteen sixty-seven and kept returning to his Madison Avenue gallery, treating it as his real education.
Most people looking at this polished institution do not realize how personal it began. Lauder started collecting Austrian Expressionist art with his bar mitzvah money in nineteen fifty-seven, buying an Egon Schiele drawing. That small, almost private beginning eventually helped create this museum. Not bad for a teenage purchase.
When Sabarsky died in nineteen ninety-six, he never saw the museum they had imagined together. Lauder carried on anyway, opening the Neue Galerie in two thousand one as a tribute to his friend. He kept the whole project unusually secret during the build-out, which is either elegant efficiency or collector-level control, depending on how charitable you feel.
Inside, the second floor leans Austrian: Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, and decorative arts from the Wiener Werkstätte, a Vienna design workshop that tried to make everyday objects as refined as fine art. The third floor turns German, with Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Kirchner, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and movements like Der Blaue Reiter and the Bauhaus. One of the museum’s magnetic centers is Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer the First, bought in two thousand six after its restitution from Maria Altmann. It had been looted by the Nazis, and its reported price of one hundred thirty-five million dollars made headlines; its moral weight mattered more.
There is one more lovely layer here: before the museum moved in, later occupants had covered much of the old oak paneling instead of tearing it out, so the restoration could uncover pieces of the house that might have vanished. Preservation by accident... New York specializes in that.
From here, we head toward a very different answer to Fifth Avenue grandeur: the Guggenheim, a museum that once looked so strange on this avenue it practically picked a fight with the block. The Neue Galerie is generally open Wednesday through Monday from ten to six, closed Tuesday, and yes, it sits firmly in the expensive camp.
