“Austrian Masterworks from the Neue Galerie” features highlights from the museum’s extensive collection of Austrian art from the period 1890 to 1940. Neue Galerie New York is the result of the close thirty-year friendship shared between art dealer and museum exhibition organizer Serge Sabarsky and Ronald S. Lauder, the museum’s co-founder and President. They spent countless hours together discussing Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka. In the decade before Sabarsky died, they dreamed of creating a museum of Austrian and German art, and the Neue Galerie New York is the outcome of this shared passion.

Lauder’s purchase at age thirteen of a drawing by Schiele presaged what would become a lifelong fascination with Austrian Expressionist art, which represents the core of this museum’s collection. His interest led to the 2006 acquisition of Klimt’s 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I for the museum. This towering work carries with it the tortured history of Europe in the twentieth century. After decades of legal wrangling, it was finally restituted to its rightful heirs, and the golden portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer now resides as the crown jewel of the Neue Galerie collection.