Austrian Masterworks from the Neue Galerie

“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 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.

This presentation of “Austrian Masterworks from the Neue Galerie” features Carl Moll’s 1905 White Interior, which will be the first painting visitors encounter once they sweep up the Neue Galerie’s grand stairs into the galleries. White Interior is a remarkable painting that vividly evokes the world of Vienna 1900. It encapsulates various aspects of that era, including the fascination with the arts of Japan and a desire to unite art and life in a cohesive whole. The work even encompasses fashion as the woman portrayed, Berta Zuckerkandl (née Szeps), poses in an artistic reform dress. It is an early depiction of a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total-work-of-art, environment in the style of Josef Hoffmann.

The presentation also includes a spotlight on the major gift from the collection of the late Leonard A. Lauder of more than 1,000 postcards produced by the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshops) during the period 1907-20. This presentation of Wiener Werkstätte postcards represents the first fulsome presentation of these miniature masterpieces since 2010 when Neue Galerie New York published a catalogue raisonné on the postcards in conjunction with a major exhibition.

Major canvases by Egon Schiele augment the Austrian permanent collection, including Stein on the Danube, Seen from the South (Large) (1913), a gift from the estate of Estée Lauder, and Town among Greenery (The Old City III) (1914), a bequest given in memory of Otto and Marguerite Manley, will also be featured. The latter was among Schiele’s last major canvases before his death in October 1918 and is one of his few landscapes to feature figures as part of the composition. These will be shown alongside Schiele’s Man and Woman I (Lovers I) (1914), which incorporates a self-portrait and a depiction of his girlfriend at the time, Wally Neuzil. The couple is dramatically positioned against a melancholic autumnal landscape setting and represents an appropriately poignant double-portrait given that Schiele married the following year, but asked his neighbor Edith Harms to become his wife and not Wally as the former came from a more bourgeois family.

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Related Publication
Providing an exclusive glimpse into the renowned museum co-founded by one of the world’s finest private art collectors, Ronald S. Lauder, this richly illustrated pocket-sized guide offers readers a chance to explore the Neue Galerie’s illustrious collection and its milieu.

Purchase the Exhibition Catalogue
Published on the twentieth anniversary of the founding of Neue Galerie New York, this stunning volume celebrates the varied achievements of modern art history in the German-speaking world by examining historical developments in Austria and Germany from 1890 to 1940.

Download the Audio Guide
Hear curatorial insights on key works in the exhibition.