NEW YORK, NY.- Neue Galerie New York debuts “25th Anniversary Exhibition: Masterworks from the Neue Galerie,” a celebratory installation of Austrian and German fine and decorative arts drawn primarily from the permanent collection. The opening offers visitors access to the galleries for the first time following a successful restoration project on the museum's historic building. On view through January 11, 2027, the “25th Anniversary Exhibition” underscores the museum’s unique mission: to bring a sense of perspective back to Germanic culture of the early twentieth century, and to make the best of this work available to American and other audiences for both scholarly and aesthetic inquiry. Key works from the collection, including Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), as well as selected recent acquisitions, commemorate the occasion. Together, they contribute to the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) that creates the unique jewel-box atmosphere of Neue Galerie New York.

The Neue Galerie is world-renowned for its holdings of early twentieth-century Austrian and German art, displayed on two exhibition floors. Donations from co-founder Ronald S. Lauder, alongside major gifts from the estate of Estée Lauder and from the Serge and Vally Sabarsky Foundation, form the core of the museum’s collection. Other generous donations have been made by the Bloch-Bauer family, the Manley family, Harry C. Sigman, Irving and Jackie Blum, and others over the years. Many of these are highlighted in this presentation.

The Neue Galerie recently announced its forthcoming merger with The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2028. In commenting on the merger, Neue Galerie Co-Founder and President Ronald S. Lauder stated, “For the past twenty-five years, the Neue Galerie has created an experience that transports visitors to another time—early twentieth-century Vienna and Weimar Germany. The merger with The Met will preserve and strengthen the Neue Galerie’s legacy in perpetuity.” Through his generous support of the Neue Galerie, Mr. Lauder has bestowed New York City with a gift that will last for generations.

AUSTRIAN ART

Highlights from the museum’s Austrian collection are being featured in the second floor galleries, including 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 marks the first occasion for the Neue Galerie to feature this important gift since it was announced in July 2026 and represents the first comprehensive 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.

The Neue Galerie is renowned for its significant paintings by Gustav Klimt, including his golden-style Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907). A few preparatory sketches, formerly in the Bloch-Bauer Collection, that relate to this portrait also are on view. Two major figural marble sculptures by George Minne, his iconic Kneeling Youths (ca. 1898), further complement this display in the Klimt Gallery to acknowledge how these pieces were originally presented in the Bloch-Bauer residence in Vienna, where they were shown adjacent to Klimt’s Adele Bloch-Bauer I. A generous gift from the heirs of the Estates of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer, the Neue Galerie honors their generosity by presenting the Minne sculptures in a similar manner. Several landscapes that Klimt painted during the summer months he spent on the Attersee seeking rejuvenation from the hectic pace of life in Vienna, also are shown, including Park at Kammer Castle (1909) and Forester’s House in Weissenbach II (Garden) (1914). Klimt painted landscapes purely for his own pleasure and not on commission, so they represent the artist’s desire to fulfill his personal creative interests.

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) (1917), a bequest given in memory of Otto and Marguerite Manley, is also being 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 are 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.

A selection of nearly a dozen works on paper by Alfred Kubin also are displayed, marking the first time that the artist’s work has been shown in depth in more than five years. Significant among this group is Aladdin (ca. 1902), which was a gift from Kubin to fellow artist Emmy Haesele, whose own work resembles fairy tales, a vital source of inspiration to Kubin himself. But Kubin also plumbed the darker side of human existence as evidenced by the more somber The Hour of Death (1900), The Fate of Mankind III (ca. 1902-03), and The Plague (ca. 1903-04)—each searing evocations of the ultimate destiny that awaits us all.

GERMAN ART

Simultaneous with the modern artistic impulses in Austria, avant-garde movements sprang up in Germany, such as the Brücke (Bridge) in Dresden and the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) in Munich. Each group realized groundbreaking results with their radical employment of color and form. Highlights from the Neue Galerie’s German collection are presented in the third floor galleries. Prominent works by the Brücke artists are on view, including Erich Heckel’s Bathers in a Pond (1908), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s The Russian Dancer Mela (1911), and shown alongside Hermann Max Pechstein’s Evening in the Dune (1911), which is being exhibited at the Neue Galerie for the first time. Both the aforementioned Heckel painting and the Pechstein scene represent impulses similar to Klimt in the effort to seek respite in nature from the stresses of life in the big city. By contrast, Kirchner’s portrait of a dancer confirms the allure of evening entertainment, especially in Berlin’s louche nightclubs and dancehalls.

The Neue Galerie welcomes back to the galleries Paula Modersohn-Becker’s Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand (1907), which is co-owned with the Museum of Modern Art. This marks the first time that it has been on view at Neue Galerie since it was a special highlight of the 2024 monographic show on the artist co-organized with the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition, Gabriele Münter’s Woman in Garden (1912), which had been lent to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for their 2025-26 retrospective on the artist, returns to the Neue Galerie where it is being shown alongside other canvases by Münter and her companion at the time, Vasily Kandinsky.

Max Beckmann’s Self-Portrait in front of Red Curtain (1923) represents a major new addition to the museum’s collection and is a powerfully emblematic representation of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement. This work was created just two years before Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub’s exhibition and publication on the Neue Sachlichkeit, which gave rise to the nomenclature used to describe the post-war approach toward favoring greater representation and even a stark and hyper-realism, often rendered with almost photographic precision. Beckmann places himself on a stage, dressed in evening attire, but with his face heavily covered with maquillage, as if he were a performer himself. This work has been on regular display at the Neue Galerie since the museum opened in 2001, and this is the proper occasion to celebrate its new status as a permanent part of the Neue Galerie’s collection.

The diversity of the artwork associated with the Bauhaus is vividly illustrated in the canvases of Lyonel Feininger, including The Blue Cloud (1925) and Oskar Schlemmer’s Five Nudes (1929). The highlight of the Bauhaus presentation is the installation of more than a dozen works by Paul Klee, including his Mystical-Ceramic (in the Manner of a Still-Life) (1925); two walls are devoted to showing these sublime creations. In the decorative arts, iconic designs by various artists, such as Theodor Bogler, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Wilhelm Wagenfeld, confirm the prestigious legacy of the school, its faculty, and its students, and its lingering impact on the field of design today with its emphasis on beautiful and functional objects for everyday use.