Neue Galerie

Upper East Side
Museum Mile
Manhattan

When people think of New York City museums they think of the Met, MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, perhaps even the Museum of Natural History, the New Museum, or the Frick. Few people think of the Neue; even fewer know how to pronounce it.

 

It’s easy to overlook or decide to pass over the Neue Galerie. Housed in a townhouse, it’s a fraction of the size of the big Manhattan museums yet costs the same for admission. I urge locals to check this place out. Because of its small size, the curators at the Neue understand something that is all too often forgotten by big museums: how to edit an exhibition. You’ll never encounter filler images or visual fatigue at the Neue; every single piece is drop-dead gorgeous. Bonus for people who don’t like going to the Met because it’s filled with screaming running unsupervised children: no one under the age of 12 is allowed in the Neue (for the best as some exhibitions would cause permanent scarring) and teens need adult supervision at all times.

The Neue was the brainchild of art dealer Serge Sarbarsky and art collector Ronald S. Lauder who shared a passion for early twentieth-century German and Austrian art and design. The building housing the museum had been built in 1914 by the same architects who designed the New York Public Library. It was once owned by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III and was purchased by Lauder and Sarbarsky in 1994. Sarbarsky died in 1996, but Lauder continued the project as a tribute to his friend.

While the building is four stories, the galleries occupy only the second and third floors. The basement level, however, is like a bonus gallery—it houses a permanent display of Vienna Secessionist exhibition posters and wallpaper design. The ground floor holds a German-style café and the most expensive gift shop I’ve ever seen. The permanent exhibition is found in two rooms on the second floor. One room is filled with cases of exquisite industrial design from the Bauhaus, Werkbund, and Vienna Workshops. For only several thousand dollars visitors can purchase reproductions in the gift shop. 

The other room displays the Neue’s main attraction: four large paintings by Gustav Klimt, including a 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, which, when purchased by the museum in 2006 was the most expensive painting to have ever sold at auction. Pollock, Cézanne, and de Kooning have since broken Klimt’s record, but it was still a pretty big deal at the time. Along with costing $135 million, the painting also has a turbulent history. It was confiscated by the Nazis when they took over Austria, and when it was returned to the family’s estate was part of a protracted court battle over whether the painting could leave the country.

The third room on the second floor houses rotating exhibitions, mostly works on paper, of various Austrian artists associated with Vienna circa 1900, the best known being Egon Shiele and Oskar Kokoschka. The third floor galleries focus on German art from the early 20^th-century, notably artists associated with the Blaue Reiter, the Brücke, and the Neue Sachlichkeit. The works on this floor rotate regularly, but one small, dimly lit room is often dedicated to fragile early photographs.

In the summer of 2012 the third floor galleries focused on Dresden photographer Heinrich Keuhn, one of the first photographers to experiment with early autochrome images—decades before the color photography technology became readily available. He was associated with Alfred Stieglitz and was influenced by the pictorialist movement. The surfaces of his gum bichromate images were so velvety soft and luscious they literally made me cry. Literally. Despite regularly having work reproduced in Stieglitz’s Camera Work, and having well-known early color photographic images often included in art textbooks, Keuhn’s name and larger oeuvre is relatively unknown outside of Germany and Austria. This is a tragedy! It’s also a tragedy that these images aren’t still on display, but you can find some of the images on the Neue Galerie’s website.

Right now there is an exhibition of Ferdinand Hodler, a major Swiss artist who was admired by the Vienna Secessionists. Sadly, the curators have chosen to remove the second floor industrial design cases, but rest assured, they’ll return in January when the Hodler show closes. View to Infinity is considered to be Hodler’s masterpiece, and the exhibition takes this piece as its title, but the real stars are his portraits and landscapes. While his technique can be painterly at times, it never crosses into Impressionism, and his landscapes are pure celebrations of color. Several paintings are not under glass, which allows viewers to really see the works—and not their reflections looking back at them. 

The only thing that struck me as a bit lacking was the smaller second floor room. It is completely overhung with dozens of photographs of Hodler taken by photographer Gertrud Dübi-Müller. I’m all for some images of the artist at work, but Dübi-Müller took over 400 photographs of Hodler and the Neue seemed intent in cramming as many of them as possible salon style in one room. The Neue makes up for this on the third floor with a room dedicated to Hodler’s emotional, almost merciless drawings of his lover, Valentine Godé-Darel, on her deathbed as she slowly died from cancer shortly after the birth of their child. The theme of capturing the death of loved ones became popular among gay artists at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, but there was no such precedent in 1914 and Hodler was exploring uncharted, heartbreaking territory. 

This is the largest American exhibition ever devoted to Hodler, which is something the Neue is known for doing—staging exhibitions by underappreciated artists you won’t see in other museums. Museums need to make money and the best way to bring in visitor dollars is by having yet another exhibition of works by Andy Warhol or the Impressionists or Salvador Dalí. The Neue has enough funding thanks to the Estée Lauder fortune Ronald S. Lauder inherited from his mother to put forth shows of lesser-known artists.

If $20 seems like a lot for such a small museum (no, it’s not suggested donation) and you didn’t finish school recently enough to use your old ID (yeah, I still do that), you can get in free on the first Friday of the month from 6pm to 8pm. This might be a good first-time visit option. Because the Galerie is so small, I often leave the museum feeling like I barely spent any time there at all and know I wouldn’t want to pay full price for such a short visit. Also, when the Neue is between exhibitions and only the two rooms with the permanent exhibition are open, the museum is pay-what-you-like.

Despite it’s small size and fairly steep price, you won’t regret visiting the Neue. It may even become your new favorite.  

www.neuegalerie.org