Met to Merge With Neue Galerie in 2028, Expanding Its Modern Art Reach
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is preparing for a significant addition to its modern art program: the Neue Galerie, the Upper East Side museum founded by collector Ronald S. Lauder, will merge with the Met in 2028. After the transition, the institution will be renamed the Met Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie, or the Met Neue.
The arrangement gives the Met a deeper foothold in German and Austrian modernism, a field in which its holdings have long been comparatively thin. Max Hollein, the museum’s director, said the merger is intended to strengthen an area that includes Vienna 1900 and Berlin in the 1920s, which he described as central to the development of the avant-garde.
To support the annex, the Met will need to raise $200 million for an endowment. Lauder and his daughter, Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer, are expected to contribute funds as well as 13 works from their collection. Those works reportedly include a prized Klimt, along with paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz.
Not everything will move uptown. Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), which Lauder purchased for $135 million, will remain at the Neue Galerie townhouse at Fifth Avenue and 86th Street. Lauder has called the painting “our Mona Lisa,” underscoring its status as the centerpiece of the museum’s holdings.
The merger also arrives as the Met advances another major expansion: a new modern and contemporary art wing planned for 2030 and designed by Frida Escobedo. The project is expected to cost $550 million and will add 126,000 square feet of gallery space.
The Met already operates the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park and briefly ran the Met Breuer during the 2010s. The Neue Galerie deal suggests that the museum’s next phase of growth will not only be architectural, but curatorial — a bid to broaden the story it can tell about 20th-century art.
