Neue Galerie to merge with the Met in 2028 as Lauder family donates major works
The Neue Galerie, the Manhattan museum founded by philanthropist Ronald S. Lauder in 2001, will merge with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2028, bringing one of New York’s most distinctive collections of Austrian and German Modernism into the Met’s orbit. The institution, housed in the Beaux-Arts William Starr Miller House at Fifth Avenue and 86th Street, will close on 27 May for major renovations and reopen in the autumn, in time for its 25th anniversary in November.
Under the agreement, Lauder and his daughter, Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer, will donate 13 works of German and Austrian Modern art from their personal collections. The gift includes works by Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad and Gustav Klimt, deepening a collection already known for its concentration of fin de siècle and early 20th-century art.
The building itself will be renamed the Met Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie, while continuing to house the museum’s collection, programming and Café Sabarsky, the Viennese-style restaurant named for Serge Sebarsky, the dealer with whom Lauder first conceived the museum. In a letter announcing the merger, Lauder said the partnership would “preserve and strengthen the Neue Galerie’s legacy in perpetuity,” and praised Met director and chief executive Max Hollein for his “deep understanding of the historical importance of this collection.”
Hollein, in turn, called Lauder “a collector like none other” and noted that his passion for Austrian and German art has long shaped the museum. The merger will significantly expand the Met’s holdings in this area, adding works by Klimt, Egon Schiele, Gabriele Münter, Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann, Josef Hoffmann and others to the permanent collection. Among the best-known works associated with the Neue Galerie is Klimt’s 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I.
Lauder’s relationship with the Met is not new. In 2020, he made a promised gift of 91 pieces of European arms and armour, a donation that led to the naming of the Ronald S. Lauder Galleries of Arms and Armor. The new merger extends that history, while giving the Met a more defined foothold in one of the most exacting chapters of modern European art.
