The story
On Fifth Avenue, in a Beaux-Arts mansion built for a Vanderbilt heiress, the Neue Galerie shows only German and Austrian art from around 1900. It opened in 2001, the project of the cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder and the art dealer Serge Sabarsky, who wanted a small, concentrated museum on the model of a European Kunsthaus.
Its most famous resident arrived in 2006. Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, the shimmering gold picture of a Viennese hostess, had been seized by the Nazis from her family and hung for decades in Vienna. After a long legal fight the heirs recovered it, and Lauder bought it for the gallery, reportedly for around 135 million dollars.
Beyond the Klimt hang Schiele, Kokoschka and the designers of the Wiener Werkstätte, and on the ground floor the Café Sabarsky serves Viennese pastry under the same roof, a deliberate piece of old Vienna dropped into Manhattan.
