Neue Galerie Turns 25 and Reopens Every Gallery Ahead of Its Planned Merger With The Met
Every gallery at Neue Galerie New York is open again from Thursday, November 12, 2026, the first access visitors have had since a restoration of the museum's historic building, and the whole building holds one show: "25th Anniversary Exhibition: Masterworks from the Neue Galerie," Austrian and German fine and decorative arts drawn mainly from the permanent collection, through January 11, 2027.
Renée Price, the museum's founding director, and Janis Staggs, Director of Curatorial, curated it. The show comes ahead of a planned 2028 merger with The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Austrian collection
The second floor holds the Austrian collection. In the Klimt Gallery, Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), popularly known as the Woman in Gold, shares the room with George Minne's two marble Kneeling Youths (ca. 1898), placed to recall the Bloch-Bauer residence in Vienna, where they stood beside the portrait. The museum acquired the portrait in 2006, and the Minne sculptures were a gift from the heirs of the Estates of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer. A few preparatory sketches for the portrait, formerly in the Bloch-Bauer Collection, are also on view.
Egon Schiele's Town among Greenery (The Old City III) (1917) was one of his last major canvases and is one of his few landscapes with figures.
The Wiener Werkstätte
Among the decorative arts is a 1912 tobacco case acquired by Otto Primavesi, designed by Josef Hoffmann and made by the Wiener Werkstätte in gold set with amber, coral, lapis lazuli, opal, turquoise and five other materials. It is lent from a private collection.
The show also includes a selection from a gift of more than 1,000 Wiener Werkstätte postcards made between 1907 and 1920, from the collection of the late Leonard A. Lauder, the museum's first substantial presentation of the postcards since 2010. "The postcards are a vital example of the innovative, graphic, modern style of the Wiener Werkstätte and include artists that are well known and obscure," Price said when the gift was announced in July.
German art and the Bauhaus
The third floor is given to German art, including Max Beckmann's Self-Portrait in front of Red Curtain (1923), on regular display since the museum opened in 2001 and now part of the permanent collection, and a Bauhaus wall of more than a dozen works by Paul Klee.
The house and the merger
Carrère & Hastings, also architects of the New York Public Library, completed the building in 1914 for the industrialist William Starr Miller. Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky bought it in 1994, and Annabelle Selldorf restored it before the museum opened in 2001.
Under the merger, announced on May 14, 2026 and pending approvals, the collection and the William Starr Miller House are to pass to The Met in 2028, and the museum is to be renamed The Met Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie, joining The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters.
Visiting
Admission is free on Monday, November 16, the 25th anniversary of the museum's opening, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., first come, first served. From November 12 the museum at 1048 Fifth Avenue is open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day except Tuesday, and admission is $28 ($18 for seniors 65 and over, $15 for students, educators and visitors with disabilities), with no children under 12 admitted.
