New York\u2019s museum world just pulled off the cultural equivalent of a luxury-brand acquisition\u2014with Klimts, espresso and one wildly expensive golden portrait included.<\/p>\n
In a surprise announcement this week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/a> revealed that it will officially merge with the nearby Neue Galerie New York<\/a> in 2028, creating what may become one of the most important collections of early 20th-century Austrian and German art anywhere in the world.\u00a0But despite the word \u201cmerge,\u201d this is not a situation where the Neue suddenly disappears into the Met like a beloved indie coffee shop swallowed by Blank Street<\/a>. In fact, for regular museum-goers, the experience may feel surprisingly seamless.<\/p>\n The biggest thing to understand is this: the Neue Galerie is staying put. The six-story Beaux-Arts mansion on Fifth Avenue will remain open as its own dedicated museum space, complete with its galleries, staff, design shop and the deeply beloved Caf\u00e9 Sabarsky.\u00a0It will simply become part of the Met\u2019s institutional universe\u2014similar to how The Met Cloisters<\/a> operates today\u2014and the new name will be the Met Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie.<\/p>\n So why does this matter? Mostly because the Met has historically been surprisingly thin in this exact area of art history. While the museum is encyclopedic in scale, its holdings in Vienna 1900 and German modernism have never been nearly as dominant as its collections in, say, French Impressionism or ancient art. The Neue changes that overnight.<\/p>\n The merger brings more than 600 works into the Met ecosystem, including major pieces by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and others. The crown jewel is Klimt\u2019s \u201cPortrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,\u201d better known as the shimmering \u201cWoman in Gold,\u201d which Ronald Lauder famously purchased in 2006 for $135 million after the painting was restituted following Nazi looting during World War II.<\/p>\n