Description of the attraction
The New Gallery is a museum of German and Austrian art, founded as recently as 2001, and located within the famous "Museum Mile" on Fifth Avenue.
The emergence of the gallery logically crowns the 400-year history of the German diaspora in the United States. In the middle of the 19th century in Manhattan, for example, there was an ethnic enclave called "Kleinduchland" ("Little Germany"). The two world wars led to the accelerated assimilation of Germans into the English-speaking environment, but cultural traditions continued to live on.
At the end of the sixties of the last century, two passionate admirers of German and Austrian art met in New York: the artist, gallery owner Serge Sabarski and businessman and philanthropist Ronald Stephen Lauder. Born in Vienna, Sabarski fled the Nazi regime in 1938. Coming from the richest family that owned the company "Este Lauder", Ronald Lauder has amassed a magnificent collection of works of art. The men became friends and gradually came up with the idea of creating a museum of German and Austrian art in the United States.
Sabarski did not live to see the implementation of this plan (he died in 1996). However, Lauder founded the museum as a tribute to the memory of his departed friend, housed in a Beaux Arts mansion on Fifth Avenue, almost opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The six-story building was built in 1914 by industrialist William Starr Miller. Lauder bought it for the New Gallery in 1994, while Sabarski was still alive. The mansion was reconstructed to house a museum by the German-born architect Annabel Zeldorf.
The collection is divided into two main sections. The entire second floor is devoted to works of fine and decorative and applied art of Austria (from the beginning of the 20th century, when Vienna turned into one of the world capitals of artistic culture). The center of the exhibition here is the work of the Austrian avant-garde artist Gustav Klimt, whose "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" Lauder bought for the gallery in 2006 at a record price of 135 million dollars. The portrait belongs to the "golden period" of Klimt and was created with the use of gold leaf - it resembles the shining Byzantine mosaics. The purchase was preceded by a long litigation between the heirs of the owner of the portrait with Austria: the Nazis at one time confiscated Klimt's paintings, and the country's government believed that the paintings should remain in Austria. However, the courts restored the rights of the heirs.
In the same section, the works of the artist, poet and playwright Oskar Kokoschka and expressionist Egon Schiele are widely presented.
The third floor of the museum is dedicated to German art. Here are exhibited works by artists from the Munich group "Blue Horseman", to which the Russian emigrant Wassily Kandinsky belonged. Nearby - the creations of the artists of the Dresden group "Most", the designers of the school "Bauhaus". Works by Kandinsky, Paul Klee, August Macke, Franz Marc, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Lionel Feininger are exhibited here.
