New York’s Neue Gallery to Merge with Metropolitan Museum of Art
13May 15, 2026
The Ronald Lauder–ownedNeue Galerie, the private New York museum known for its deep collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and Austrian art, isset to mergewith New York’sMetropolitan Museum of Artin 2028. TheNeue Galerie, which occupies a Fifth Avenue town house several blocks north of the Met will thereafter be known as the Met Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie, or the Met Neue Galerie for short.
Met director Max Hollein told theNew York Timesthat the merger would significantly expand the Met’s holdings of German and Austrian modernist art. “This is an area where the Met’s collection is not very strong,” he said. “If you look at Vienna 1900, Berlin 1920s—this was really the epicenter of the development of the avant-garde and it’s important to have a broad and deep collection there.”
Following the merger, works from the Neue may go on view at the Met, though the Neue’s gold-flecked Gustav Klimt painting Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, will remain in the town house. “It is our Mona Lisa,” Lauder told the Times.
Lauder, who is heir to the Estée Lauder Companies, and his daughter, Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer, plan to make a major gift that will fund a $200 million endowment assuring the long-term care of the Neue Galerie and the preservation of its works. The pair have additional plans to donate thirteen Austrian and German works from their own collection to the merged entities, among them those by Klimt, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Franz Marc.
“Somehow I don’t think I’m going to live to 120,” said the eighty-two-year-old Lauder told the Times. “I want to make sure that after I’m no longer there—whatever happens—the Neue Galerie will stay the Neue Galerie.”