Merger Brings Met $1.5B in New Art

New York's biggest art museum is about to get a very gilded annex. The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Thursday announced it will take over the Neue Galerie—the Ronald Lauder–founded museum devoted to German and Austrian modernism—starting in 2028, in a merger that hands the Met an art collection that people familiar with the deal tell the Wall Street Journal is valued at more than $1.5 billion. The Upper East Side townhouse across Fifth Avenue will be rebranded the Met Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie but more simply called the Met Neue Galerie, with the Met owning and operating the 25-year-old institution while keeping its look and feel intact.

The Neue's 600-piece collection, anchored by Gustav Klimt's 1907 "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I," will largely remain in place. Indeed, "'Adele Bloch-Bauer' stays where it is," Lauder tells the New York Times. "It is our Mona Lisa." Met director Max Hollein, who has long served as a Neue trustee, said the gift fills a major gap in the Met's holdings of early-20th-century Central European art. Artnet calls the Neue Galerie's collection of 20th-century German and Austrian art "perhaps the most renowned [one] to exist outside of Europe." The museums did not disclose financial terms, but an endowment drive for the Met Neue Galerie is already more than 80% funded; the Journal reports a typical endowment target would be around $200 million.

The paper notes this will not be the Met's first satellite location: "In the 1930s and 1940s, it began to oversee and ultimately own the Rockefeller family's medieval collection housed in what is now the Met Cloisters," and Lauder says he hopes his museum will maintain the same distinctive identity. "Somehow I don't think I'm going to live to 120," Lauder, 82, tells the Times. "I want to make sure that after I'm no longer there—whatever happens—the Neue Galerie will stay the Neue Galerie."