Hollein and Ronald Lauder have been in conversation about joining the two museums for a year, and the Neue Galerie’s 25th anniversary—coming up this autumn—seemed like the perfect occasion for it. “For me, it’s personal,” says Hollein, who was born in Vienna and has been a Neue Galerie trustee for the last 20 years. “Its more than 600 objects, including masterpieces by Max Beckmann and Egon Schiele, adds great strength to the Met’s holdings. A visit to the Neue Galerie, like a visit to the Cloisters, is an entirely immersive experience—a gesamtkunstwerk.” Indeed, the merger—to be formalized in 2028—will also expand the Met’s campus to include the Neue Galerie’s landmarked Beaux-Arts mansion on East 86th Street; and Lauder’s gift will include 13 additional works from his and Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer’s personal collections.
“It’s a wonderful project that’s very dear to him,” says Lauder Zinterhofer, the founder and creative director of Aerin, style and design director of Estée Lauder Re-Nutriv, and a recent Met trustee, of her father and the merger. “He really loves all different areas of art—arms and armor, Austrian and German, contemporary, old masters—so the Met is a wonderful partner in this project for him. And the idea of keeping this as a free-standing museum is something special for the Met.” Lauder has also enjoyed a long-standing relationship with Hollein. “My father has known Max for many many years—he was friends with Max’s father,” Lauder Zinterhofer says. “So there’s a wonderful connection there.”
Lauder Zinterhofer has memories of sitting with her father and his mentor, the art dealer Serge Sabarsky, in Sabarsky’s gallery on Madison Avenue when the Neue Galerie was still only an idea. “When I was little, my father used to walk me to Serge’s gallery. He would say to my mother, ‘I’m going to take Aerin to the park,’ and we would go to the park and then end up at Serge’s for hours and hours. I would color while they were discussing their dream of having a museum of Austrian and German art,” she says. When Lauder finally opened the museum in 2001, two months after the September 11 attacks, “it was a gift to New York—this jewel box.” All these years later, she says that he goes to the museum’s Viennese-style restaurant, Café Sabarsky, every Sunday for dinner.
Photo: Annie Schlechter
