A Face-Lift on Fifth (original) (raw)

When Ronald Lauder, the cosmetics heir, ran for mayor, in the nineteen-eighties, he wanted all the publicity he could get. When he decided, in the early nineteen-nineties, to establish a new museum on Fifth Avenue, he went in the opposite direction and kept the idea almost completely under wraps for years. In 1994, along with his old friend the art dealer and collector Serge Sabarsky, Lauder purchased one of the Avenue's greatest mansions—the former William Starr Miller residence, designed by Carrère & Hastings, at the corner of Eighty-sixth Street—to house both his and Sabarsky's collections of German and Austrian modern art and design. Sabarsky died in 1996, before the project had got very far, and Lauder took it over. He named the museum the Neue Galerie New York, hired Renée Price, the director of Sabarsky's gallery, to run it, and put the architect Annabelle Selldorf in charge of renovations. Then Lauder didn't say another word about it until two weeks ago, when the Neue Galerie threw open its newly cleaned doors.

"This was a museum done without committees, and things work very efficiently without committees," Lauder, who is also chairman of the Museum of Modern Art's board of trustees, said last week. He was standing in the panelled ground-floor room that has been turned into a Viennese café named for Sabarsky. Lauder started collecting Austrian art in 1957, when he bought an Egon Schiele drawing with his bar-mitzvah money; along with his brother Leonard, he eventually assembled one of the largest private collections of works by Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Oskar Kokoschka. When he began, there was little market for Austrian and German Expressionist art in the United States. Lauder once asked Sabarsky if there were any collectors of Schiele and Klimt in this country. Sabarsky told him he knew of only two. "You have to add two more, me and my brother," Lauder said. "I already counted you," Sabarsky said.

The William Starr Miller house, which resembles a slice of the Place des Vosges, in Paris, has had an unusual history. In 1944, the Miller family sold it to Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, who gave up her bigger mansion at Fifty-first Street and referred to the Miller house as "the gardener's cottage." She entertained in the house relentlessly until her death in 1953, at which time the house was sold to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which sold it to Lauder.

YIVO had filled the rooms with offices, but, to save money, never stripped away the original oak panelling. The elaborate interior details were simply covered up. Lauder asked Selldorf to restore the building as much as possible and, at the same time, to make it function as a contemporary museum, with modern lighting, mechanical systems, and elevators. The process took four years. Selldorf has gone through the building with a light hand, adding pristine, delicate touches to Carrère & Hastings's heavier, grander ones. The result is a kind of gentle modernism of utter precision, with perfect proportions.

"Ronald was in love with the building and with the idea of having it look intact," Selldorf said. "And I didn't want to make a big statement and put in a transparent elevator or something." But she was uncomfortable with pretending that her new elevator was original, so she designed its cab to look like those of the elevators in the Seagram Building—"my homage to Mies van der Rohe," she said—and then she encased the elevator shaft in white glass, which almost blends in with the white walls of the original building.

Selldorf and Price turned the former music room, which is lined with marble pilasters, into a gallery for the major Austrian paintings, and put Austrian decorative art objects, which include a grandfather clock by Adolf Loos and a chair by Koloman Moser, into the oak-panelled drawing room that runs along Fifth Avenue. The third floor, which is devoted mainly to German art and decorative objects, had to be rebuilt entirely, and Selldorf made new rooms, with exquisitely simple bare-bulb light fixtures and stark planked floors.

Lauder also turned the original panelled library into a bookstore specializing in German and Austrian art books. The bookstore will be run by Faith Pleasanton, who for years managed the late and much lamented Wittenborn art bookstore, on Madison Avenue. ("Not a day goes by when someone doesn't come in and say 'Faith!' " Renée Price said. "She knows everyone, and she knows all of the books.")

"I look around this place and try to find what is wrong, what I would do differently if I were starting all over," Lauder said. "I can't find anything I would change."