When Ronald S. Lauder was thirteen, he made his first purchase of an Austrian modernist work, a drawing by the tragically short-lived Egon Schiele. It’s easy to understand why one of Schiele’s stylized, emotionally supercharged images would appeal to a young teenager. (I lusted after a Schiele drawing myself, at about the same age, but my meager savings were insufficient to my wishes and my mother refused a loan for the balance.) Lauder’s precocious attraction to the drawing that he acquired had profound effects. It gave rise to a lifelong passion for the work of early twentieth-century Austrian artists and their German counterparts and led to a thirty-year friendship with the art dealer and curator Serge Sabarsky (1912–96), a deeply knowledgeable specialist in the field. Together, the two men planned a museum focusing on the artists they admired—Schiele, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and their colleagues. Late in 2001, their ambition was realized with the founding of the Neue Galerie in a Beaux-Arts mansion at Eighty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue. (Café Sabarsky, in the former ballroom, with its excellent goulash soup and spectacular Viennese pastry, is named in the cofounder’s honor.) This past November, to celebrate its twentieth anniversary, the Neue Galerie opened “The Ronald S. Lauder Collection,” a showcase of works that the co-originator of the museum lives with, combined with others often (and sometimes permanently) on view in the museum.¹

It’s an astonishing assortment. In his introduction to Lauder’s collection