Neue Galerie
The Neue Galerie is a museum for German and Austrian art from the early twen- tieth century. It is located on the Upper East Side, part of the Museum Mile. The building by Carrere & Hasting, architects of the New York Public Library, articulates its entrance on the 86th street in a rather reticent manner, with a discreet black placard.
The museum hosts two exhibitions – both dedicated to two friend artists Austrians Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele on the second floor and Germans Franz Marc and August Macke on the third floor. One is guided to the first exhibition by a central staircase with a flat dome skylight – a recurring motif since Schinkel’s Altes Museum.
From there, one can either begin in the central gallery room with paintings or in a gallery with a crafts exhibition of Wiener Werkstaette. The interior of the central gallery brings us back to 1914 Beaux-Arts era with its classical rhythm of walls and windows as well as exquisite wall ornaments and marbles. The masterpieces of Klimt and Schiele
are integrated within this calm rhythmical pattern; yet, on such a background Klimt’s affluent gold and Schiele’s bold line are even more vibrant. The natural light is dimmed by window shades and the outside world of Upper East Side and Central Park reduced to tree contours swinging in the wind. Arrayed in each window, there is a handcrafted clock, however the rules of time seem to be paradoxically suspended within the exhibition galleries. The interior, pictures, drawings, furniture and jewellery all seem to form together into one Gesamtkunstwerk that transpose the visitor into an ambience of the early twentieth century Vienna.
The lightning system, added in the recent renovation of the museum space by Selldorf Architects, relies mostly on the combination of reflectors and milk glass ceiling tiles. The latter ones adapt to each gallery in a slightly different manner, determined by the original ceiling design. The minimalistic squares either form a rectangle around the Beaux Arts chandeliers (in the drawing’s gallery) or one-by-one cover the ceiling (in the central gallery) providing an even lightning condition for the visitors, while the works of art receive a concentrated spotlight from the reflectors. The ceiling tiles complete the original interior and lightning system in a very undemonstrative yet elegant way, making at the same time no attempt to mimic the period of the building. The reflectors disturb to some degree this restrained image, however integrated with the tiles provide a flexible artificial lightning system.
The second exhibition can be reached by a side staircase, out from the piano nobile into a significantly more modern setting, hosting German avantgarde artists. A narrow corridor presents a timeline juxtaposing artists’ lives and connects to all four exhi- bition galleries. In contrast to the previous exhibition setting, the galleries on this floor are shaped by inbuilt walls that serve as a pure colour background for the works of art. Vivid orange and yellow paired with warm grey are samples from Marc and Macke’s paintings - the colors energetically accompany the display and, to some extent, compensate the lack of natural light in this space. The artificial lightning is, again, provided by reflectors and reflector squares integrated into a ceiling, on this floor trying to shape into a sparse pattern in a slightly less elegant form. The corridor connected to four rectangular gal- leries, each of a different size, works well with the curation of the exhibition. Providing a context instead of a sequence is achieved by bringing the paintings of members of the same artist group (“Der Blaue Reiter”) - Vassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee – into a dialog with Marc and Macke’s art.
Surprisingly, the floorplans of both exhibitions are identical in the size and place- ment of the galleries. Nevertheless, the presence of the grand staircase, as well as the entrances to and connections between the galleries give a visitor a different reading of those spaces. The central staircase, located in the core of the museum, connects directly to the central hall on the second floor. The hall’s connection to the galleries is thereby lessened and the transitions in between the galleries allow them to exist more inde- pendently from the central circulation space. In other words: finding oneself in the central hall, there is a feeling one has left the exhibition. The absence of the central staircase on the third floor gives the same space a reading of a corridor. This corridor, being itself a part of the exhibition, takes the center of gravity from the room that was a central gallery on the second floor and distributes the movement to the galleries, without any suggestion of a sequence.
The overall organization of the Neue Galerie suits the specific type of collection (revolving around a relatively short historical period) it displays. Both exhibition floors, one slightly more suggestive of a visitor’s path then the other, give a sense of simultaneity within one exhibition. The curatorial intent to present a single work of art always as a part of a larger constellation of other works of arts and crafts allows the Neue Galerie to truly captures the Zeitgeist of the early twentieth century between the Rhine and the Danube.
