Billionaire Donates Entire Gallery Plus $135M Klimt to Met

A billionaire art collector just made sure hundreds of masterpieces will stay accessible to the public for generations to come.

Ronald Lauder, heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune, is donating his entire Neue Galerie museum to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The gift includes more than 600 artworks, the historic Fifth Avenue building where they're displayed, and one of the world's most famous paintings.

The centerpiece is Gustav Klimt's "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I," a shimmering 1907 masterpiece Lauder bought for $135 million in 2006. The golden portrait has a remarkable history: it was seized by the Nazis in 1938 and only returned to the original owner's family in 2006.

Lauder founded the Neue Galerie in 2001, just two months after the September 11 attacks. In his announcement letter, he recalled how the museum offered "a sense of renewal" to a city still healing from tragedy.

Now he's ensuring that sense of renewal continues. The museum will become part of the Met but keep its name and location on Museum Mile, where visitors can still experience its focus on early 20th-century German and Austrian art.

The Ripple Effect

This gift fills major gaps in the Met's collection while keeping an entire museum's worth of treasures available to anyone who wants to see them. Max Hollein, the Met's director, called it "clearly one of the greatest and biggest gifts ever given to a museum."

The donation includes 13 additional paintings by Klimt and other masters, plus funding to maintain the building and operations long-term. The merger between the two museums is expected to be complete by 2028.

Lauder's generosity follows a family tradition. His late brother Leonard donated 78 Cubist masterpieces to the Met in 2013, including works by Picasso, Braque, and Léger.

The gift ensures that more than 600 works of art will remain accessible to the public forever, instead of being locked away in private collections or scattered through sales.