Sunday in the City With Otto

I have lived in the city full time for over a year now, but I still get a thrill from the fact that I live ten minutes from some of the planet's greatest works of art. Gustav Klimt's "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer" (1907) was one half of the focus of a private tour I took today, along with my daughter and another family, at the Neue Galerie on 86th street and Fifth Avenue. My friend won the tour as part of a fundraiser for her synagogue, which has an irony all its own, given the provenance of the painting.

The painting was left behind by its original Viennese owner (and widow of Adele), Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, whose townhouse was annexed by the Nazis and turned into a rail station for transporting Jews to concentration camps. The painting (surprise surprise) wound up the property of the Austrian government and was displayed in the Belvedere museum in Vienna until 2006 when the 86 year-old niece of the Bloch-Bauers won her groundbreaking lawsuit to return the stolen art to its rightful, surviving heir. The story ends with the heroic (and very rich) Ronald Lauder, who helped finance the lawsuit, buying the painting for a record $135 million and placing it, like the Mona Lisa, at the heart of his own townhouse museum dedicated to Austrian and German art.

You could say I have waited my whole life to have this painting in my backyard. As a child spending every other summer visiting my mother's friends and relatives in Vienna, I first fell in love with the shiny work of Klimt, particularly "The Kiss," in its original, but not proper, home. So having this spectacular portrait, with all of its intricate gold inlay and the delicate, painted white skin and black hair of Adele practically to myself today, I felt inordinately lucky and grateful. Adele looked pretty satisfied with the situation herself, but that may be because she was, according to our docent, having an affair with the artist.

The second half of the tour was devoted to the current show of work by the German artist Otto Dix (1891-1969). In terms of aesthetics, the two could not be further apart. The Dix exhibit is the reason the museum has an ongoing, strict "no children under 12" policy. His gruesome etchings of World War I scenes and graphic depictions of the depravity of German society during the Weimar Republic are grotesque and utterly compelling at the same time. He was a master watercolorist, and we are not talking your Impressionist watercolors here. As my good friend so eloquently put it, "What's with all the prostitutes?"

And of course, the final and real reason most people visit the museum: Cafe Sabarsky. Forget the opportunity to expand the cultural knowledge of German Expressionism, and relish the opportunity to expand the waistband by ordering the Hungarian goulash with spaetzle, a glass of red wine and the Topfentorte or the Sacher torte mit schlag for dessert.

God Bless You, Ronald Lauder.