Ronald Lauder’s private collection at the Neue Galerie shows art through the eyes of a billionaire

You have unlimited funds and an equally expansive desire to accumulate one of the world’s great art collections: how do you choose what to buy? Do you acquire what the market boosts or fashion promotes — one each of Koons, Warhol, Richter and Twombly, say? Not if you’re Ronald Lauder.

The 78-year-old cosmetics heir, diplomat and philanthropist has spent almost his entire life (since he was an early teenager) desiring, lurking, waiting and pouncing with the single-mindedness of a panther. Two decades ago he founded the Neue Galerie in New York, an institutional reflection of his taste for the art of Vienna and central Europe. Now, the museum has temporarily turned itself into an extension of his domestic life, presenting the treasures he’s amassed in roughly the same way they’re displayed in his assorted homes. (Alas, the museum couldn’t accommodate his car collection.)

The show, he has said, provides the ordinary non-billionaire viewer with “a glimpse into my world”. And what you see when you look through the keyhole is a collector with a gift: an immense confidence in his consistently idiosyncratic taste. Ever since he used his bar mitzvah money to buy a drawing by Egon Schiele in 1957, he has known what he likes: the unidealised, the unfinished, the vaguely grotesque.

And yet there’s room for beauty in his schema, especially if it’s hard to come by. Carl Moll’s “White Interior”, painted in 1905 and last exhibited in 1908, disappeared into a private collection for more than a century; art historians knew it existed but not where it was. When it finally came up for sale in 2021, Lauder swooped.

You can see why. The light-filled canvas depicts the saloniste Berta Zuckerkandl dressed in a columnar white gown, standing with her back to the viewer in a glowing white dining room in the most advanced turn-of-the-century Viennese style. We get a glimpse into her exquisite world, too, and it is filled with Japanese scrolls, porcelain tea sets and delicate statuettes. In this hard-won acquisition, you see the collector as subject, spirit and guiding hand, immersed in an environment of her own creation. Lauder has referred to the Neue Galerie as a Gesamtkunstwerk — a total work of art. He might have been referring to Zuckerkandl’s home.

He is a virtuoso of patience. Utterly seduced as a 15-year-old by Klimt’s gilded portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, he finally managed to acquire it in 2006 for a record-setting $135mn. It is the show’s presiding muse. And yet the sheen and swish of those early 20th-century women are not always representative of a sensibility that gravitates to the perfectly imperfect, a mixture of sublimity and gnarled realism that transcends period or style.

Since the mid-1990s, Lauder has nurtured an affinity for quattrocento Italian paintings with gold backgrounds, and of course he has snagged some of the best. Two tiny panels by the Sienese painter Giovanni di Paolo (c1403-82) seem to peel away from the wall and hover before our eyes. They depict miracles from the life of St Clare, a 13th-century disciple of St Francis, but in their surreal abstraction they look almost contemporary. In one, St Clare glides above a stormy sea to rescue a boatful of fishermen. With one arm she grasps the torn sail and flailing mast, while the other reaches out to the terrified sailors, whose noses poke timidly above the gunwale. The waves that crash around the vessel look more like hairy hummocks, so that the boat seems adrift on a sea of mounds, as if it were stranded in the desert outside Siena.

Lauder has always had a weakness for portraits of the elderly, the frail and the not-quite-right

In his “surreal”, “visionary” manner, di Paolo “arbitrarily warps the mathematical, perspectival space of Renaissance painting to evoke an emotional or otherworldly experience”, observes Metropolitan Museum emeritus curator Keith Christiansen in a catalogue essay. Lauder warms to just that sort of expressive idiom, even when — or because — it violates clichés of beauty. Early in his collecting career, he acquired Carlo Ceresa’s 17th-century portrait of a dour, double-chinned mother with her two doleful daughters. Her Scrooge-like demeanour, combined with the painter’s decided obscurity, entranced him then, and its radiant weirdness beguiles me now.

Lauder has always had a weakness for portraits of the elderly, the frail and the not-quite-right. Quinten Massys gives his nameless “Old Man” a whole arsenal of distinctive traits: an aquiline nose with a bulbous tip, sensual lips, hooded eyes and furling ear, all rendered in mesmeric detail. The man’s floppy pancake hat, elongated and slightly crooked figure, and hint of a grin make him the sort of person you might avoid on the street, but never forget.

Another early purchase, the 16th-century “Portrait of an Abbot”, directs us to the man’s irreducible specificity. Despite all his gorgeously rendered accoutrements — a filigreed golden crosier and a bejewelled mitre — it’s his personality that holds our scrutiny. Along with the resolute frown, sagging flesh and bald pate, which make him ringingly un-generic, he demands attention through the intense authority of his stare.

The same qualities — ferocity and a gruff impatience with languid Mediterranean graces — cling to Lauder’s astonishing collection of arms and armour (much of which he has promised to the Metropolitan Museum). A 16th-century Austrian helmet mimes a human face in steel, and if the thick nostrils and cruel lips are anything to go by, the warrior who wore it was a murderous type. A visored 15th-century basinet from Germany flaunts a beaklike mouth and a pointy peak, giving it the air of a bionic beast engineered to intimidate.

A thread of temperament leads from the Old Masters and master craftsmen of the north to the German and Austrian expressionists who have been Lauder’s abiding love. Only a show such as this would allow us to savour the affinities between that unattributed “Portrait of an Abbot” and Max Beckmann’s exquisite 1915 drawing of “Senior Medical Officer Prof Dr Kuhn” — the same polished head, angular nose and aura of incandescent absorption.

The scathing realism of the Renaissance evolves before our eyes into the pitiless grotesques of the early 20th century: Otto Dix’s flushed and kohl-eyed nude from 1926, halfheartedly trying to cover herself; Oskar Kokoschka’s luridly lit Peter Altenberg, with his wild whiskers and mangled hands; George Grosz’s hypnotic portrait of the glass-eyed John Förste, his artificial gaze boring into a book. Here, these expressionist exemplars seem less like icons of an artistic revolution than images from a life-long hyper-real dream, a glimpse not just into the collector’s rooms but into his psyche too.

To February 13, neuegalerie.org