Dear Friend,

The Neue Galerie is founded on the legacy of two great collectors: our president, Ronald S. Lauder, and his friend and mentor, Serge Sabarsky. Together, their extraordinary gifts of German and Austrian fine and decorative arts form the core of the museum collection. Now in its second decade, the Neue Galerie has expanded its reach and drawn in material from other devotees in this field as well. One such gift has been the assemblage of 125 decorative objects from the collection of Harry C. Sigman. An attorney based in Los Angeles, Sigman has been collecting for more than 40 years, and he has graciously donated the items for this exhibition as a tribute to the mission of the Neue Galerie.

In addition to those new objects for the collection, we will also be displaying some of our most prized works of German Expressionism, one of the central movements represented in the Neue Galerie holdings. With masterworks by artists ranging from Max Beckmann to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, from Lovis Corinth to Paul Klee, the Neue Galerie proudly presents artists whose originality and vision qualify them as among the major innovators of the twentieth century.

Renée Price
Director, Neue Galerie New York