Dear Friends,

We welcome the Winter/Spring 2026 season at Neue Galerie New York with a flurry of activity at the museum, highlighted by the opening of “Egon Schiele: Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff.” Egon Schiele (1890-1918) is one of the greatest artists in the collection of the Neue Galerie. We have proudly presented a number of major exhibitions on Schiele over the years, surveying his extraordinary portraits and landscapes, as well as other aspects of his brilliant but brief career. With this exhibition, we are focusing on a single work, along with related drawings and paintings: the Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff from 1910. This was the year Schiele really came into his own as an artist, and we consider the Graff painting to be one of the most important works in the extended collection of Neue Galerie.

Schiele completed this portrait of a surgeon at Vienna’s Second University Women’s Clinic at the age of twenty. The painting of the striking thirty-two-year-old doctor somehow manages to portray the subject looking both friendly and slightly menacing, with his warm smile, but also darkened complexion and bandaged finger. Dr. Erwin von Graff (1878-1952), who the young artist met in Vienna at the home of collector Carl Reininghaus, became a confidant of Schiele. Graff generously treated, cared for, and paid the hospital bills of Schiele’s pregnant friend Liliana Amon. The doctor was among the very first to recognize Schiele’s great talent, allowing the artist to visit the clinic to draw pregnant women and newborns. This was quite an uncommon practice and a sign of respect and trust between the two men. It was clear to Graff that Schiele was deeply interested in the life cycle, which he honored with his artworks. This portrait and several works on paper were given by Schiele to the doctor in gratitude for his service. These works are reunited in this exhibition, accompanied by studies of pregnant women, babies, and children. Approximately 40 works ranging in date from 1910 to 1918 are featured.

Meanwhile, the Neue Galerie is delighted to continue to present an exhibition devoted to one of the most inventive Austrian decorative artists of his generation, “Dagobert Peche: Ornamental Genius.” This show features approximately 50 objects, beautifully selected by Janis Staggs, Director of Curatorial at the Neue Galerie. Peche had a passion for the decorative, and he produced interiors and objects of incredible imagination and whimsy. “German Masterworks from the Neue Galerie” and “Austrian Masterworks from the Neue Galerie” also remain on view, drawn from the museum’s core holdings, offering you an extraordinary, up-close view of the gems in our collection.

We look forward to welcoming you to the museum this season. Our greatest thanks go to the Neue Galerie’s President and Co-Founder, Ronald S. Lauder, for his generous and longtime support of the museum and for making our work on behalf of German and Austrian art possible. And we thank you, our supporters and friends, for joining us in the process of discovery.

With best wishes,