One of my favorite museums in the world is the Neue Galerie, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 86th Street. It's just the right size, has a great cafe (though there's usually a line), an equally good bookstore and a wonderful permanent collection. A few weeks ago, I saw From Klimt to Klee: Masterworks from the Serge Sabarsky Collection. This has since closed. Other than the fact that Sabarsky co-founded the Galerie with Ronald Lauder, I knew nothing about him before. A native Viennese, Sabarsky worked as a designer for Simplicissimus. He came to New York in 1938, and eventually established a gallery for Austrian and German Expressionist art (this is much cribbed from the exhibit brochure). There were some wonderful Georg Grosz drawings which I hadn't seen before.
The next exhibit is the work of painter Otto Dix. This painting is Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber, 1925. Dix's portraits seem to share Oskar Kokoschka's fascination with his subjects' hands.
