I Am at Home in the Neue Galerie
By Barbara Krasner
April 15, 2026
April 15, 2026
I. In the Foyer
By entering New York City’s Neue Galerie, through iron-grated doors and white-and-black marble floors, I step into the former residence of industrialist William Starr Miller, who had this six-floor townhouse built to his specifications in 1914 for himself and his family. The building was once home to Grace Vanderbilt and then to YIVO, the transplanted Yiddish cultural organization from Vilna in Lithuania. The structure, restored to its original beaux-arts grandeur, has housed the Neue Galerie since 2001. From the foyer, I look up to the broad, winding marble staircase bounded by the wrought-iron balustrade, crowned by the oval glass dome. I am transported to the past.
II. In a Gallery
Here, on the third floor, I peer into Franz Marc’s Fighting Cows, a painting I’d only seen in a webinar on Expressionism. He is known for his love of animals, especially horses. Here, each of the three bovines bears the same signature stroke: a broad painterly impression along the forehead. Maybe Marc, a founder of Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) movement, developed this single mark in his paintings of horses. A single shot. Like the single piece of flying shrapnel that claimed him on the battlefield in 1916 during World War I. I am drawn to the interplay of bold orange, blue-black, and green. The strength of Marc’s lines. The rhythm and curves of the animals for which he will become known.
III. In the Basement
I am at home in the Neue Galerie. In the ladies’ room in the basement, I detect a German accent, and the woman ahead of me says she’s from Nürnberg. I’m not thinking about the city and its significant Nazi history. I’m not thinking about how this woman might be the daughter or granddaughter of Nazis who might have been the ones prodding and poking my family toward Treblinka or Belzec. Or forcing some into a mass grave after shooting. I think about my last visit to that city in 1978, sampling its unique version of sausages, two tiny ones, stuffed into a large roll. Instead, I say in German, “Ich habe an der Uni Konstanz studiert.” She says I have a perfect accent. Later, by the coat room, she asks in German what I studied. I stumble over my words, because my previous statement is the only practiced one I have.
IV. In the Café
I order Wienerschintzel for lunch at the Café Fledermaus. Same food as the Café Sabarsky upstairs but without the Central Park views. I could live without the scenery. It is tough to get my rollator through the aisle to a back table that would be high enough to suit my mobility device as chair.
V. In the Hallway
I hover in the hallway of the Austrian Masterworks floor, lured by the serenity of a fin-de-siècle painting by Carl Moll, White Interior, the voyeurism of a woman in her living room. The woman with her back to the painter is Berta Szeps, who married my grandmother’s distant relative, Dr. Emil Zuckerkandl. I peek in on Berta in her white dress. She stands before a white-clothed table. Two floor-to-ceiling cabinets flank her, their translucent white wood and glass reflecting the tranquil mood. As if I could touch them, elegant knickknacks like a trumpeting white elephant, its trunk turned toward the sky. I creep in behind her to take a seat in one of the cane-backed chairs. Like Berta, I await Emil’s arrival and the belly laugh of his jokes.
VI. In My Imagination
I can see the design store as the powder room it once was with perhaps white enamel fixtures. I can imagine myself arranging flowers in the Klimt room, the former reception room, with large windows and golden marble perimeter. Hosting extravagant dinners in a dining room of wall-to-wall wood paneling under a tray ceiling before heading en masse to the opera. But at the turn of the nineteenth century, my family was living in tenements in downtown Newark, or the Lower East Side of Manhattan, or still trying to get to America from Poland. I am at home, but it’s not my home. Could never be my home.
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Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has been featured in more than seventy literary journals, including nonfiction in The Journal of Expressive Writing, Collateral, South 85, The Manifest Station, and Vassar Review. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, she lives and teaches in New Jersey.
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Author’s Note:
Because the Neue Galerie does not allow photos, I wanted to record my visit in some other way. Going to art museums and writing in response to art have become my raison d’etre as I grapple with the confluence of multiple chronic conditions. Each museum offers a different encounter with its art, staff, and restaurants. I am eager to own Carl Moll’s White Interior, visit Vienna with my rollator, and immerse myself in fin de-siecle Vienna. And, of course, visit the art museums.