Once upon a time, a fellow billionaire asked Mr. Trump why he’d never amassed a collection of art. Why, in fact, wasn’t he interested in art at all? “You know what a Van Gogh is?” asked an annoyed Mr. Trump in return. “It’s a piece of cloth with some colored mud on it.”

The story is probably apocryphal, but anyone who’s watched The Apprentice will recognize the brusque and dismissive reply as being perfectly in character.

So there he was, The Donald, haunting me as I gazed at the most expensive painting in the world. One hundred and thirty-five million dollars, he whispered in my ear. That’s a lot of money for a piece of cloth with some colored mud on it.

Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) is a feather in the cap of the Neue Galerie, the Upper East Side jewel-box museum devoted to early 20th-century Germanic art. Certainly the purchase of the painting by Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics heir who founded the museum, provided plenty of boffo media coverage.

The art of Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) straddles the 19th and 20th centuries—and yet he’s not quite a Modernist. His serpentine compositions, sickly eroticism and decorative flair are beholden to academic precedent and too self-conscious to completely reimagine or revitalize artistic form. A misplaced experimentation, not forward propulsion, defines the oeuvre. Compared to Bonnard or Matisse, Klimt is just a bit stodgy.

All the same, the development of 20th-century Austrian art is inconceivable without him: He co-founded the Vienna Secession in 1897 (roughly speaking, the Austrian stylistic equivalent of Art Nouveau); he was mentor to the exceptionally gifted and eternally adolescent Egon Schiele; and Klimt’s paintings, never less than accomplished, are often magnificent, particularly the landscapes.

But in the greater scheme of things, Klimt is small potatoes. Forget Modernism: If $135 million is considered a commendable investment for a picture by a minor artist, what price tag do we put on a painting by Fra Angelico, a sculpture by Donatello or a drawing by Durer? The question is undoubtedly lodged in the overexcited minds of museums, collectors and auction houses the world over.

To entertain the question at all is to risk making art an adjunct to capital. The relationship between art and money—or power—began on Day 1. (You’d best believe the tribal chieftain had something to say about the paintings daubed on the cave wall.) Yet the greatest works of art have an independence that thrives outside the dictates of wealth, prestige or dogma. This is what has always pissed off those who would seek to control it: Art is alive in a way that confounds practical consideration. Art fetches obscene amounts of money for a reason: Though freedom is impossible to quantify, its presence is real, its value indisputable. Some things can’t be bought. Ponying up $135 million for a painting is, in a roundabout way, an admission of defeat.

There’s another, more heartening story about the Neue Galerie’s newly acquired prize. Adele Bloch-Bauer I—along with four other Klimt paintings—has only recently been returned to the heirs of the Bloch-Bauer family after having been looted by the Nazis.

Though the official line condemned “degenerate” modern art, the Nazis liked these particular Klimts enough to claim them as their own. The pictures wound up in Vienna’s Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. Attempts to recover them led to the United States Supreme Court, and ultimately Austria returned the pictures to the Bloch-Bauer family. It’s hard not to find a certain satisfaction in history having come full circle.

It might be impolitic, after all the money lavished on it, to note that of all the Klimt paintings on view at the Neue Galerie, Adele Bloch-Bauer I is the least interesting. It’s a flashy performance, that’s for sure. Klimt was savvy enough to flatter his subject and do so with bells and whistles.

Compare Adele Bloch-Bauer’s features as seen in an adjacent photograph to the subtle, yet marked, stylizations of the painting. Lips and eyes are enlarged; the face is ascetic and lean. The body is engulfed by a Byzantine field of gold leaf, silver and an ascending array of geometric motifs and abstracted eyes, vaguely Egyptian in character. Klimt’s idealization of Adele, not to mention the painting’s over-the-top ornamentation, is almost ridiculously erotic. Did the painter and his subject have an affair? Standing in front of the canvas, the question seems a no-brainer.

Less showy, and considerably more satisfying, are the four other paintings from the estate, three landscapes and the only other portrait that Klimt painted of Adele. In Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912), decorative overkill is stifled by a consistent application of oil paint. Leaving the gold leaf and silver well enough alone, Klimt did history a favor by being truer to the art of painting, not to mention the physical characteristics of his subject.

In the landscapes, Klimt achieves a frazzled intensity with his pitter-pat brushwork, transforming the lessons of Impressionism (especially Seurat’s Pointillism) into a veritable pressure cooker of spiritual portent. Houses at Unterach on the Attersee (c. 1916) is as solid as a stained-glass window, Birch Forest (1903) as memorable as the most disquieting of dreams. Apple Tree I (1912), with its gentle, umbrella-like composition, has both the charm and the menace we associate with the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.

The hubbub surrounding Adele Bloch-Bauer I will die down; the painting will become less burdensome to consider. The Neue Galerie has filled out a rather specialized collection, and the overpriced Klimt will claim its place as the centerpiece. Yet a nagging question remains: Are inflated prices for art an indication of a culture’s well-being or a symptom of its insecurities? Donald Trump couldn’t care less. The rest of us should.

Gustav Klimt: Five Paintings from the Collection of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer is at the Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue at 86th Street, until Sept. 18.

Once upon a time, a fellow billionaire asked Mr. Trump why he’d never amassed a collection of art. Why, in fact, wasn’t he interested in art at all? “You know what a Van Gogh is?” asked an annoyed Mr. Trump in return. “It’s a piece of cloth with some colored mud on it.”

The story is probably apocryphal, but anyone who’s watched The Apprentice will recognize the brusque and dismissive reply as being perfectly in character.

So there he was, The Donald, haunting me as I gazed at the most expensive painting in the world. One hundred and thirty-five million dollars, he whispered in my ear. That’s a lot of money for a piece of cloth with some colored mud on it.

Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) is a feather in the cap of the Neue Galerie, the Upper East Side jewel-box museum devoted to early 20th-century Germanic art. Certainly the purchase of the painting by Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics heir who founded the museum, provided plenty of boffo media coverage.

The art of Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) straddles the 19th and 20th centuries—and yet he’s not quite a Modernist. His serpentine compositions, sickly eroticism and decorative flair are beholden to academic precedent and too self-conscious to completely reimagine or revitalize artistic form. A misplaced experimentation, not forward propulsion, defines the oeuvre. Compared to Bonnard or Matisse, Klimt is just a bit stodgy.

All the same, the development of 20th-century Austrian art is inconceivable without him: He co-founded the Vienna Secession in 1897 (roughly speaking, the Austrian stylistic equivalent of Art Nouveau); he was mentor to the exceptionally gifted and eternally adolescent Egon Schiele; and Klimt’s paintings, never less than accomplished, are often magnificent, particularly the landscapes.

But in the greater scheme of things, Klimt is small potatoes. Forget Modernism: If $135 million is considered a commendable investment for a picture by a minor artist, what price tag do we put on a painting by Fra Angelico, a sculpture by Donatello or a drawing by Durer? The question is undoubtedly lodged in the overexcited minds of museums, collectors and auction houses the world over.

To entertain the question at all is to risk making art an adjunct to capital. The relationship between art and money—or power—began on Day 1. (You’d best believe the tribal chieftain had something to say about the paintings daubed on the cave wall.) Yet the greatest works of art have an independence that thrives outside the dictates of wealth, prestige or dogma. This is what has always pissed off those who would seek to control it: Art is alive in a way that confounds practical consideration. Art fetches obscene amounts of money for a reason: Though freedom is impossible to quantify, its presence is real, its value indisputable. Some things can’t be bought. Ponying up $135 million for a painting is, in a roundabout way, an admission of defeat.

There’s another, more heartening story about the Neue Galerie’s newly acquired prize. Adele Bloch-Bauer I—along with four other Klimt paintings—has only recently been returned to the heirs of the Bloch-Bauer family after having been looted by the Nazis.

Though the official line condemned “degenerate” modern art, the Nazis liked these particular Klimts enough to claim them as their own. The pictures wound up in Vienna’s Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. Attempts to recover them led to the United States Supreme Court, and ultimately Austria returned the pictures to the Bloch-Bauer family. It’s hard not to find a certain satisfaction in history having come full circle.

It might be impolitic, after all the money lavished on it, to note that of all the Klimt paintings on view at the Neue Galerie, Adele Bloch-Bauer I is the least interesting. It’s a flashy performance, that’s for sure. Klimt was savvy enough to flatter his subject and do so with bells and whistles.

Compare Adele Bloch-Bauer’s features as seen in an adjacent photograph to the subtle, yet marked, stylizations of the painting. Lips and eyes are enlarged; the face is ascetic and lean. The body is engulfed by a Byzantine field of gold leaf, silver and an ascending array of geometric motifs and abstracted eyes, vaguely Egyptian in character. Klimt’s idealization of Adele, not to mention the painting’s over-the-top ornamentation, is almost ridiculously erotic. Did the painter and his subject have an affair? Standing in front of the canvas, the question seems a no-brainer.

Less showy, and considerably more satisfying, are the four other paintings from the estate, three landscapes and the only other portrait that Klimt painted of Adele. In Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912), decorative overkill is stifled by a consistent application of oil paint. Leaving the gold leaf and silver well enough alone, Klimt did history a favor by being truer to the art of painting, not to mention the physical characteristics of his subject.

In the landscapes, Klimt achieves a frazzled intensity with his pitter-pat brushwork, transforming the lessons of Impressionism (especially Seurat’s Pointillism) into a veritable pressure cooker of spiritual portent. Houses at Unterach on the Attersee (c. 1916) is as solid as a stained-glass window, Birch Forest (1903) as memorable as the most disquieting of dreams. Apple Tree I (1912), with its gentle, umbrella-like composition, has both the charm and the menace we associate with the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.

The hubbub surrounding Adele Bloch-Bauer I will die down; the painting will become less burdensome to consider. The Neue Galerie has filled out a rather specialized collection, and the overpriced Klimt will claim its place as the centerpiece. Yet a nagging question remains: Are inflated prices for art an indication of a culture’s well-being or a symptom of its insecurities? Donald Trump couldn’t care less. The rest of us should.

Gustav Klimt: Five Paintings from the Collection of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer is at the Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue at 86th Street, until Sept. 18.

But there is, of course, a great deal else to look at. The flawlessly installed opening exhibition is called New Worlds: German and Austrian Art, 1890-1940 , a survey of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, photographs and the decorative arts. All the great names are represented: Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, among the Austrian painters; Max Beckmann, Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Dix, Oskar Schlemmer, George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters and Franz Marc, among the Germans; and Vasily Kandinsky, Laszlo-Moholy-Nagy, Lyonel Feininger and Paul Klee, among the outsiders who participated in the Blaue Reiter movement or the Bauhaus project. The sections of the opening exhibition devoted to "Viennese Decorative Arts Around 1900" and "Applied Arts and Architecture in Germany, 1890s-1930s" all but constitute a separate exhibition in themselves, and not one that is in any respect aesthetically inferior to or historically less compelling than the rooms devoted to paintings and drawings. I suspect that for many visitors to the Neue Galerie New York, the decorative arts in this initial exhibition may exert an even greater appeal than some of the paintings and drawings-which, frankly, are not as consistently high in quality, and some of which are remarkably lurid in their imagery.

Still, with a masterwork like Beckmann's Self-Portrait with Horn (1938)-in my judgment, the single greatest work of art in this survey-and such other works as Emil Nolde's Sunset (1909), Lyonel Feininger's The Blue Cloud (1925), Kokoschka's Paul Scheerhart (1910), Grosz's Portrait of John Flirste, Man with Glass Eye (1926), Otto Dix's watercolor Self-Portrait (1922) and virtually all the drawings by Schiele and Alfred Kubin and all the works by Kurt Schwitters-to mention only my own favorites in the exhibition-there is no shortage of first-rate examples among the paintings and drawings, either.

In addition, the Neue Galerie New York is providing New Yorkers with their first-ever perfect replica of a fin-de-siècle Viennese coffeehouse, and not just to look at. The Cafe Sabarsky, as it's called, is a functioning coffeehouse, complete with replicas of Viennese bent-wood furniture and period banquettes as well as Viennese coffees and the high-caloric delicacies that were standard fare in the days when nobody seemed to worry about such things. Were the original coffeehouses of Vienna ever as elegant as this one? Hard to say. The coffeehouses I frequented during my many visits to the city in the 1960's had gotten to be pretty shabby, and the artists I met in Vienna wouldn't go near them. They much preferred the horrible little espresso bars, where you sat on plastic stools under grim neon lights. These, they said, made them feel like they were in New York-though in fact they didn't at all resemble any New York coffee bar I had ever seen. It was all part of the younger generation's rejection of Viennese bourgeois sentimentality, precisely the vein of sentiment and style that is so painstakingly revived in the Cafe Sabarsky. But this rejection of bourgeois sentimentality was already a powerful under current in fin-de-siècle Viennese art itself, as we can see in the mordant imagery of Schiele, Kokoschka and Kubin.

I would be very much surprised, however, if the Cafe Sabarsky didn't prove to be a great hit with our own herd of bourgeois sentimentalists. It's unlikely, in any case, to pose a threat to Starbucks. What the Neue Galerie New York also offers us is a splendid book shop devoted to the art and design of early 20th-century Austria and Germany, and even translations of some of the literature. There is also a design shop, where reproductions of tableware and textiles are likely to bring some brisk business, too.

In this initial exhibition at the museum, the second floor is devoted to Austria while the third floor is devoted to Germany. In spirit and style, they are in some respects radically different. Austrian Expressionism was rather more elegant than its German counterpart, and Austria never produced anything as radical as the applied arts of the Bauhaus. There is thus an interesting dialectic of decorative excess on the one hand, and its categorical denial on the other, to be observed as one moves from the Austrian section of the exhibition to the sometimes brutal simplifications of German art and design.

Are there some disappointments to be observed as well? Inevitably, there are. The two virtuosic figure paintings by Klimt, with their super-saturations of decorative detail, will no doubt delight many people, but I found them unendurable. Klimt's landscape paintings are splendid, however, and so are the Klimt drawings. Kokoschka's drawings, on the other hand, are by no means his best work. The Klees are similarly disappointing, but the Kandinskys are marvelous. It is only in the realm of the decorative and applied arts that this initial exhibition is devoid of disappointment.

Like so many of our museums in New York, the Neue Galerie New York is based upon great private collections-in this case, those of the late Serge Sabarsky (1912-1996), who for many years was New York's principal dealer in modern Austrian and German art, and Ronald S. Lauder, the chairman of Estée Lauder International and also chairman of the board at the Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Lauder was the U.S. ambassador to Austria from 1986 to 1987. It was the two gentlemen's original intention to collaborate on the founding of the Neue Galerie New York, but following Sabarsky's death five years ago, Mr. Lauder undertook to bring this project to completion. In doing so-and on such a grand scale-he has made an important contribution not only to the cultural life of New York, but to the entire nation.

For the significance of the Neue Galerie New York goes beyond the aesthetic delights it brings to the city. This museum is devoted to a particular-and particularly difficult-chapter in the history of the 20th century. Germany had the distinction of being at once one of the most advanced and one of the most barbaric societies in the modern world, and Austria was a close collaborator in both of these disparate endeavors. Germany created some of the very first museums to be devoted to modern art, and it was also the locus of one of the most ambitious plans to exterminate modern art and the people who created it. The life of art in New York in the 20th century has, moreover, been closely linked to the fortunes and misfortunes of German and Austrian cultural life. What our own cultural life in the 20th century might have been without the arrival on our shores of German émigré artists, art scholars and writers, art dealers, art collectors, museum curators and teachers, is beyond imagining. It is in relation to this aspect of our history in the 20th century that the creation of the Neue Galerie New York is especially significant, and I hope there will be opportunities in the future for the museum to focus on some of this history as well. There are allusions to it, to be sure, in the mammoth hardcover catalog that accompanies the opening exhibition-a book running to some 600 glossy pages that weighs a ton. As I am still trawling my way through its endless columns of fine print, I shall defer my discussion of it until a later date.

Meanwhile, it needs to be pointed out that visiting hours at the Neue Galerie New York are somewhat eccentric. It is open to the public four days a week, on Friday, Saturday and Monday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and on Sunday from 1 to 6 p.m. Admission is $10 (student and seniors, $7). Children under 12 will not be admitted, and those under 16 must be accompanied by an adult. There will also be a limit placed on the number of visitors to be admitted at the same time, so be prepared to stand in line, at least to begin with. All the same, it is not to be missed. And fortunately, the opening exhibition remains on view at the museum through Feb. 18.