A $50 Price Is Set for Special Viewing Of the Priciest Painting Ever Purchased

Want an intimate afternoon with Adele Bloch-Bauer? The Neue Galerie announced yesterday that, on Wednesday afternoons for the duration of the Klimt exhibit that features the most expensive painting ever purchased, it will charge a higher than normal price — $50 — in an effort to keep the crowds down. At other times when the museum is open, Thursday through Monday, its normal price of $15 for adults and $10 for students and seniors will be in effect.

"Because we get such a crowd, we thought we might offer a more private viewing," a representative of the museum explained over the phone yesterday evening. Asked if there were any concerns about offering this more intimate encounter with the paintings only to those who could afford the steep ticket price, she said there were not. It's an experiment, she explained, "and we'll see how it goes."

The museum representative said they modeled the policy after the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which in the past has offered $50 Mondays during particularly popular exhibitions. (The Met is typically closed on Mondays, and the Neue Galerie is typically closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.) The suggested donation for admission to the Met was recently raised to $20 from $15.

The Met's spokesman, Harold Holzer, confirmed that the Met has "experimented from time to time with $50 Mondays" open only to members, though he said there were none planned for this fall. "Some of them have produced dramatic results, because we've had them for exhibitions for which there were long lines, like Leonardo's drawings," he said. "It seems to be a popular thing with members, and we may well do it again."

The five Klimt paintings on display at the Neue Galerie were recently restored by Austria to Maria Altmann of Los Angeles. Ms. Altmann is the niece of the paintings' original owners, a prominent Jewish couple in Vienna. The president of the Neue Galerie, Ronald Lauder, recently purchased one of the paintings, "Adele Bloch-Bauer I," from Ms. Altmann for $135 million, the highest price ever paid for a painting.