The Neue Galerie is a treasury of Austrian and German art from the early 20th century. Not only does it show excellent examples of fine and applied arts of that period and place, but it also recreates the haute bourgeois surroundings of its early patrons — despite the anti-establishment rawness or the utopian simplicity of the various movements and styles: Expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), the Bauhaus.

Any museum has highlights, but because of the excitement surrounding the enormous sums paid for certain key works at auction by the museum’s benefactor, Ronald Lauder, the Neue Galerie tends to be top heavy with its masterpieces. In the case of two of the most spectacular works on display, Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (1907) and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Berlin Street Scene” (1913–14), the works came to market through restitution, the legal process of returning to rightful heirs works that had been stolen or obtained under duress from persecuted Jews during the Third Reich.

The Klimt had been hanging in Vienna’s Belvedere Castle, while the Kirchner was given up by Berlin’s Brücke Museum, an institution dedicated to the Expressionist group founded by Kirchner and his circle in Dresden in 1905. Kirchner’s evocation of the modern city is now highlighted in the company of the works that will keep it company, including a recently acquired sculpture by the artist, “Standing Girl, Karyatide” (1909–10), and paintings and drawings with gritty urban themes by such artists as George Grosz, Otto Dix, and Christian Schad.

It is telling, indeed, that space was found for “Berlin Street Scene” in the room of post-World War I New Objectivity painters, rather than the room which already houses two glorious Kirchners, “Tightrope Walk” (1908–10) and “The Russian Dancer Mela” (1911), and other canonical Expressionists. It is as if to acknowledge that — despite its expressionist style — this seminal image cuts across usual allegiances. Because “Berlin Street Scene” has a focus on social posture and issues of urbanism, it hangs more comfortably with the more politically minded and satirical post-World War I artists than with the canonical Expressionists, with their primitive sense of timelessness and their affinity with nature.

“Berlin Street Scene” belongs to a series of ambitiously scaled paintings (others are in the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne) that dealt with the metropolis as Kirchner experienced it. They are neither celebratory nor castigatory of the big bad city but instead explore a vibrant fusion of both sentiments. What they certainly convey is a sense of complexity and fragmentation, rather like the urbanism of Alfred Döblin’s novel “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (the German “Ulysses”). Kirchner was close with the Modernist writer, illustrating his plays with woodcuts.

In 1911, Kirchner had moved to Berlin and placed Die Brücke under the wing of Max Pechstein’s Neue Secession (an Expressionist group that splintered from the Impressionist-dominated Secession, which itself, a generation earlier, had broken away from the official Academy). His street scenes represented a new level of ambition in terms of scale and thematic scope. Whereas earlier paintings tended to concentrate on one or two figures in interior space, and relied heavily on virulent, glowing color for their expressive effect, the street scenes moved outdoors, exploring the city at night in multi-figure compositions. Formally, there is a shift in emphasis from color to line, although the paint handling certainly remains coarse and robust. The female figures in “Berlin Street Scene,” in particular, derive their strange fusion of angularity and voluptuousness from Kirchner’s close examination of the Renaissance master Lucas Cranach.

The ambiguous space in “Berlin Street Scene” is at once expansive and compressed. There is a sense of both claustrophobia and alienation, rather like Edvard Munch’s city street scenes. A throng of pedestrians and a horse-drawn carriage at the back of the composition signal traffic and commotion. The foreground opens out to a small group of two women making their way toward the viewer, and between us and them, two men, seen from the back approaching the women. The head of one of the men, smoking his cigarette, is awkwardly turned almost at 90 degrees to meet our gaze, his hand similarly contorted. Glamorously attired and brazen in their sexual authority, the women are most probably streetwalkers. That one looks haughtily ahead while her companion subtly meets the glance of an admirer indicates the codified language of commercial exchange on the heavily policed Berlin streets.

As Pamela Kort recounts, in a vivid and engaging new book on the painting, the faces of the three protagonists in “Berlin Street Scene” belong to the artist himself and two sisters, the nightclub dancers Erna and Gerda Schilling. Erna had become Kirchner’s new companion — he broke with Doris Grosse, the model of his Dresden pictures, when she refused to join him in Berlin — and stayed with him for the rest of his life. This combination within a single, spatially charged composition of autobiography and prostitution can only force a comparison with another canvas where these themes cohabit: Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon.”

It is Berlin’s loss and New York’s gain that, in the restitution shuffle, Kirchner’s painting is wrested from the company of its fellow Die Brücke works, including many important paintings of his own, to this small, if delightful, new museum. Perhaps the Neue Galerie will take the lead in a reunion of the whole series, with stops in New York and Berlin.

Until September 17 (1048 Fifth Ave. at 86th Street, 212-994-9491).