Since its inception in an Upper East Side mansion six years ago, the Neue Galerie has often been a victim of its own success. But that victimization seems to have trebled on the occasion of the newly installed “GustavKlimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections.”

It is now evident, if it was not already, that Klimt has entered that select stratosphere of painterly fame that only a handful of other artists can claim. Among these artists are Picasso, van Gogh, Caravaggio, Leonardo, and, on a good day, Monet. Six painters in all have the power to make otherwise affluent and well-mannered people crawl all over one another in order to win a fleeting proximity to their thaumaturgic touch. As if to complete Klimt’s apotheosis, the museum has included one of the blue smocks that he wore whenever he painted, as well as a stunning recreation of his studio, which may be the most compelling part of the entire show.

The show’s title, however, is all-important. Though there seems to be a sense that this is a retrospective of Klimt, in that it takes up all of the museum’s gallery space, it is not a retrospective, and anyone who comes to it expecting a retrospective will walk away disappointed. It is merely a collection of eight paintings and 120 drawings that are from the collections of Mr. Lauder, who founded the museum, and of the late art dealer Sabarsky, Mr. Lauder’s longtime friend and colleague. As such, it makes no claim and can make no claim to being anything other than an adventitious assembly of works, most of them on paper.

Once that all-important fact is impressed upon the mind, an appreciation of the art can begin. The queen bee of the collection, of course, is the portrait “Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” which the museum acquired two years ago for the sum of $125 million. Lest you think it philistine to dwell upon the price tag, I would submit to you that, although the painting is as wondrous as people say, the stunt value of all those millions — making it the most expensive painting in the world — was directly causative of Klimt’s recent induction into the pantheon mentioned above.

The critical history of Klimt (1862–1918) is one of the stranger phenomena in the appreciation of modern art. It parallels fairly closely the fortunes of his friend and amorous rival, Gustav Mahler, in music. Relative to their predecessors and to subsequent generations, both men occupied a position that, like the works they created, was fraught with complex ambiguity. Each man represented the last gasp of a dying tradition — figural art on the one hand and tonal music on the other. Each altered and twisted that tradition to such a degree as to seem alienated from it, although neither of them ever effected that climactic breakdown that Picasso and Schönberg achieved in painting and music, respectively. As a result, Klimt and Mahler were dead nearly half a century before they were tentatively resurrected in the early 1970s.

Now that the crisis between Modernism and non-Modernism has become largely irrelevant, we are finally in a position to admire Klimt according to his merits. As evidenced in the Neue Gallerie exhibition, he can be sloppy, lackluster, and uninspired, all within a context of generally luminous competence. That competence is exhibited, not least, in the deft academic works that open the show. But when Klimt rises, as often, to height of his powers, how deeply he strikes home!

In works such as the portrait “Adele Bloch Bauer I,” or his landscapes, or his “Beethoven Frieze” (recreated in the galleries as a lifesize photographic mural), there is an almost supernatural tact in the creation of eccentrically off-kilter compositions that succeed in seeming flawlessly and simply right. Joined to the works is a draftsmanly dazzle greatly fortified by the academic tradition from which Klimt emerged, whose fullest expression appears in the world-weary features of Frau Bloch-Bauer and in the golden storm of biomorphic lines that make up her robes and the air around her.

But perhaps the finest thing about Klimt is the rare mood that is distilled in his best work. It is a sense of saturated, hypnagogic, well-nigh unutterable beauty at the heart of everything. Clearly the time is ripe for a full-dress retrospective of this artist. For the moment, this latest offering at the Neue Galerie will serve nicely as a thrilling foretaste.

Until June 30 (1048 Fifth Ave. at 86th Street, 212-628-6200).