The Neue Galerie has a small "focus" exhibition on Oskar Kokoschka -- just seven paintings and, in a separate gallery, 40 works on paper. To me, it illustrates the perils of placing a good but not great artist among his more impressive confreres and surroundings.
The seven works, all portraits, hang in a wood-paneled gallery that's also home (at the moment) to two fine Schiele landscapes and five vitrines filled with silver, glass, jewelry and other decorative arts by Dagobert Peche, Koloman Moser and, above all, Josef Hoffmann. Many are dazzling. Just across a threshold is the center gallery, filled with Klimts, including the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I that cost the Galerie's maestro, Ronald S. Lauder, $135 million. It's flanked by the two Georges Minne sculptures, Kneeling Youths, that were given to the Neue Galerie by Bloch-Bauer's heirs in 2007. They, like the painting, had been restituted by Austria to Maria Altmann and her relatives, in 2006. The youths had been displayed near the portrait in Austria all those decades ago, before World War II, and both the narrative and the juxtaposition remain compelling today.
With all that competition, if you were simply visiting the Neue Galerie, not specifically for the Kokoschka show, you might miss his paintings.