NEW YORK: New York is adding to its glittering portfolio of art museums with a new gallery dedicated to modern and contemporary art — The Met Breuer, which opens with a retrospective of a little known Indian artist.

The gallery is housed in the modernist icon that Hungarian-born Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer built in 1966 on Madison Avenue for the Whitney Museum of American Art, which last year moved downtown to a spanking new site.

When the Breuer opens to the public on March 18, it will become the third site for the famed Metropolitan Museum of Art — the city’s most frequented museum. Last year it welcomed a record 6.3 million visitors to its Fifth Avenue address and Cloisters celebrating Medieval art in northern Manhattan.

“This is a masterpiece of mid-century architecture and we are going to be reactivating it with a new curatorial spirit,” Met director Thomas Campbell told reporters, calling it a “significant moment for the city.”

The project is the brainchild of billionaire philanthropist Leonard Lauder, the son of cosmetics legend Estee who has endowed the Met with millions of dollars to further its modern and contemporary art and scholarship.

The Met says the Breuer will compliment, rather than compete with, what’s already on offer by linking the present to its almost unparalleled historical archives.

“What our peers do is show modern and contemporary art in the context of the modern and contemporary. What the Met does, uniquely, is that we have the historical traditions that modern and contemporary artists are either embracing or reacting against,” said Campbell. It’s “a different experience,” he added.

The other exhibition is the first retrospective in a US museum of Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi, looking back on her delicate, meditative art from the beginning of her career in the 1960s until her death in 1990.

Born in Karachi, which is today in modern-day Pakistan, she grew up and worked in India, but remained obscure throughout her lifetime.

“It’s a giant step for us,” said Kiran Nadar, a prominent Indian art collector who owns several Mohamedi works in the exhibition and who six years ago opened the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art New Delhi.

“Indian art is perceived as very figurative, so to see abstraction in the purest sense coming out of India is going to be an eye opener for people here,” she added. “I think it’s going to start a new recognition of Indian art.”