On Wednesday afternoon, three days before Sotheby’s was set to open its new home in the old Whitney, the auction house’s CEO, Charles Stewart, was standing in the old-new lobby, snapping an iPhone photo of a color-popped Frank Stella painting from the ’60s. Then he took a picture of a giant Jean Arp sculpture, darting around in his typical natty suit, exuding his usual bucket-of-sunshine demeanor, peppering most sentences with, “Isn’t that amazing?”
It was, to be fair, kind of amazing: I was about to be one of the first outsiders to enter the iconic Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue, after years of its lying empty. It was the Whitney, then The Met Breuer, then The Frick’s mid-reno waystation, and now the lobby is sporting a perked-up look, with its signature elements all intact: the bluestone floors, the dome lights, the concrete walls. Sotheby’s announced the plan in 2023, paid $100 million for the building in 2024, and waited as Herzog & de Meuron finished its tasteful, mostly imperceptible makeover. The wait is over. The Breuer is back.
And for the first time, that Stella in the lobby will come equipped with a price tag. There’s been some pearl–clutching from those who can’t fathom that all 650 pieces of art on the Breuer building’s walls will be unambiguously for sale. After decades of wrangling over the legacy of Manhattan’s Brutalist fortress—including some wacky proposals from Michael Graves and Rem Koolhaas—the Breuer house won’t be another collecting institution, but rather, the auction house that sold a $6.2 million banana to a crypto billionaire who gave millions to Donald Trump’s crypto venture and then watched as the government’s civil fraud charges against him got dropped (he denied the allegations).
Others see it as a positive outcome—what if it had become a plutocrat’s mega-mansion, as it easily could have? Instead, there will be art in the Breuer. Lots of art, all year round, and most prominently before the evening sales, when Sotheby’s will install masterpieces consigned from collectors the world over and open the doors to all. No ticket necessary. As I approached on Wednesday, staffers were affixing a sign to the front of the building: “FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.”
“It’s going to completely change how we engage with everybody,” Stewart said. “With our consignors, with collectors, with buyers, and people—the people are going to come.”
