Sotheby’s not only opened its new headquarters this week, but it also restored it to its original state.
The auction house took over Marcel Breuer’s Brutalist landmark on Madison Avenue, a building that had already gone through a variety of cultural lives: It was the long-term home of the Whitney Museum, then the Met Breuer, then a short-lived contemporary art annex to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a temporary outpost of the Frick Collection. Now, after Herzog and de Meuron’s transformation, Bloor’s building has become something else—not a museum, to be exact, but a museum-sized showroom.
The building’s architectural skeleton is still clearly visible. Cantilevered granite facades, deeply recessed windows, a serious post-war vibe. What is new is what happens inside. Herzog and de Meuron’s self-described “quasi-invisible” intervention is more subtraction than addition: remove office partitions, restore the original gallery proportions, and install the climate, sound, and lighting systems expected of an auction house that can sell a painting for the price of a Manhattan skyscraper.
Visitors entering the lobby are immediately struck between grandeur and restraint. A large painting of cherry blossoms by Damien Hirst hangs on one wall, while opposite an angular, rainbow-hued work of concentric squares by Frank Stella. To the left stands a huge sculpture of Jean Arp. Glass cases display Cartier and David Webb jewels, Rolexes, Patek Phillippes and, of course, limited-edition Birkin bags, under surgical lighting; to the right are rare manuscripts, including first editions of The Hobbit and Alice in Wonderland – a visual split screen of glamor and scholarship. Brauer’s saucer-shaped installations still line the ceiling. The terrazzo floors, deliberately gray, and the classic stone walls remain intact, giving the lobby an elegant, solid feel, just on the secular side of the church. But the building has moved from contemplation to transaction, or as Sotheby’s might say, from passive viewing to active circulation.
Sotheby’s Breuer Lobby Gallery, featuring works from the collection of Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein.
Photography by Stephen Ruiz. Courtesy of Sotheby’s
Sotheby’s unveiled the space not with a single sale, but with a series of exhibitions that behaved like a full-scale private wealth biennial. Three truly outstanding single-owner collections, the Leonard A. Lauder, Cindy and Jay Pritzker, and the Exquisite Corpus, headline the November season, with the high-end collection expected to be worth more than $1 billion in total, double last year’s total for the same quarter.
Three works by Gustav Klimt appear in the Lauder Collection, each appearing at auction for the first time; a Van Gogh still life from the Pritzker Collection, a house hailed as one of the artist’s finest works that remains in a private collection; and a Frida Kahlo painting from the Exquisite Corpus expected to set a new auction record for a female artist. Contemporary evening sale centers on works by Basquiat Crown (Bisonnetto) and a fully functional 18-carat gold toilet by Maurizio Cattelan, USA —The opening price of a work will be tied to the price of gold at the moment the gavel falls.
All are available for free viewing by the public until the hammer falls.
With this move, Sotheby’s essentially transformed an art-historical landmark into a commercial landmark. Unlike the old York Avenue headquarters, the Brower Building will cater to everyday people, tourists, collectors, influencers and the simply curious. It’s a bet that a museum-quality viewing aura can blend with the speed of high-end sales.
Although the building is smaller than York Street, its purpose is more singular and it feels that way. Movable walls will allow the fourth gallery to transform into a sales floor on auction days, albeit in a slightly smaller space. The auction space on York Ave can accommodate just over 300 in-person visitors. The Brower Pavilion has a capacity of 200 people. To compensate, the auction house has upped its live-streaming game to make people watching at home “feel like they’re in the room,” said Lisa Dennison, Sotheby’s U.S. executive vice president and chairman. (Lisa, who has worked at the Guggenheim for many years, gave the press a tour of the gallery and sales highlights, noting at the outset that “I guess you can take the museum away from the girl, but you can’t take the girl out of the museum.”)
Before the tour began, CEO Charles Stewart called the upcoming November sales “our biggest and best sales in recent memory.” The subtext: Sotheby’s has spent the past five years building a global real estate portfolio designed to match the geography of wealth; Hong Kong, Paris and now New York – but with the cachet of Madison Avenue.
Whether this is a profound transformation or a flashy real estate maneuver depends on how you define “public.” Artwork is free to view, but only until purchased. The Breuer Museum always hosts temporary art events. This will only shorten the time. But it’s a wonderfully chic (re)addition to Madison Avenue and the New York art scene in general.
