Sotheby’s has announced plans to acquire the Breuer Building from the Whitney Museum of American Art at Madison Avenue and 75th Street and relocate its galleries and York Avenue saleroom to the space in 2025. According to A Bloomberg report, the auction house will buy the brutalist building for around $100 million.
Designed by Bauhaus-trained architect Marcel Breuer, the building has had its fair share of occupants since its construction. It was first the third home of the Whitney from 1966 to 2014before the museum moved to its current home in the Meatpacking District in May 2015. The Breuer Building was later occupied by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which used the space to display contemporary art in what some criticized as a heavy undertaking that forced the institution to spread its resources over a period of financial stress. Then, in 2021, it became the temporary home of the Frick Collection while the institution’s headquarters on 70th Street underwent renovations; the Frick is set to reopen his Fifth Avenue mansion in 2024.
The mid-century building initially received mixed reviews upon its completion in 1966, considered heavy and oppressive. Write for the New York Herald columnreview Emily Genauer would have been baptized the “Madison Avenue Monster” structure. Reception has since mellowed, and the Breuer Building is often cited as a notable Brutalist landmark.
Notably, the previous tenants of the Breuer building have all been museums: this is the first time that a commercial enterprise will occupy the space. The move will place the auction house closer to mega-galleries like Gagosian and Mnuchin and public institutions lining Museum Mile, which isn’t to everyone’s taste.
Visual theorist and activist Nicolas Mirzoeffprofessor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, called the acquisition “a sad waste”.
“The 19th-century museum displayed imperial loot as part of a white supremacy web linking it to statues and borders. Today’s extractive capitalism has replaced this network with one linking art fairs to auctions and galleries,” said Mirzoeff, whose most recent book White Sight: visual politics and practices of whiteness (2023) discusses the ways in which visual culture perpetuates systems of oppression. “The acquisition of Sotheby’s – to use the old obfuscation for spoils – the Whitney marks the new high point of art as a demonstration of oligarchic acquisition.”
News of Sotheby’s acquisition plans comes less than three months after Whitney Museum director Adam Weinberg announcement he will leave the institution in the fall after 20 tumultuous years at its head.
