The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, is selling its former Upper East Side home, designed in 1966 by Marcel Breuer, to Sotheby’s for about $100 million. The auction house will take possession of the five-story Brutalist structure in September 2024, after the Frick Collection, its current tenant, vacates it. Sotheby’s will relocate its headquarters there the following year. Sotheby’s CEO Charles F. Stewart told the New York Times that the chance to buy the stark, nearly windowless building was “a once in a lifetime opportunity that we couldn’t pass up.”
The fate of the Breuer Building had been in question since 2015, when the Whitney decamped to its new Renzo Piano–designed home in Manhattan’s downtown Meatpacking District after decades uptown. The Metropolitan Museum of Art for several years operated the Met Breuer at the 945 Madison Avenue address, but shuttered the contemporary art–focused branch permanently in July 2020. The Frick Collection in March 2021 moved its trove of elaborately framed old masters there in advance of a planned $160 million renovation and expansion of its home in the Gilded Age mansion of industrialist Henry Clay Frick.
The move to the Breuer Building from its current flagship on York Avenue returns Sotheby’s to the central, gallery-filled location it enjoyed more than twenty years ago, when it occupied the former Parke-Bernet Galleries just a few doors up Madison Avenue. Though the structure is not landmarked, Sotheby’s will retain an architect to oversee an interior redesign that preserves the building’s integrity. Planned are a state-of-the-art gallery and exhibition space, which will be free and open to the public, and an auction room.
“We often refer to the provenance of artwork, and in the case of the Breuer, there is no history richer than the museum which has housed the Whitney, Metropolitan and Frick collections,” said Stewart in a statement. “The acquisition will further distinguish us as we continue to transform and innovate for our clients.”
Adam D. Weinberg, the outgoing director of the Whitney, who shepherded that institution’s move downtown, cast the sale as “bittersweet” but noted that he was pleased that the building would continue to serve as a home for art. “Most importantly,” he said in a statement, “this architectural masterpiece—thanks to its status in a landmark district—will be preserved.”