Going Once, Going Twice

Sold! For a reported $100 million—rather under estimate—to the Sotheby’s auction house: the former home of the Whitney Museum. That building is the so modest yet so grand, and thus so urbane, 1966 Brutalist masterpiece by Marcel Breuer that was also the greatest artifact—due respect to Edward Hopper—in the museum’s collection. After the Whitney decamped to its current dog’s breakfast of a building in the Meatpacking District in 2015, the Breuer was borrowed, and sensitively and expensively refurbished, by the Metropolitan Museum during the rehabilitation of its own aging contemporary art galleries, then used similarly since 2021 by the Frick Museum during its similar renovations.

No doubt it’s a finer fate than the place becoming an Apple Store. Sotheby’s, while not an art museum is at least art-worldly; and in 2025 will poetically return from the Siberia of York Avenue to just opposite its original home on Madison, now a flagship Gagosian gallery, and adjacent to an actual Apple Store. The difficulty is that, architecturally speaking, what makes for a good contempo…