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The Whitney Museum of American Artwork, New York, is promoting its former Higher East Aspect dwelling, designed in 1966 by Marcel Breuer, to Sotheby’s for about $100 million. The public sale home will take possession of the five-story Brutalist construction in September 2024, after the Frick Assortment, its present tenant, vacates it. Sotheby’s will relocate its headquarters there the next 12 months. Sotheby’s CEO Charles F. Stewart advised the New York Occasions that the possibility to purchase the stark, almost windowless constructing was “a as soon as in a lifetime alternative that we couldn’t move up.”
The destiny of the Breuer Constructing had been in query since 2015, when the Whitney decamped to its new Renzo Piano–designed dwelling in Manhattan’s downtown Meatpacking District after many years uptown. The Metropolitan Museum of Artwork for a number of years operated the Met Breuer on the 945 Madison Avenue handle, however shuttered the modern artwork–targeted department completely in July 2020. The Frick Assortment in March 2021 moved its trove of elaborately framed previous masters there upfront of a deliberate $160 million renovation and enlargement of its dwelling within the Gilded Age mansion of industrialist Henry Clay Frick.
The transfer to the Breuer Constructing from its present flagship on York Avenue returns Sotheby’s to the central, gallery-filled location it loved greater than twenty years in the past, when it occupied the previous Parke-Bernet Galleries just some doorways up Madison Avenue. Although the construction shouldn’t be landmarked, Sotheby’s will retain an architect to supervise an inside redesign that preserves the constructing’s integrity. Deliberate are a state-of-the-art gallery and exhibition area, which will likely be free and open to the general public, and an public sale room.
“We regularly discuss with the provenance of art work, and within the case of the Breuer, there isn’t any historical past richer than the museum which has housed the Whitney, Metropolitan and Frick collections,” mentioned Stewart in a press release. “The acquisition will additional distinguish us as we proceed to rework and innovate for our shoppers.”
Adam D. Weinberg, the outgoing director of the Whitney, who shepherded that establishment’s transfer downtown, solid the sale as “bittersweet” however famous that he was happy that the constructing would proceed to function a house for artwork. “Most significantly,” he mentioned in a press release, “this architectural masterpiece—due to its standing in a landmark district—will likely be preserved.”
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