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<\/p>\n\n\tSotheby\u2019s did not just open a new headquarters this week\u2014it staged a return to form. <\/p>\n
\n\tThe auction house has taken over Marcel Breuer\u2019s Brutalist landmark on Madison Avenue, a building that has already lived several cultural lives: it was the longtime home of the Whitney Museum, then the Met Breuer, followed by a short-lived contemporary art annex of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a temporary Frick Collection outpost. Now, after a renovation by Herzog & de Meuron, Breuer\u2019s building becomes something else again\u2014not a museum, exactly, but a museum-sized showroom.<\/p>\n
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\n\tThe building\u2019s architectural bones remain unmistakable. The cantilevered granite fa\u00e7ade, the deep-set windows, the weight of postwar seriousness. What\u2019s new is what happens inside. Herzog & de Meuron\u2019s self-described \u201cquasi-invisible\u201d intervention was a matter of subtraction more than addition: removing office partitions, restoring original gallery proportions, and installing the kind of climate, sound, and lighting systems expected of an auction house that can sell a painting for the price of a Manhattan skyscraper.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tVisitors entering the lobby are immediately pulled between spectacle and restraint. On one wall hangs a monumental Damien Hirst cherry-blossom painting, while opposite it is a hard-edged, rainbow-hued concentric square work by Frank Stella. To the left stands a hefty Jean Arp sculpture. Vitrines display jewelry from Cartier and David Webb, Rolexes, Patek Phillippes, and of course a limited edition Birkin Bag, under surgical lighting; to the right, rare manuscripts including a first editions of The Hobbit and Alice in Wonderland \u2014 a visual split-screen of glamour and scholarship. The ceilings are still lined with Breuer\u2019s saucer-like fixtures. The terrazzo flooring, studiously grey, and the classic stone walls are intact, giving the lobby an elegant, sturdy feel that just on the secular side of ecclesiastic. <\/strong>But the building has shifted from contemplation to transaction, or, as Sotheby\u2019s might argue, from passive viewing to active circulation.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tSotheby\u2019s Breuer lobby gallery, featuring works from the Collection of Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhotography by Stefan Ruiz. Courtesy of Sotheby\u2019s<\/p>\n \n\tSotheby\u2019s is inaugurating the space not with a single sale, but with a sequence of exhibitions that behave like a full-scale biennial of private wealth. Three truly exceptional single-owner collections \u2014 Leonard A. Lauder, Cindy and Jay Pritzker, and Exquisite Corpus \u2014 anchor the November season, together estimated at over a billion dollars on the high end, double last year\u2019s total for the same season.<\/p>\n \n\tFrom the Lauder trove come three Gustav Klimts, each appearing at auction for the first time; from the Pritzker collection, a Van Gogh still life the house is billing as one of the artist\u2019s finest examples still in private hands; and from Exquisite Corpus, a Frida Kahlo painting positioned to reset the record for a woman artist at auction. The contemporary evening sale centers on Basquiat\u2019s Crowns (Peso Neto) and Maurizio Cattelan\u2019s fully functional 18-karat gold toilet, America \u2014 a work whose opening bid will be pegged to the price of gold at the moment the gavel drops.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAll of it is free for the public to view until the hammer falls.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n