At the old Whitney, a Pyrrhic preservation victory

Given that Kate Wagner took a writing assignment directly from the auction house in question, and Michael Kimmelman offered mostly genial praise, I suppose it’s left to me, at this point in the hype cycle, to state the obvious:

Sotheby’s, in the process of saving the old Whitney Museum, has significantly degraded the experience of actually spending time inside the building.

Our first reaction should of course be gratitude that Marcel Breuer’s 1966 upside-down granite ziggurat, at Madison and East 75th, remains standing (and hasn’t been turned into condos or the offices of a hedge fund with very good architectural taste). What’s more, virtually all the damage that’s been done by Sotheby’s and its restoration architects—Herzog & de Meuron, in a rare false step from the Swiss office—is reversible. 

But why kid ourselves? There has been a meaningful price to pay—a preservationist’s premium, let’s call it—for the switch from museum to auction-house headquarters. After making two visits to “Sotheby’s at the Breuer” (cursed locution!) over the last week, I have no desire to return anytime soon, which is to say that although the building is open to anyone, without an appointment, it no longer holds a place on my mental map of significant public architecture in Manhattan. At least not in its current configuration.

The changes, executed by Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with PBDW, the architects of record, include: lighting bright enough in several galleries to suggest an operating theater; a dense thicket of movable partitions, many wedged uncomfortably close to Breuer’s coffered concrete ceilings; and far too many paintings, however stunning they may be individually, crowded onto that ginned-up maze of walls. This month, as a special treat, there is also a deeply odd installation of Surrealist artworks spotlighted against purple-black curtains, as if the paintings were deep-sea creatures vulnerable to even the tiniest speck of natural light. The star of this display is an overripe painting by Frida Kahlo expected to fetch north of $40 million next week.

In one corner of the lobby, where the coat closet used to be, there is a wall of Hermès Birkin bags beneath Breuer’s signature naked ceiling bulbs and alongside vitrines holding a handful of first editions (Dickens, Tolkien) and jewelry by David Webb. Nearby, a glowing 1966 Frank Stella, “Concentric Square,” is protected by a black airport-style divider running awkwardly across the bottom of the canvas, while a digital display shows labels of the 2009 La Tâche Domaine de la Romaine-Conti, a vintage, according to the Sotheby’s website, that possesses a “covert power.”

In short, Breuer’s tough, elegant, and idiosyncratic building—a work of architecture whose appeal, as Ada Louise Huxtable memorably put it, “grows on one like a taste for olives and warm beer”—is now suffering the indignity of being treated like just another warehouse holding a high-end art fair.

If visiting an art fair could give you gout, that is. Walking through the galleries now is like eating at the French Laundry and watching as every one of your six, seven, or even dozen exquisite courses is deposited, Thanksgiving style, onto a single overstuffed plate. The Guston and the Tuymans are piled atop the Haring and wedged next to the Kusama, the Baldessari, the Kruger, and the Ruscha, with a magnum of that decanted La Tâche waiting to wash it all down.

Those particular paintings will be gone soon enough, replaced by another batch of artworks primping for an upcoming sale. The churn is in fact part of the show. The battalion of art handlers, seemingly everywhere in their trim dark aprons and white gloves, are the stars of many spaces, alongside the auctioneers with their beautifully tailored suits and plummy accents, ready to rhapsodize about any of several dozen artists at the drop of a paddle. During the media preview I heard mini lectures on Gustav Klimt, Yves Tanguy, and Maurizio Cattelan, whose solid-gold toilet, entitled “America,” is on display in a mirrored-glass bathroom ahead of a Nov. 18 sale.

The too-muchness of many of the gallery displays, their overarching, overstuffed clusterfuckedness, is in stark contrast not just to the ways in which Whitney curators once treated the building (before decamping in 2015 for new downtown digs, designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop) but also to a pair of valiant recent efforts to keep it in the museum-world orbit. The first happened when the Metropolitan Museum leased the building from the Whitney, and helped beautifully to restore it, as a satellite location for its modern and contemporary collections.

Then, from 2021 to 2024, the Frick Collection moved in while remaking its own building not far away. It was an arrangement, masterfully overseen by Annabelle Selldorf and the curator Xavier Salomon, that made both the building and the Frick’s paintings, in their giant gilded frames, and with plenty of room to breathe, look better than ever. It was officially called the Frick Madison, and more familiarly the Frickney. 

Here I quote Thomas de Monchaux, writing in the New York Review of Architecture:

“For those thousand and eighty-one days, the Frickney was the best art museum in the history of New York City.... Breuer’s severe melancholia perfectly tempered the single vice of Henry Clay Frick’s taste: a tendency, somewhere at the edge of a Fragonard or an Ingres, toward the cloyingly dainty, fussy, shiny, and insipid. Certain pieces, such as Giovanni Bellini’s 1480 ‘St. Francis in the Desert,’ granted its own chamber in which steady northern light from one of Breuer’s trapezoidal windows appeared to fall not merely onto the canvas but into the saint’s own eyes, seemed at long last to have come home.”

The balance in any museum between objects on display—objects that reward sustained attention—and places to rest your eyes, and your nervous system, is a crucial one. It might just be the crucial one. What Sotheby’s has done in this latest remaking of 945 Madison is to tip that balance so far in the direction of sheer volume of art on view as to wreck—at least for me—the experience of visiting Breuer’s building. True, the original architecture remains largely intact under the piles of excess (and the Whitney’s brilliant stair, thankfully, is virtually untouched). But that could change over time, as only the exterior and the lobby of Breuer’s design—not the galleries—are landmarked.

Of course we all understand the direction the art market has taken in recent years, and the ways in which museums as well as auction houses are to blame. But it is hard to concentrate on any given painting when two dozen others within your field of vision are jostling for your attention. It is harder still, in these hothouse conditions, to produce a coherent thought about the relationship of those paintings to the architectural container in which they hang.

There was measured optimism when it was announced in 2023 that Sotheby’s had purchased the Breuer building for $100 million. It could have been so much worse, is what many of us thought. As Kimmelman put it in his review, the auction house’s “business is, after all, selling art (which it exhibits).”

Ah, but there’s the rub: The selling always takes priority, and Sotheby’s is exceptionally good at shoving it to the front of the queue. Rarely has a single set of parentheses done more work in a critical essay.

News & Notes

Michael Lewis, writing in the Wall Street Journal, likes the new JPMorgan Chase headquarters a lot more than I do.

I don’t have any moral objection to Architectural Record publishing an interview with David Adjaye—his first in this country, as far as I’m aware, since accusations of serious sexual misconduct appeared in the Financial Times two years ago. But the execution, the generally softball questions, and the curiously old-fashioned headline (“The Matter of Mr. Adjaye”) leave a lot to be desired. And how could Josephine Minutillo not have bothered to visit Adjaye’s brand-new Studio Museum in Harlem, a mere five miles from Record’s Manhattan offices, before conducting the Q&A?

An update from Mark Lamster: “Plans to abandon Dallas City Hall are a tragic farce.”

Punch List is published weekly. Subscribe free here, or sign up for a paid subscription, with bonus material, here.

Email: [email protected]