Sotheby's will move its New York headquarters to the Whitney Museum's former home, a Brutalist structure on Madison Avenue designed by architect Marcel Breuer Photo by Max Touhey
Sotheby’s will purchase the former site of the Whitney Museum of American Art and relocate its headquarters from the York Avenue building it has called home for more than four decades, a deal that confirms months of rumours about the auction house's real estate maneuvers.
Sotheby’s had no comment about the price of the building, but people familiar with the deal told The New York Times and Artnet News the Whitney had sold its Marcel Breuer-designed building for a little over $100m. Sotheby’s will take possession of the Breuer building in September 2024, the auction house said, but will retain ownership of the York Avenue complex until it opens its new galleries in the Breuer building in 2025.
Breuer's Brutalist structure has been a fixture in the New York art world since it was completed in 1966. It was home to the Whitney until 2015 when the museum moved to its new Renzo Piano-designed home in the Meatpacking District. Subsequently it served as an outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art known as the Met Breuer, where the museum staged Modern and contemporary art shows. Currently it is being rented to the Frick Collection while that museum’s Upper East Side mansion undergoes a renovation (the Frick’s lease ends in August 2024).
“We are honoured to acquire and write the next chapter of such an iconic and well-known New York architectural landmark,” Sotheby’s chief executive Charles F. Stewart says in a statement. "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."
Rumours about Sotheby's potentially moving its headquarters have been swirling for months. In the June print issue, The Art Newspaper reported that the auction house was looking into selling its current New York flagship, a former cigar factory and Kodak warehouse at 1334 York Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
The auction house's owner Patrick Drahi, the French-Israeli billionaire, refinanced the 500,000 sq. ft building in 2020 using a five-year $483m floating rate loan from Barclays, according to The Real Deal, a property news website. In 2020 US interest rates were at zero. Last month the Federal Reserve raised the cost of borrowing to a 16-year high of 5.25%.
Over that same period, the share price of Altice USA, the cable TV company owned by Drahi, has fallen by 93%. Altice USA is based in Long Island City where, in February 2020, Sotheby’s also spent $82m on a new, nine-story office building.
Despite today's news, only a few weeks ago a Sotheby’s spokesperson denied the rumours of a move, telling The Art Newspaper: “York Avenue is not for sale”.
Sotheby’s purchased the York Avenue location for $11m and spent $140m on expanding and renovating the space before moving in in 1980. Sotheby’s sold the building in 2002—amid a price-fixing scandal that also implicated rival Christie’s—for $175m to real estate firm RFR Holding, which leased it back to the auction house. Sotheby’s repurchased the space in 2009 for $370m. In 2019, Sotheby's spent a further $55m renovating its York Avenue complex to maximise gallery space.
The Breuer building deal will provide a significant boost to the Whitney's endowment. The sale will also allow the museum to “focus its undivided attention and all of its energies on forwarding our mission” in the Meatpacking District, the Whitney's outgoing director Adam Weinberg said in a statement.
