On Friday, September 25th, 2026, a special conversation was held at Independent 20th Century on the history of 945 Madison Avenue, Marcel Breuer’s iconic 1966 building, which served as the Whitney Museum of American Art for 48 years and hosted The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection, before becoming Sotheby’s New York headquarters. Moderated by Charles F. Stewart, Chief Executive Officer of Sotheby’s, the discussion brought together Richard Armstrong, Director Emeritus, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and former Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, with Ian Alteveer, Chair of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and former Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. They shared their experiences of working in, and with, the storied edifice. Below are highlights from their talk, edited for brevity and clarity.
Photo by Leandro Justen.
Charles F. Stewart: We are celebrating the 60th anniversary of the building. It opened on September 28th, 1966, and I have been looking back on that period and reading about some of the things that were said about it at the time. It was a very controversial building and Marcel Breuer knew it. But Ada Louise Huxtable, who was probably the most significant architectural critic of the time, wrote [in The New York Times] that “the taste for its disconcertingly top-heavy, inverted pyramidal mass grows on one slowly, like a taste for olives or warm beer.”
We have certainly discovered that it does grow on you. The more time you spend here, the more you appreciate it. Think about the close-to-earth materials and how beautifully they have aged over 60 years—the brass, the bronze, the bluestone floors, the unfinished concrete, the teak banisters. Could you each talk about your first times being in this building?
Richard Armstrong: I think I came here in 1967, so I saw it relatively early. If you have ever looked on the 74th Street side, you see a very small staircase, and I would imagine how I could get into the building without paying by going down that staircase.
Charles F. Stewart: Admission was 50 cents in those days.
Richard Armstrong: Could not afford it.
Charles F. Stewart: We have lowered the price.
Richard Armstrong: I found the building intriguing, even back then, not knowing much about architecture. A few years later, in 1973, I came here for the Whitney Independent Study Program, which was not in this building, by the way; it was downtown, but we were allowed to do an exhibition in this building, which was very freewheeling of the administration. So, with other people, we made a show called Frank O'Hara: A Poet Among Painters and met lots of artists who were from that era. Then, I worked on a lot of biennials, a number of big shows.
Charles F. Stewart: Ian, can I ask you about your first experiences in the building?
Ian Alteveer: I am trying to remember when I first came. My grandmother lived on 74th Street and she virulently despised this building and never took me here. We would always go to the Met and MoMA when I was up here visiting her. But, as I got into seeing art more and more as I grew up, I would come on my own whenever I was in New York, and what a treat it was to install shows here when we finally made it the Met Breuer.
I realized in those early moments that, overlaid on top of my experience [as a curator], was this long history of so many other projects that I had seen in this building, from the 1990s on. There is something about this building that keeps all of that memory. I see [those decades of exhibitions] layered on top of each other in my mind's eye in the most incredible way. I do not know that there is another institution that I could say the same for. Even at MoMA, I can remember shows, but not in this vivid way that I remember shows installed here.
Installation view, Al Held, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (October 11 – December 1, 1974). Courtesy of the Al Held Foundation, Inc.
Charles F. Stewart: Richard, what did you think about using this space as a curator? What was either appealing or dramatic about it, what was challenging and how did it change over time as you put on shows here?
Richard Armstrong: It is very rigid, it is very unforgiving in its own way. It does not really suggest how you can alter the space until you take all the walls out. When you do that, then the building has a different personality, a much better one in a way. When Richard Marshall and I organized The New Sculpture 1965–75: Between Geometry and Gesture, we took all the walls out of the whole building and put up Post-Minimalist sculpture by 10 artists on all three floors. The building was alive. To my mind, I think the building is happiest with sculpture. Although today, when I go downstairs and see large-scale paintings by Al Held, for example, you can see that it accommodates pictures in a very nice way if they have some muscle.
Charles F. Stewart: Fun fact: that big red and white Al Held painting [on view in the fair], if I am not mistaken, was last shown in this building in an exhibition.
Richard Armstrong: In 1974. I was the gopher of that show.
Charles F. Stewart: In all of the shows that you were involved in and put on here, are there ones that really stand out to you that did particularly well in this space?
Richard Armstrong: Not really. I think I did not know how to exploit the place. I had a bad sense of color for the walls. The lighting was not nearly so good as it is today and we could not afford to get all the scarification off the floor. So, we put down these dark, shellacky surfaces on the floor and they ate up a lot of art. It is much better now when you see them clean. The only thing that I regret is that back room on the third floor, which was carpeted and had stucco walls and it was proof positive that one of Breuer's central preoccupations was tactility.
Charles F. Stewart: Picking up on your comment of light, that was obviously a concern to us when we acquired the building. And the first revelation was exactly as you said, when all the walls came out and we realized that there is actually quite a bit of light. We have tried to preserve, on every floor, the corridors of light, and you will notice that as you walk around.
The evolution of technology has meant that we feel really good about the light, even when you are in a space that is less naturally lit. Then, of course, there is the light in the lobby, and if there is a more iconic lobby in New York or in the art world, I am not sure I know what it is.
Richard Armstrong: The Guggenheim.
Charles F. Stewart: They are cousinly buildings, in the sense that the Guggenheim was built in 1959 and this was ‘66.
Ian Alteveer: The lighting is interesting because I think it also relates to the materiality of the building. I remember when I was installing Vija Celmins’s show and she was on the floor by the elevators staring at the wall, that wonderful nubbly [hammered concrete wall] studded with obsidian stones. She was fascinated by that surface and also thinking of the kitchen she was renovating. So, she turned to her amazing studio manager and said, “I think I want to do this for the backsplash in the kitchen.” And he said, "Vija, do you know what this is? It is poured concrete that's been sandblasted?" And she said, "I know."
So many of the artists I worked with were in love with the materiality of the building, but each of them approached it in a different way. Vija's approach was acknowledging the concrete, the stone, as all these natural materials that needed a brighter daylight, a cooler temperature of light. So we actually cooled the lights down to 5,000–5,500 kelvin for that show, which was weird, because it looks cold but it is not. Making little changes like that actually really affects the building in interesting ways, just as different works make the building look slightly different. It is amazing how it accommodates all kinds of things.
Charles F. Stewart: Ian, you spent two decades at The Metropolitan Museum. I would love to hear about The Met Breuer, how it came to be and what was the thinking behind it at the time?
Photo by Stefan Ruiz. Courtesy of Sotheby's.
Ian Alteveer: For many years, maybe as long as I was there, there was talk about redoing the Modern wing at the Met, which had not originally been built as a wing for art. It was converted into galleries in the 1980s, during construction. So, there was always the feeling that the Met never had adequate spaces for contemporary work and maybe also needed to do some work around the program for contemporary art. Discussions had already begun well before Tom Campbell became the director and Sheena Wagstaff, my former boss, came over from Tate. Originally, I think, The Met Breuer was meant to have been a swing space: we would move in, they would tear down the Modern wing, rebuild it, and we would move back in. Of course, it never works out that neatly and we are about a decade off in this case.
But we saw it, under Sheena's guidance, as an amazing opportunity to plant a flag of a program in a crowded field. There are countless places in New York City to see Modern and contemporary art—all kinds of institutions, large and small. We felt strongly that there was still room to do something a little different and to think about what that would mean for the Met in general—to build a reputation around Modern and contemporary art for an institution that had not really had much of one. I had worked on many shows in the Met's main building before the Breuer—John Baldessari and Richard Serra drawings and Jasper Johns—but I cannot tell you how many times people would ask, "Oh, there is contemporary art at the Met?" So, this was really about showing what we could do, in the spirit of a large, transhistoric, global collection.
It was amazing because we were trying something new and really excited to see that there was a good response and an interest in our point of view. But also that we could present surveys for artists who had been for many years overlooked or undervalued, or whose careers had not been assessed in a way that we thought would be important. That was very exciting, to make a mark for artists, many of whom are women, many of whom are of color, to be part of that conversation and add a Met imprimatur as well.
The other thing that I loved about our program was that it was very much in partnership with other institutions that we admired. That was a clever way for us to align ourselves with programs and colleagues who we thought were doing good work—the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, MCA Chicago, MoCA Los Angeles, the Walker in Minneapolis, the list goes on.
Charles F. Stewart: Richard, you mentioned that you have this unique history at the Guggenheim and the Whitney. I want to go back to the article that Ada Louise Huxtable wrote about the Breuer building in September 1966. She says: "The exhibits are now being installed and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish art from artifact. . . . It is rumored that a shovel stood by a wall for a week until its status was settled. In a sense, however, the building is its own exhibit. But unlike the Guggenheim, it is not the whole show. The new Whitney uses the strict, understated fulfillment of a functional program as the basis for a serious and successful work of architecture." There is a real kinship between the Guggenheim and this building. They are both these inverted structures, one circular, one square. They both hold their own with relatively short heights in a sea of towers. And, of course, they are both purpose-built for the display of art in their own ways. I am curious how you would compare and contrast them.
Richard Armstrong: Wright and Breuer both use the phrase “inverted ziggurat.” Breuer was certainly meditating on Wright and it was unusual that he would have gotten the job, period, because he had not done anything of this scale anywhere and was not always the most popular architect of the moment. What I think is so peculiar is that this great museum of German and German-derived art has a building put together by the greatest American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the museum of American art has a building put together by one of the greatest German-Hungarian architects. So, it is like cross-dressing to me in the end.
Even though I had a terrible prejudice against the Guggenheim for many years while working here—because the two institutions really did not speak in a way, not literally and metaphorically—I really feel in the end that the Guggenheim building is more inspired and it might also show art in a better way. Part of that is kinesthesia. When you are walking around, you have a feeling of progress, or falling—one or the other. But it is a building where, when pictures and sculpture are properly presented, which is hard to do, you really remember what you saw.
It is an echo of what you said earlier about this building, Ian. I remember many things here because I spent so much time here, but I am not sure the public at large would feel that way. Whereas, at the Guggenheim, I think that the bays in a weird way operate as a memory frame. When you look across the void in the middle and see other people experiencing what you just did, it really clicks in your memory. So, this building is unquestionably connected to the ambition of the Frank Lloyd Wright building.
Photo by Stefan Ruiz. Courtesy of Sotheby's.
Ian Alteveer: I have never installed anything at the Guggenheim. I would imagine it would be very difficult. In this building, there is also a kind of rhythm to the floors. I realized that was something I needed to work with. I could not fight against it. I have memories of exhibitions here that I thought were not as successful because there was too much intervening in the architecture. I realized that every project needed to follow the pace of the space—the ceiling will drop in the back and the middle, so, you needed to think through what that would mean for your narrative or how the show would look. It was like another curator that was forcing you to think things through in a different way.
Richard Armstrong: Historically, if you look back at the time that this building revealed itself most, it was the Robert Irwin retrospective in 1979, because the fifth floor was completely emptied and people were shocked.
Ian Alteveer: That is the work that was shown again before the Whitney left the building—the whole floor and the scrim. It is an amazing work.