Sotheby’s and Independent Announce Partnership
167Sept. 10, 2025
Top auction house Sotheby’s and well-known New York art fair operatorIndependenton September 8 announced a multiyear collaboration that will see the latter mount its Independent 20th Century art fair, featuring work made between 1900 and 2000, at Sotheby’s Breuer Building headquarters in Manhattan, beginning in 2026.
The Breuer Building, the five-story Brutalist structure at 945 Madison Avenue that for decades served as the home of the Whitney Museum of American Art and then, more briefly, housed the Met Breuer and the temporarily displaced Frick Collection, appears to be central to the agreement, as both entities perceive its stark, nearly windowless confines as a sales-enhancing setting for the artworks each is peddling.
For Sotheby’s, which will move into the building this November, the partnership allows the concern to be seen as “more than an auction house,” and the Breuer as a cultural hub, rather than only a selling site, Madeline Lissner, Sotheby’s global head of fine art told theNew York Times.
The Independent, for its part, will gain a larger space for its fair, which for the past few years has been held at Casa Cipriani inside the Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan; participating galleries will enjoy a roughly 25 percent decline in exhibition costs. Independent will move its second fair, simply called Independent and presenting contemporary art, to Pier 36, near Manhattan’s historic South Street Seaport.
The deal is the first of its kind to be struck between a major auction house and a large art fair operator and reflects the profound recent shifts in the way contemporary art is bought and sold, as well as changes in the artmarket’s fortunes. The past twelve months alone have seen the cancellation or postponement of four major art fairs, and year-over-year decreases in art sales at blue-chip auction houses.
“There’s always been some sort of tension between gallerists and auction houses, because they operate in competition with each other,” Caren Decter, a partner at the art law firm Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, toldHyperallergic. “It’s a hard time for the art market right now, but maybe this is where we’re going to see interesting new collaborations and energy injected.”