Despite the mind-boggling amount of spectacular works on view, I was reminded at each turn that the Breuer Building has been turned into an art mall.
Independent 20th Century is an art fair within an auction house inside a building that used to be a museum, a monstrous mise en abyme that perfectly encapsulates the art world today.
The fifth edition of Independent’s dedicated modern art fair opened today, September 24, at the Breuer Building in Manhattan, a Brutalist landmark that was purchased by Sotheby’s in 2023. The cool, imposing structure served as the long-time home of the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1966 to 2014, and later briefly housed the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s contemporary galleries, followed by the Frick Collection, which used the space temporarily during renovations. If I were the Breuer Building, I’d need a vacation.
You can almost hear the collector class salivating at the bounty of “undiscovered” treasures packed into the booths at Independent 20th Century. Admittedly, there is a mind-boggling amount of spectacular art on display at the Breuer, particularly by late women artists who were inadequately recognized in their lifetime. Take, as just one example, the paintings of Austrian-Italian Surrealist Manina at Richard Saltoun Gallery. A Dadaist muse, she began painting in the 1940s after meeting Frida Kahlo in Mexico, filling canvases with mythic visions of femininity that combine minutely applied brushstrokes against explosive color passages. She exhibited with Magritte at the Hugo Gallery in New York and even showed at the Venice Biennale in the ’60s, but Manina is far from a household name, in part because the death of her only daughter left her without an estate, the gallery’s director Monica King explained. Her paintings range between $40,000 and $160,000. (Magritte’s auction record is $121.2 million.)
Stories like Manina’s abound at a fair whose premise is to “reframe the canon” of the past century’s avant-garde. Garth Greenan Gallery brought painted sculptures by Pop darling Rosalyn Drexler, rendered with charming abandon in plaster, wood, and found objects. Shown at the Guggenheim in 1965, they’re much less known than her paintings, which she started making after her gallery, Reuben, closed. She noticed that all the other artists — male — found representation elsewhere, so she shifted mediums. These loosely formed, slightly lumpy sculptures seem to thumb their nose at commercial taste.
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