Upper East Side residents mourning the Whitney Museum’s move last year to the Meatpacking District, fear not! In the ultimate switcheroo, a new museum, the Met Breuer, will fill the Marcel Breuer’s designed building with art once again in March.
The Met Breuer will debut its premiere show “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible” comprised of a curation of incomplete works by masters such as da Vinci and Warhol.
Time Out New York had the luxury of being shown around the place pre-opening by Beatrice Galilee, the museum’s associate curator of architecture and design for the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art.
Here are some standouts from top to bottom:
- The lobby features an oversize digital screen, when lit, creating a sea of glowing light fixtures.
- The four-story staircase’s bronze and wooden handrails feature a variety of textured treatments like bush-hammered concrete.
- As Galilee explains, in the ’60s, Breuer was “worried that the whole of New York would become this kind of commercial [city], with glass skyscrapers,” and he wanted the art museum to be a kind of sanctuary from all that. The outdoor garden designed by Günther Vogt and his team are a nod to Breuer’s vision and features a row of spindly aspens and a low blueberry bush.
- The floors are made up of restored square blue stones, with the exception of the second floor, which post-renovation, are walnut-colored.
And while the structure itself is stunning so stunning (except to fans of mid-century architecture), the art housed inside is.
Check out: “Do It Yourself (Violin)” by Andy Warhol, “The Vision of Saint John” by El Greco, and “Stag (Hirsch)” by Gerhard Richter