Inside the Sotheby’s Takeover of the Breuer Building

On Wednesday afternoon, three days before Sotheby’s was set to open its new home in the old Whitney, the auction house’s CEO, Charles Stewart, was standing in the old-new lobby, snapping an iPhone photo of a color-popped Frank Stella painting from the ’60s. Then he took a picture of a giant Jean Arp sculpture, darting around in his typical natty suit, exuding his usual bucket-of-sunshine demeanor, peppering most sentences with, “Isn’t that amazing?”