Sotheby’s new Breuer location is quickly becoming a cultural destination. Photograph by Emma Milligan/Sotheby’s

Sotheby’s reported unprecedented attendance last month for its record-shattering $1.173 billion marquee week sales—with queues circling the block from the moment its new Breuer Building headquarters opened on November 8 and more than 25,000 visitors passing through in just over a week. The auction house has, it seems, secured a new level of widespread popularity, drawing audiences beyond the usual art-world crowd

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Now, “Icons: Back to Madison” is bringing together some of the most widely celebrated works the auction house has sold over the years. Masterpieces acquired by private collectors and museums will return to Sotheby’s for the exhibition, which will be on view at the new Madison Avenue location December 13-21—a first-of-its-kind showcase made possible through a collaboration with Etihad Airways. With this show, Sotheby’s seems determined to uphold the Breuer Building’s museum-rich legacy by utilizing its landmark spaces not only to showcase art-history-defining artworks and collectibles headed to auction but also to celebrate the auction house’s own institutional history and its role in preserving the resonance of that history.

Among the highlights is Banksy’s Love is in the Bin (2018), the only artwork ever created live in an auction room when, in a radically Duchampian gesture, it partially self-shredded the moment Sotheby's hammer fell at its record price of £1.04 million. Although Sotheby’s staff admitted they had no idea the frame had been modified—and Banksy subsequently released a behind-the-scenes video revealing the mechanism hidden inside—the auction house and the sale itself played a key role in shaping the work’s meaning and afterlife.

Also in the exhibition is Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982), which sold in 2017 for a record-shattering $110.5 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for an American artist. Although the........

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