Icons: Back to Madison

Icons: Back to Madison inaugurates our new global headquarters at the Breuer Building and marks our return to Madison Avenue for the first time since 1980. This presentation introduces a dialogue between past and present, bringing forward some of the most extraordinary works ever handled by Sotheby’s.

The exhibition brings together 25 works that reflect the evolution of style, collecting, and the art market. Among the highlights is John Singer Sargent’s Group with Parasols (A Siesta) (1904–5), an early glimpse of the more personal, exploratory mode of expression that would come to characterize his later output. From Contemporary Art, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982) stands as a touchstone of the artist’s meteoric rise, revealing the immediacy and intensity that shaped a new visual language. Complementing these is Andy Warhol’s Orange Shot Marilyn (1964), a brilliant example of the artist’s enduring exploration of celebrity, desire, and the construction of myth. Also on view is the Lake Sentani Sculpture of a Female Ancestor from the storied collection of Helena Rubinstein, a work that speaks to the cross-cultural influences that shaped twentieth-century collecting, as well as Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Medusa Pendant, a rare, signed masterpiece that marked the genesis of Tiffany’s pioneering career in jewelry.

Seen together, these works turn to the central question of the project: what elevates an artwork from masterpiece to icon? Sometimes it is the breakthrough that defines an artist’s career, sometimes the cultural moment an object comes to represent, and sometimes the way a work enters collective memory through image, performance, or provenance. Some have shaped taste, some have shifted the market, and each reveals something essential about the creative ambition of its maker.

This exhibition offers an opportunity to reflect on nearly three centuries of discovery, scholarship, and connoisseurship at Sotheby’s. Icons is both a celebration and a meditation. It invites visitors to look closely at the moments and masterpieces that have shaped our shared history, and to imagine the future we continue to build on Madison Avenue.