On Tuesday night, the Breuer Building played host to something that would have been unthinkable during the decades it spent housing The Whitney: its first auction.

Sotheby’s, newly located inside the Brutalist landmark, has been open to the public since the start of the month, and New Yorkers have lined up around the block— literally down to Park, and then to 74th, back to Madison, and back up to 75th—just to poke their heads inside the building in the weeks before the work got auctioned. Yes, crowds formed to take a selfie with Maurizio Cattelan ’s America, the solid-gold toilet. But the real draw was the collection of cosmetics heir and legendary arts patron Leonard Lauder, who in 2013 promised his astonishing 78-work collection of Cubist masterpieces to The Met. But he kept a few

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