Independent 20th Century opened today, September 24, at the Breuer Building in Manhattan — an art fair within an auction house inside a building that used to be a museum. The fifth edition of Independent's dedicated modern art fair occupies the Brutalist landmark that Sotheby's purchased in 2023.

The building carries a heavy institutional history. It served as the long-time home of the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1966 to 2014. It later briefly housed the Metropolitan Museum of Art's contemporary galleries, then the Frick Collection, which used the space temporarily during renovations. A fair nested inside an auction house inside a former museum, the setup reads as a mise en abyme of the contemporary art world.

The booths hold a substantial amount of remarkable art, particularly by late women artists who received inadequate recognition in their lifetime.

Richard Saltoun Gallery presents paintings by the Austrian-Italian Surrealist Manina. A Dadaist muse, she began painting in the 1940s after meeting Frida Kahlo in Mexico, filling canvases with mythic visions of femininity that combine minutely applied brushstrokes against explosive color passages. She exhibited with Magritte at the Hugo Gallery in New York and showed at the Venice Biennale in the 1960s. Yet Manina remains far from a household name, in part because the death of her only daughter left her without an estate, the gallery's director Monica King explained. Her paintings range between $40,000 and $160,000. For comparison, Magritte's auction record stands at $121.2 million.

Stories like Manina's define a fair whose stated premise is to "reframe the canon" of the past century's avant-garde.

Garth Greenan Gallery brought painted sculptures by Pop artist Rosalyn Drexler, rendered in plaster, wood, and found objects with charming abandon. Shown at the Guggenheim in 1965, these works are much less known than her paintings. Drexler started making paintings after her gallery, Reuben, closed — she noticed that all the other artists, all male, found representation elsewhere, so she shifted mediums. These loosely formed, slightly lumpy sculptures seem to thumb their nose at commercial taste.

Elsewhere on the floor, Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts presents sculpture by William Zorach alongside textile by Marguerite Thompson Zorach and William Zorach.

With its fifth edition, Independent 20th Century continues to stake its identity on artists the market and museums passed over — a premise that turns Sotheby's newest trophy building into a showcase for careers the canon missed.