On the last Saturday in September, Jay Jopling, the founder of London gallery White Cube—and so far as I can tell, the only art dealer to ever make the British GQ best-dressed list—was standing on the sidewalk outside his new Upper East Side gallery. For more than a decade, Jopling had been angling to open a stateside beachhead on a stretch of Madison Avenue that constitutes the world’s toniest contemporary art nexus outside of Mayfair. A small office opened in 2018, but a proper space eluded him until this week, when he opened the doors of a group show called “Chopped & Screwed” to the public at 1002 Madison Avenue, the former home of First Republic Bank after a yearslong gut renovation. At the private opening last Saturday, servers from Sant Ambroeus, which is immediately next door, were passing around plates of arancini, tuna tartare, cacio e pepe, and vitello tonnato. Others wheeled around cocktails. Most gallery openings barely have a bottle of lukewarm Chardonnay, but White Cube’s first New York opening was catered by a place that sells $90 plates of Dover sole.
Jopling, walking back inside of his absolutely mobbed gallery, explained that for years, those ambling down Madison on their way to The Carlyle or The Whitney would walk past this structure and wonder why it had been vacant for so long.
“You know, people have relationships with this bank, like their aunt banked here,” he said. “We found all these safe deposit boxes in the basement.”
The king of the London gallery scene—ever charming and ever dressed in a Savile Row suit, and known to be interview-averse—admitted to getting a little choked up amid the opening.
“We had a dinner for the artists in the space last night, 45 artists,” he said. “And it was very emotional for me.”
Given the art world’s keeping-up-with-the-Joneses approach to expansion, it’s fairly commonplace for New York galleries to open in London, or London galleries to open in New York. But there’s something novel about a White Cube in the Big Apple, about considering Jay Jopling a Yankee gallerist. Jopling’s been the avatar of contemporary art in the United Kingdom for years, the dealer most closely associated with the movement that became known as the Young British Artists. He developed a symbiotic relationship with the ne plus ultra of the YBAs, Damien Hirst, who first showed his animals in formaldehyde after Jopling sourced the carcasses and sold them, sight unseen, to collectors. Jopling went on to open spaces in St. James’s, South London, and the East End, some of the biggest commercial spaces in that city. He opened outposts in Hong Kong and seasonal spots in Aspen and West Palm Beach.
He’s also known for annual ragers at the circuit’s ritzy ports of call. There’s the party at Soho Beach House during Art Basel Miami Beach that’s famed for its excess: platters of lobster and Joe’s Stone Crab, Champagne, beachfront property, and musical guests such as Giorgio Moroder, Kelis, and Francis and the Lights. There’s the Frieze Los Angeles party that takes over the Chateau Marmont, complete with a drum line parading through the hotel grounds. Jopling’s annual star-studded party at the Chiltern Firehouse—I’ve spotted Harry Styles, Mick Jagger, and Rob Pattinson in attendance—is often the social highlight of Frieze London.
But there’s one place he’s never thrown a party.
“I have always loved New York City, its artists and its museums,” Jopling told me.
Perhaps the way to look at it is that Jopling in Gotham was inevitable—or that in some way he’s always been here. He first came to New York in the early 1980s to work not among the galleries of 57th Street or SoHo, but to complete an internship with a diamond dealer connected to his father, Baron Jopling, who at the time was the Tory chief whip under Margaret Thatcher. While at the University of Edinburgh, where he matriculated after Eton, Jopling organized a charity auction for Save the Children, a sort of art version of Live Aid, and flew to New York to wrangle up some splashy lots to offer. Shockingly, he managed to convince art stars like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, and Anthony Caro, and it raised 250,000 British pounds.
Encouraged, he made New York a vital piece of his early career, often parachuting into the city to source works for clients and hosting pop-up shows along the way. His breakthrough was turning inward to a group of young artists in his own city, the YBAs. There was Marc Quinn, who made sculptures using pints of his own blood; Tracey Emin, who wowed Jopling when she explained to him at a party that her newest endeavor would be to write anyone three letters about her life for the price of 10 British pounds; and Damien Hirst, who asked Jopling to source a dead tiger shark, which Hirst promptly plopped in formaldehyde and had Jopling sell to advertising pooh-bah Charles Saatchi for 50,000 British pounds. The Sun ran with the now legendary wood: “50,000 for Fish Without Chips.”
For the first few years of White Cube’s reign on Duke Street in St. James’s, Jopling pumped the collections of London’s wealthiest with the new offerings from the YBAs in his stable. In 1997, Norman Rosenthal organized “Sensation,” a show at the Royal Academy of Arts entirely of Saatchi’s collection, prominently featuring Emin, Hirst, and Quinn. It was a smash hit, with 300,000 bodies passing through the museum, and two years later it arrived at the Brooklyn Museum where it received…a different reaction.
Then mayor Rudy Giuliani threatened to shut down the museum until it agreed to take down the show, even going so far as to say he’d dissolve the board of trustees in a hostile takeover. He was especially beat up about Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary, a painting that uses elephant dung on the canvas along with oil paint and resin. Lawyers for the city filed a suit against the museum, and the city withheld funding. The museum filed its own suit, and the two parties eventually settled out of court.
“If I can do it, it’s not art, because I’m not much of an artist. And I could figure out how to put this together. You know, if you want to throw dung at something, I could figure out how to do that,” Giuliani said at the time.
The show did, in fact, go on, but the whole thing was a bit scarring for Rosenthal, who was taken aback by the fact that, even in New York City, “the level of prudery is much stronger in the United States than in Europe, and that includes London.”
Jopling, on the other hand, loved it—it was a moment that crystalized his love for the city. He saw nothing but upside from the controversy. When a reporter in December 1999 asked him about Giuliani’s assault on the show, Jopling responded, “That was great! You’d pay a million dollars to get publicity on that scale!”
But even if you’re the king of the London scene, the reigning capital for the entire postwar era is New York, the epicenter of an industry that generated around $30 billion in domestic sales in 2022. The UK generated just $11.9 billion last year. For an apples-to-apples comparison, 68% of all fine art sales last year at the major houses—Sotheby’s, Phillips, and Christie’s—happened in New York, while 18% happened in London.
Rumors of a White Cube office in New York started in 2015, but Jopling had actually been looking around the Upper East Side for much longer than that. He started the search about a decade ago, he told me. One day, walking up Madison, he saw the former bank building, erected more than a century ago. The structure was aching to show art, he thought.
“Finding the right space in the right location, and embedding ourselves in a meaningful way within the community here is extremely important to me,” Jopling said. “It has great proportions and high ceilings, and is in the heart of the Upper East Side. It’s in an area historically associated with art dealing but also a short walk from some of the best museums in the world.”
There was also a place to get lunch, or cocktails: “With Sant Ambroeus, which is a bit of an art world favorite, next door, it was always going to make a perfect location for a gallery,” he said.
He added that the plan is to continue adding staff, having already brought on Sukanya Rajaratnam (previously of Mnuchin) and Courtney Willis Blair (formerly of Mitchell-Innes & Nash). At some point he will add artists to the roster as well. When asked how big a slice of the pie New York is for White Cube’s business, the gallery said the US currently constitutes a third of the balance sheets, but that amount is expected to grow.
I noticed Jopling looking over my shoulder as guests poured in—Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz weaved through an artist-heavy crowd that also included the billionaire Monegasque art collector David Nahmad, the director of The Met, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, curators from The Guggenheim, fashion treasure Michèle Lamy, two dozen artists from the White Cube stable, and eventually members of the New York City Fire Department, who had to disperse the crowds after they flooded the elevators and caused one car to get stuck in its shaft.