Whitney Museum Announces Biennial Plans The Whitney Museum of American Art has tried different ways to organize its biennial. It has used its own staff members and invited outside curators, including Europeans, to present shows that take the measure of contemporary art in this country. Once it even asked a former art dealer, Jay Sanders, who is now a Whitney curator, to help organize one. This week the museum is announcing another approach. The 2014 Biennial will be organized by three non-Whitney curators, each taking a floor of the museum. Elisabeth Sussman and Mr. Sanders - the curators who put together the much-praised 2012 edition - will be advisers, overseeing the whole and making sure that the three guest curators don't pick the same artists to feature. The three represent a purposely diverse mix of tastes and talents. They are Stuart Comer, the film curator at the Tate Modern in London; Anthony Elms, an associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia; and Michelle Grabner, a professor and the chairwoman of the painting and drawing department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. "The idea to have three curators came about after a series of discussions here," said Donna De Salvo, the Whitney's chief curator. It's an experiment. By slicing the museum up like a layer cake and seeing how it will look collectively, it gives the curators the opportunity to express their own points of view, each on a different floor. The selection came out of a list of candidates proposed by Whitney staff members and approved by Adam D. Weinberg, the director. "We then narrowed it down to seven people and asked them to submit speculative proposals, which gave us a sense of their methodology," Ms. De Salvo said. This will be the last Biennial in the Whitney's Marcel Breuer building. The museum is leaving the Upper East Side for the meatpacking district, where it is scheduled to open its new building, designed by Renzo Piano, in 2015. Jean-Luc Baroni and his five siblings had a problem after their father, Giancarlo Baroni, died in 2007. The three brothers are all art dealers. The three sisters are not. Giancarlo Baroni was an art dealer too, but he was also a passionate collector who bought paintings, drawings and decorative arts for his own pleasure. Dividing up the collection among his six children would be difficult. "I would have loved to sell the collection myself," Jean-Luc Baroni, a London-based dealer in old master paintings and drawings, said in a telephone interview. But after years of sorting through and organizing the works, the six heirs came to the same conclusion. "The only way to avoid conflict and be totally fair," Mr. Baroni explained, "was to sell everything at auction." Sotheby's plans to hold an evening sale in New York on Jan. 29 that will feature primarily old master paintings and drawings. More old masters will be auctioned the next day. There will also be Baroni material in different Impressionist and Modern art sales, as well as in decorative arts sales, from January through April. Sotheby's estimates that the entire collection will bring more than $10 million. Christopher Apostle, who runs Sotheby's old master paintings department in New York, said the breadth of the collection amazed him. He was incredibly scholarly and bought everything from gold ground paintings to 20th-century works. Among the highlights will be "The Entombment of Christ," an early panel by El Greco from the mid-1570s. Baroni bought it at a sale in Paris in the early 1970s, Jean-Luc Baroni said, adding, "He only lent it once, to an exhibition in Venice." It has an auction estimate of $1 million to $1.5 million. Also for sale is a Venetian scene by Bellotto, estimated to bring $800,000 to $1.2 million. Because Baroni was a serious collector of Italian art from the 15th to the 18th centuries, Sotheby's will be selling examples of paintings and drawings by artists like Canaletto, Guardi and Tiepolo, including two of Tiepolo's devotional images - one of the Madonna and another of Mary Magdalene - each estimated to sell for $120,000 to $160,000. There are also drawings by more modern artists, like Boldini and Degas. What is also unusual about the collection is the price range. While the El Greco is the most expensive work, there is also a group of Rodin drawings estimated to bring from $5,000 to $7,000 each. "Not everything is important or expensive," Mr. Apostle said. He had an eye for the chic, often buying things like the gold ground paintings decades before they were in fashion. His view of art was broad and deep. The billboards created by artists in Chelsea next to the High Line have become playful, ever-changing parts of the landscape along West 18th Street and 10th Avenue. The last year or so has included a giant image of a $100,000 bill, the work of the Los Angeles artist John Baldessari, and a close-up shot of a woman's immaculately manicured and jeweled hands, created by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan with the photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari. On Monday there will be another startling sight: two zebras posed on a snowy mountaintop set against a brilliant blue sky. Created by the Italian artist Paola Pivi, the work, "Untitled (Zebras)," will be on view through Jan. 2. Although the billboard appears to be a clever example of digital manipulation, Cecilia Alemani, the curator and director of High Line Art, said that Ms. Pivi staged the photograph (live zebras and all) at Gran Sasso, a national park in central Italy known for its mountains. "It's a bit of science fiction in the landscape," Ms. Alemani said. Almost like a postcard from the future.