The Whitney Museum of American Art has no intention of leaving quietly. Before heading to its new, considerably larger home in the meatpacking district of Manhattan in 2015, its final exhibition will be as much a first as it is a last. The museum is planning to present a Jeff Koons retrospective that will fill all of its Madison Avenue home, with the exception of the fifth-floor permanent exhibition galleries.

“This will be the first time a single artist has ever taken over almost the entire museum,” said Scott Rothkopf, a Whitney curator who has quietly been working on the retrospective for over a year now. “But we wanted to choose an iconic American artist as a farewell to the Breuer building.”

“It’s been a dream of mine to do this show,” Mr. Rothkopf added, explaining that he has had a long relationship with Mr. Koons, having written about him extensively since Mr. Rothkopf’s days as a graduate student at Harvard a decade ago.

Other New York museums have tried but failed to organize giant retrospectives covering Mr. Koons’s career. At the Guggenheim Museum, discussions date back to 1996. A show was scheduled and rescheduled several times, until curators there finally abandoned the idea.

Reasons included the high cost of fabrication and technical difficulties in making the works that are part of Mr. Koons’s “Celebration,” a group of large-scale sculptures and paintings. Because of their size and the materials — stainless steel and plastics that are hard to manufacture — they require special use of foundries, a cost that has nearly bankrupted some dealers who tried to produce the pieces. That series is only now nearing completion.

Mr. Rothkopf said the Whitney’s show would span 35 years of Mr. Koons’s career, from 1979 through 2014, and would include more than 100 works in all media: paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints. New York won’t be its only stop. The exhibition will open in January 2014 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; then in June it will go to the Whitney before traveling to the Pompidou Center in Paris in December 2014.

No stranger to the Whitney, Mr. Koons, 57, has been included in more than 10 Whitney-organized exhibitions, dating from 1985.

“I’ve never had anything like this in New York,” he said. “I remember being an art student and going to the Whitney in 1974 to see the exhibition of Jim Nutt, the Chicago imagist. It was then I transferred to school in Chicago, all because of that show. The Whitney is a museum that has a great rapport with younger artists and the community.”

The public knows the artist best for a few signature sculptures, including “Balloon Dog,” which was installed on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2008; “Puppy,” the lovable 43-foot terrier fashioned from more than 70,000 flowering plants that presided over Rockefeller Center 12 years ago; and “Rabbit,” a giant silver balloon that was in the 2007 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

“Despite the ubiquity of so many of his works in the popular imagination, so much remains unexplored and unexamined,” Mr. Rothkopf said. “People remember these singular works, but they grew out of specific series. I want the show to tell the narrative of his development, to be very scholarly and give historical perspective to his career.”

Mr. Koons has gained considerable attention for the high prices many of his sculptures have fetched at auction — “Balloon Flower (Magenta)” sold for $25.7 million at Christie’s in London four years ago, a record for him at auction — so it is surprising that he has never had a large or comprehensive retrospective in New York, especially considering those artists of his generation who have had such shows, including Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine.

Included in Mr. Koons’s show will be all his famous sculptures, as well as his paintings from every era and preliminary studies for many of them. Loans will come from museums and collectors, in addition to Mr. Koons’s own holdings.

“It will be interesting to remind people how specifically he created dialogues between his paintings and sculptures,” Mr. Rothkopf said. “He’s traditional on one hand, radical on the other.”

SECOND AVENUE SUBWAY ART

There has been little good news about the long-awaited Second Avenue subway, what with the noise, dust, barricades, occasional explosions and endless delays. But here’s something positive for art lovers, anyway: Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit has commissioned Chuck Close to create a permanent installation for the 86th Street and Second Avenue station, which is scheduled to open in 2016.

Instead of painting portraits, Mr. Close will be creating mosaics. “My work has always had a mosaiclike quality to it,” Mr. Close said in a telephone interview. “So it’s not such a stretch. The idea is to reflect the riding population: old people, young people, people of color, Asians. I’m going to do as many as 12 separate mosaics, mainly from pictures of artists I’ve taken over the years.”

He added, “The richness of the city is all the various cultures coming together, and the richness of my art will be to simultaneously let people in on how many ways there are to build an image.”

But with the exception of John Cage, Mr. Close explained, most people will probably not recognize who’s who. (There will be a baby, perhaps a future artist, based on a photograph of his niece Emma.) Each of the portraits will be 10 feet high, and, all told, more than 1,000 square feet will be dedicated to the artwork.

The mosaics will be integrated into the walls of the subway station, including a long concourse level. There will be mosaics at the entrances at 86th and 83rd Streets, as well as in various areas throughout the station.

For months now Mr. Close has been meeting with mosaicists from California to Canada, learning about the myriad ways he can create his portraits.

“I’m trying to make each one different,” he said. “Even though they are made of thousands of chunks of glass, there’s a rhythm and a handwriting to it that is similar to painting.”

RESIGNATION AT SOTHEBY’S

Auction house departures tend to follow a pattern. They come either right before or right after the big sale season. Here’s the latest: Stephane C. Connery, who has been one of Sotheby’s biggest rainmakers, significantly increasing the company profits as worldwide director of its private sales, has resigned. He plans to start dealing privately.

“I’ve always hoped to see if I could stand on my own two feet, and after 20 years at Sotheby’s, I think the time has finally come,” Mr. Connery said.