Before Phillips kicked off its own modern and contemporary evening sale on Wednesday in New York, almost $1.4 billion of modern and contemporary art had already found buyers this week at its much larger competitors, Christie’s and Sotheby’s. That’s a tough act to follow, especially given that not even 24 hours prior Sotheby’s sold a Gustav Klint portrait for $236.4 million, the highest price for any work of modern art sold at auction and the second-highest price ever paid for an artwork at auction. Sotheby’s then banked some $160 million more for two of the Austrian’s landscapes.
Phillips, for its part, was hoping to get a slice of the pie with a concise 33-lot sale featuring an untitled Joan Mitchell painting (high estimate: $15 million), a Francis Bacon diptych (high estimate: $18 million), and a juvenile triceratops skeleton (high estimate: $3.5 million).
The sale netted a total of $67.3 million (all prices listed are inclusive of fees unless otherwise noted); only two lots failed to find buyers, achieving a sell-through rate of 94 percent by lot. In its post-sale release, Phillips noted that this year’s sale was a 24 percent increase from the equivalent sale last year, which brought in $54.1 million; it’s worth pointing out that last November’s auction was itself a 23 percent decrease from the 2023 auction, as ARTnews previously reported.
That trio of headlining lots, however, failed to incite the same nitro-fueled bidding that saw Monday and Tuesday nights’ totals swell to eye-watering levels. Only the dinosaur—preserved for 66 million years and described by auctioneer Henry Highley, Phillips head of private sale, as “a rare glimpse into deep time”—passed its high estimate, selling for $5.3 million. The Mitchell, painted in 1957–58, came close, going for $14.3 million, while Bacon’s Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne and George Dyer (1967) took in $16 million.
From his rostrum, Highley announced to a busy room that no lots had been withdrawn and then got the bidding going on the evening’s first lot, a Ruth Asawa hanging wire sculpture, which sold for $1 million against a high estimate of $600,000—a seemingly auspicious start. Lot 3, Firelei Báez’s Daughter of Revolutions (2014), achieved $645,000, at the time breaking her record of $567,000. (Báez’s record would be broken later that night, at Christie’s, where a 2021 painting sold for $1.1 million.)
The momentum kept going when “Cera,” the triceratops skeleton, sold on the phone. Right after came an untitled Jean-Michel Basquiat work on paper, which was bought for $1.25 million, a shade over its $1.2 million high estimate.
Two lots later was another Basquiat, Exercise (1984), which sold for $3.85 million, followed by the $16 million Bacon, the evening’s priciest lot. Max Ernst’s Dans les rues d’Athènes (1960) bronze was one of the night’s 11 lots to break the seven-figure mark, selling for $1.5 million after a 10-minute bidding battle, more than doubling its high estimate.
Other notable lots includes Camille Pissarro’s Le pré et la maison d’Éragny, femme jardinant, printemps (1901), which went for $1.9 million;Sean Scully’s Wall of Light Pale Green (2014) for $838,500, and Robert Motherwell’s A Sculptor’s Picture, with Blue (1958) for $1.2 million.
During the action, London-based adviser Liberté Nuti told ARTnews that Phillips hosting its sole evening sale third, after Christie’s and Sotheby’s each stage their first of two, “is always difficult, especially in such a classic season,” referring to the high prices achieved for modernist artist and established blue-chip names earlier in the week.
“Phillips is known for cutting-edge contemporary art and design, and this market has slowed over the last year,” she said. “New York’s fall auctions this season are about the big collections and big estates, and classic modern and contemporary art, so clients probably weren’t so focused on the more cutting-edge art.”
Robert Manley, Phillips chairman and worldwide head of modern and contemporary art, dismissed the idea that trailing the rival houses was a disadvantage. He told ARTnews after the sale that he was “ecstatic about the result.”
“When the only things you don’t sell are a large piece of gold, which I wouldn’t exactly call our specialty, and a painting that was just so massive that, frankly, very few people can handle it, it’s only good news,” he said, referring to Thunderbolt and Jadé Fadojumtimi’s 118-by-197-inch untiled work, respectively. “We had tons of bidding. I only wish we had more work to sell because the market is so strong right now.”
New York-based adviser Dane Jensen told ARTnews that while the Phillips sale had “some really great works,” like Mark Tansey’s Revelever (2012),which sold for $4.6 million, “a lot of the air was sucked out of the room after the extraordinary things that were sold at Christie’s and Sotheby’s earlier in the week.”
