The Phillips team appeared joyous with the results of its modern and contemporary art evening sale, which got underway at the respectable time of 5pm on Tuesday. The auction house achieved $115.2 million against an estimate of $84.2 million—its highest presale estimate since the frothy days of 2022. All 40 lots found buyers, with 2 works, by Richard Prince and Albert Oehlen, withdrawn before the sale.
This sale total was almost double November’s $61.2 million for 31 lots (not including the dinosaur fossils it offered), and more than double the $52 million for 36 lots in May 2025. Looking at it another way, the sale’s average lot value, $2.9 million, is more than double the $1.4 million average lot value from last May.
Only about 19 of the 40 lots had third-party guarantees. Given that several works hammered below their low estimates, it seems that many consignors were willing to accept lower reserves. About 50 percent of the lots recieved priority bids through Phillips’s proprietary system, which gives bidders a 4 percent discount off the buyer’s premium if they place a bid more than 48 hours in advance. That’s further evidence that the auction house’s new system is working: as of January, it reported that, since introducing priority bidding in July 2025, 40 percent of all sold lots had attracted such bids, with the value of lots sold before a sale eight times greater compared to the first half of 2025, and the number of early selling bids quadrupling.
Phillips excelled at what, perhaps, it’s best known for: selling works by living artists on the secondary market unattainable on the primary market. The bidding for Joseph Yaeger’s 2021 watercolor on gessoed linen, There Is a Light and It Always Goes Out, can only be described as frenzied. As soon as auctioneer Henry Highley opened the lot, seven specialists’ hands were already in the air trying to place phone bids. Altogether about 10 bidders placed more than 30 bids for the painting of a hand holding a lit match, driving it up to $477,300 against an estimate of just $60,000. The winner was a client on the phone with U.K.-based senior director Tamila Kerimova. The price tops the $320,000 record that Sotheby’s set for the artist just last week.
Joseph Yaeger, There is a light and it always goes out, 2021.
An early Anna Weyant painting of a flaxen-haired woman face down on a dinner table, with the cloud-patterned wallpaper behind her curling up ever so slightly, sold for $980,400 against an estimate of $380,000. She painted the work in 2019, three years before she joined Gagosian. Six bidders competed for the painting, with Bernard LaGrange of Gagosian Art Advisory fighting for it to the end against Courtney Pettit of Pettit Art Partners, who ultimately won out.
A 2020 painting by Salman Toor, who is represented by Luhring Augustine, sold for $335,400 against an estimate of $180,000. Comparatively, his primary market works are priced at around $90,000 to $120,000, according to Phillips’s head of sale Carolyn Kohlberg.
Works by important 20th-century female artists whose prices are playing catch-up to their male counterparts—among them Lee Bontecou, Pat Passlof, Olga de Amaral, Helen Frankenthaler, and Georgia O’Keeffe—exceeded expectations. A rare Bontecou pastel on canvas more than tripled its $1.2 million estimate to achieve $4.3 million, a record for a two-dimensional work by the artist.
Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1985.
Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips all had gold textile works by de Amaral this season, with Phillips’s work, from 2015, widely considered the best of the three. Just as Highley brought down the hammer at $1.25 million to a client on the phone with Miami-based deputy chairman Vivian Pfeiffer, Kohlberg jumped in with a bid of $1.3 million, or $1.7 million with fees. That is almost triple the work’s estimate of $600,000. By comparison, Sotheby’s 1990 work by the Colombian textile artist, whose market has spiked since her show at the Fondation Cartier in 2024, sold for $742,400, while Christie’s example, also from 2015, is being offered on Thursday.
Advisor Erica Samuels beat out four other bidders, including two in the room, to win Georgia O’Keeffe’s small double-sided painting Maple Leaves and Flowering Cactus, from the 1920s. The work had passed through Edith Halpert’s downtown gallery and has been in the same collection since 1978. “This two-sided canvas is 100 years old and feels completely fresh,” Samuels texted ARTnews after the sale. “I’m feeling great about American painting.”
Phillips has been making a push to diversify into Impressionist, modern, and American paintings under deputy chairman Jeremiah Evarts, who joined in 2021. The house is offering 80 works in those categories this season, compared to 65 in all of 2024. It won the Danish art collection of ambassador John L. Loeb Jr., son of philanthropist Frances Lehman Loeb (of the Lehman Bros. Lehmans), thanks largely to Evarts’s relationship with the family.
After selling several works from the collection in London in March, this week’s evening sale featured five more, with another 27 being offered on Thursday morning. The top lot from the collection in the evening sale was a 1902 self-portrait by Skagen School painter P.S. Krøyer that more than quadrupled its estimate to sell for $1.3 million, beating the artist’s previous record of $1.1 million set in 2000. The buyer was a client on the phone with Tokyo-based strategy advisor Takako Nagasawa. Before the sale, Phillips toured highlights from the collection to seven locations, including Tokyo and Hong Kong. “We knew there was interest in Asia and then expanded it,” Evarts told ARTnews.
The highest-estimated lot of the sale was Warhol’s Sixteen Jackies, from 1964, which was making its fifth appearance at auction in five decades. It last sold at Christie’s in 2023 for $25.9 million. Phillips offered it at an estimate of just $15 million, with a third-party guarantee. Highley opened the lot at $11 million and volleyed a few bids between deputy chairman Scott Nussbaum and London-based managing director India Phillips, who joined the house in February from Bonhams. Nussbaum’s client won out at a hammer price of just $13.5 million, translating to a huge loss for the seller.
The consignor of Gerhard Richter’s colorful abstract Besen, from 1984, also lost money. They bought it at Christie’s Hong Kong in 2022 for $10.2 million, and at Phillips it hammered at the low estimate of $6.5 million, or $8.1 million with fees.
Lastly, Phillips itself took a hit on a white-on-black Jackson Pollock drip painting from 1948, which it was offering for a second time. It first sold in November 2024 as “Property from a Prominent Private Collection” to film producer David Mimran for $15.3 million, but he reneged, leading to a highly publicized lawsuit. We now know the consignor was Robert Mnuchin, who died late last year. Likely capitalizing on the appearance this season of the Mnuchin collection at Sotheby’s, and also S.I. Newhouse Jr.’s major Pollock drip painting from the same year at Christie’s, Phillips decided to reoffer the work. This time, likely tainted by the legal entanglements, it sold for just $9.2 million to a client on the phone with Nussbaum.
By the time the Phillips sale ended, it was already on to the next for the fast-paced art world. Most attendees were already heading uptown to Sotheby’s modern evening auction or downtown to the Whitney Gala.
