Sold-out Phillips auction in New York brings in $115.2m, more than double 2025 result – The Art Newspaper

As the temperature in Midtown Manhattan climbed near 100ºF on Tuesday afternoon, art-market denizens sought shelter in Phillips’s cool below-ground sale room on Park Avenue for the auction house’s marquee spring auction. But the ample air-conditioning did not keep the competition for lots from heating up repeatedly, leading to a sold-out sale that brought in a solid hammer total of $91.73m ($115.2m with fees), firmly within the night’s pre-sale estimate of $84.3m to $121.7m (estimates are calculated without fees).

That total represents a 67.4% increase from Phillips’s marquee auction last November, which tallied nearly $54.8m ($67.3m with fees), and an impressive 107.5% improvement from the equivalent sale a year ago.

Two lots were withdrawn before Tuesday’s sale: a Richard Prince Nurse painting (est $2m-$3m) and a large black-on-white abstraction by Albert Oehlen (est $800,000-$1.2m). Of the 41 lots that were offered, just over half (21) were backed by guarantees, helping to ensure the white-glove result even the few times bidding stalled well below estimates.

“The market is alive and well,” Robert Manley, Phillips’s chairman and worldwide head of Modern and contemporary art, said in a statement after the sale. “It was a joy to present an evening sale that so wonderfully captures the strength, enthusiasm and depth of the collecting community at every level.”

There was strong bidding from attendees in the room, bidders online and clients on the phones with Phillips specialists throughout the sale, although the fiercest bidding wars were not over the biggest-ticket works. The top six top lots by hammer price exactly matched the top six lots by pre-sale estimate, showing Phillips’s specialists had done their homework—but also that the bidders with the deepest pockets were not moved to fight over trophy works.

The top lot was Andy Warhol’s Sixteen Jackies (1964), a grid of 16 silkscreened canvases featuring the repeated image of the grieving First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. It fell short of its $15m to $20m estimate, with a bidder on the line with Scott Nussbaum (Phillips’s deputy chairman for the Americas and senior international specialist for Modern and contemporary art) logging the winning bid of $13.5m ($16.2m with fees). The cooling effect of Claude Monet’s wintry landscape La Route de Vétheuil, effet de neige (1879) was enough to push bidding over its $7m low estimate; it hammered at $7.5m ($9.9m with fees) to a client on the phone with Phillips specialist Nina Piro, good for the night’s second-highest result.

The night’s third-biggest lot was a familiar sight: Phillips had offered Jackson Pollock’s Untitled (around 1948), a modestly-sized but dazzling drip painting with collaged elements, in its November 2024 evening sale in New York, with an estimate of at least $13m, which proved to be the winning bid ($15.3m with fees). However the lot’s third-party guarantor, film producer David Mimran, failed to pay, prompting Phillips to sue him and pay out the consignor—who, though it was not publicised at the time, was the dealer Robert Mnuchin. This time, the Pollock came with a tempered estimate of $7m to $10m, and sold to a client on the phone with Nussbaum for $7.4m ($9.1m with fees). (Mnuchin died last December, and 11 choice works from his collection brought in $140.7m, or $166.3m with fees, at Sotheby’s last week.)

Rare gems and in-demand artists drive bidding

The fiercest bidding at Phillips was for works by contemporary artists whose primary markets are tightly controlled and in short supply, or for exceedingly rare 20th-century works. The night’s opening three lots all fit this pattern and surpassed their high estimates.

The first lot, a small, emerald-hued canvas by Salman Toor, Two Friends (2020), set off a contest among bidders online and on the phone lines, pushing it past its $250,000 high estimate. An online bidder in California ultimately won the lot with a bid of $260,000 ($335,400 with fees). Cecily Brown’s stormy abstraction Untitled (2019) followed and also quickly passed its high estimate ($500,000), ultimately selling for a hammer price of $520,000 ($670,800 with fees). The third lot, a large pastel-on-canvas composition of a fractal wave by Lee Bontecou, Untitled (1985-2001), was among the sale’s great rarities and came with an estimate of $1.2m to $1.8m.

“You know, at auction houses, we probably abuse the words ‘rare’ and ‘unique’ more than any other business in the world,” Manley confided before the auction while discussing the Bontecou work. “But tell me how many canvases you’ve seen by Bontecou come up for auction at this scale. I can answer for you: it’s zero. She was an incredible draftsman and she did some pastels on board, but they’re all a lot smaller. This monumental, fully realised pastel on canvas—it’s magical.”

Sure enough, bidders were entranced and at least four of them chased Bontecou’s epic wave, pushing its price close to double its high estimate. It eventually sold to a bidder on the phone with Carolyn Kolberg, Phillips’s head of evening sale, for $3.3m ($4.2m with fees). That result set a new highwater mark for Bontecou’s two-dimensional works, though her better-known wall-mounted sculptures top out at more than double that sum.

One of the night’s biggest surprises came from a group of early Modern Danish paintings consigned by John Loeb Jr, who served as the US ambassador to Denmark for two years under president Ronald Reagan. A sunny, seaside self-portrait by P.S. Krøyer from 1902 set off a protracted contest between two phone bidders. The client on the line with Phillips’s senior international specialist Takako Nagasawa ultimately scored the winning bid of $1m, or double the painting’s high estimate; with fees the price came to $1.2m, surpassing Krøyer’s previous auction record that was set back in 2000.

The four other lots in the sale from Loeb’s collection were all by Krøyer’s far better known pupil, Vilhelm Hammershøi, though they proved far less enticing to would-be bidders and three of them ultimately sold for hammer prices below their low estimates. After the sale, Phillips revealed that two of the Hammershøi paintings—Courtyard Interior at Strandgade 30 (around 1905) and Study of standing woman, seen from behind (1884-88)—were acquired by “prominent institutions”, though a spokesperson for the auction house declined to name them.

Spotlight on AbEx women

Works by women Abstract Expressionists were another strength of the sale, with two such lots coming from the collection of the late Miami collectors Lee and Tina Hills: the cool Joan Mitchell diptych Plain (1989) and the verdant Helen Frankenthaler abstraction Paloverde (1978).

“The Hills did what people did back then, before Miami had developed its own art ecosystem: they would come to New York and satisfy their craving for art,” Manley said ahead of the sale. “Their Joan Mitchell painting was in an important show of her late work in 1989, and it was basically still wet when the Hills bought it two days after the opening. The Hills family has had it for 37 years. The Hellen Frankenthaler from their collection is the same, acquired in 1990.”

While the Mitchell sold squarely within its $5m to $7m estimate, for a hammer price of $5.5m ($6.8m with fees) to a bidder on the phone with Manley, the Frankenthaler set off a duel between bidders in the salesroom. It finally sold for more than double its high estimate, hammering at $1.7m ($2.1m with fees).

Another Abstract Expressionist, albeit not yet a household name like Frankenthaler and Mitchell, achieved a new record price. Pat Passlof’s large composition of swirling areas of oil paint, Fortune (1960), fetched a hammer price of $450,000 ($580,500 with fees), surpassing the previous record set in February at Sotheby’s.

The auction’s third and final record result was for a work by the Millennial US-born, London-based painter Joseph Yaeger, who shows with the galleries Gladstone and Modern Art. His large watercolour-on-linen composition There is a light and it always goes out (2021), depicting a hand holding a match that is burning dangerously low, sparked a seven-way bidding war that quickly pushed the price past the lot’s $80,000 high estimate. It eventually sold to a phone bidder on the line with Tamila Kerimova, a London-based Phillips senior director, for $370,000 ($477,300 with fees). That represents a jump of nearly 50% from Yaeger’s previous auction record, set last week during Sotheby’s evening sale of contemporary art.

The next lot, a large and characteristic painting by Anna Weyant—another Millennial artist whose supply of works on the primary market is closely guarded, in her case by Gagosian—set off a bidding frenzy of its own. At least six bidders, two of them in the salesroom, chased Weyant’s Dinner (2019) well past its $450,000 high estimate. It ultimately sold to a woman bidding in the room, for $760,000 ($980,400 with fees).

The sale’s total tally, especially compared to Phillips’s slim results last November and in May, shows that the firm can carve out a place in an auction trade still dominated by a duopoly. It may not have the muscle to attract blockbuster consignments of nine- and ten-figure collections like the estates of Agnes Gund, Marian Goodman and S.I. Newhouse at Christie’s or those of Mnuchin and Enrico and Adele Donati at Sotheby’s. But by tapping into the fervour for works that are ultra-contemporary and in-demand, and the excitement around lots Manley might rightly call “rare” and “unique”, Phillips can keep hitting its marks.

The New York spring sales, which thus far have offered optimists plenty of signs of a market rebound, continued last night with Sotheby’s evening sale of Modern art. The marquee evening auctions wrap up tonight at Christie’s, with 12 lots from Henry S. McNeil Jr’s stellar collection of Minimalist art, followed by a 31-lot multiple-owner sale of contemporary art that includes eight Gerhard Richter paintings from the estate of Marian Goodman.