Tiny green shoots of recovery have been discernible in a stubbornly bearish art market during London’s marquee auctions this week, but Phillips slim 29-lot evening sale yesterday (6 March) punched below its weight, bringing in £12.2m (£15.4 m with fees) against an estimate of £16.4m to £24.2m. All estimates are calculated without fees.
Two works, by Le Corbusier and Lucio Fontana, were withdrawn just before the sale and three failed to find homes. According to the London-based art market analytics firm ArtTactic, just three lots sold above mid-estimate and 25 went below mid-estimate, giving a particularly low confidence indicator of 10.7, “which shows that estimates were just too high for buyers’ appetite”, says Lindsay Dewer, the head of analytics at ArtTactic. Nonetheless, the sale achieved a strong 90% sell-through rate and marked a 12% uptick on last year’s auction, which netted £10.9m (£13.7m with fees), though still around a third less than the equivalent sale in 2023.
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Pattya (1984)
Courtesy of Phillips
It is no secret that the market for ultra-contemporary material has been more volatile recently and Phillips—once known for specialising in emerging art—erred towards tried and tested names with just three so-called “wet paintings” created in the past few years. The rest of the sale was bolstered by well-established mid- and late-career artists, while a third of lots was dedicated to work created in the 1970s or earlier.
“Whereas in past years, the room would be filled with emerging art and wet paintings, it was very geared towards classic, post-war art,” says Stephanie Armstrong, a partner at the London-based art advisory firm Beaumont Nathan.
But supply is a problem in this area of the market, and while Phillips pulled in several multi-million-pound works by blue-chip names including Picasso, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Joan Mitchell, very few were A-class.
The second of the two late-period Picassos to come to the block—an oil painting from 1964 of a man ogling a woman’s genitalia—failed to find a buyer at £1.5m-£2m. Basquiat’s Pattya, meanwhile, though fresh to market and with impeccable provenance having once been owned by friend and collaborator Andy Warhol, is a figureless landscape of a beach in Thailand—a far cry from the imagery usually associated with Basquiat. The 1984 canvas achieved £1.4m hammer (£1.7m with fees) against a £2m to £3m estimate. The lot was one of seven to carry a third-party guarantee; five of them secured in the 24 hours before the sale.
The top lot of the evening was Mitchell’s Canada II, a vast triptych painted in 1975 just one year after the artist’s breakthrough solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Despite attracting bids from four clients on the phone, here too the estimate punched above its weight. The painting sold for £2.2m (£2.7m with fees) on the phone to London-based specialist Charlotte Gibbs against an estimate of £3m to £5m.
For Armstrong, it was again a question of quality. “The palette was a challenge; collectors are becoming ever more discerning, and what you want with Mitchell is colour and bold strokes of paint,” she says. “It comes back to quality. This middle area of the market for works that aren’t A++ is often the first place to take the hit.”
There were some pockets of activity, notably for Christopher Wool’s Untitled enamelled aluminium work stencilled with the words “YOU MAKE ME”, a line from Richard Hell’s 1977 punk song Blank Generation. At least three bidders went head-to-head for more than five minutes, but it was the London-based specialist Matt Langton who eventually won the work for a client on the phone at £730,000 (£927,100 with fees), squarely within its £600,00 to £800,000 estimate.
Proving that there is still interest for newer names in the ultra-contemporary market, where prices are also more affordable, there were auction records for 35-year-old French artist Nathanaëlle Herbelin and the 38-year-old German Florian Krewer, who is making a name for himself on both the East and West Coasts of the US.
Oliva Thornton, Phillips’s head of Modern and contemporary art in the UK and Europe, says the firm is “conscientious about sustaining momentum and offering artists who will be met with enthusiasm by global collectors”, particularly when it comes to emerging talent. “We continue to actively source these artists to include across our sales and the collecting appetite for young and exciting names remains strong.”
The Phillips sale rounds out a week of markedly different results for markedly different sales across the auction houses, with Christie’s emerging a clear winner with its additional Surrealist sale, which scored 50 in ArtTactic’s confidence indicator (compared with 28.3 in its 20th/21st century evening sale and 25 at Sotheby’s Modern and contemporary evening auction). As Armstrong says: “I’ve never come out of a sales season and felt that there were such clear differences between the three auction houses. Usually, what goes for one will go for the other, but it felt really distinct this week. I’m now cautiously optimistic for New York in May, but it’s certainly not without its challenges.”
