At Phillips New York on Tuesday night, a far less lucrative sale night than 2024 bore out concerns of a cooling market.
The house’s modern and contemporary evening sale generated $52 million, around 40 percent below last year’s haul of $86 million at the equivalent May sale. Tuesday’s auction also exactly achieved its pre-sale estimate of $52 million, likely caused by five lots failing to sell. (Another four were withdrawn prior to the sale.)
That current state of affairs, however, didn’t stop a handful of breakout moments, including five new records for women artists. While the sale’s top selling artists by value were men, artists like Kiki Kogelnik and Ilana Savdie saw prices go above expectations. A figurative painting by Kogelnik sold for $280,000, nearly double the $150,000 estimate, while bidding from Texas, Lebanon, and London drove a Savdie work to $180,000, against a $100,000 estimate.
Other records were set for Olga de Amaral, whose 1996 fiber work Imagen perdida 27 sold for $1.2 million, nearly 4 times its $300,000 estimate, while Grace Hartigan’s The Fourth (1959) sold for $1.6 million. (Auction interest in Amaral comes less than two weeks after her traveling retrospective opened at the ICA Miami.) The sole record achieved by a male artist came via James Turrell’s Ariel (2022), which sold for $660,400, or just $400 above its previous one.
The Hartigan work, which drew six phone bidders, was pushed just out of the top ten lots sold Tuesday by an Alexander Calder mobile that sold for $1.88 million. The evening’s top lot was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1984), which sold for $6.6 million, followed by an Ed Ruscha painting for $4.9 million and a Donald Judd stack for $4.3 million. The collective total of those three lots, at $15.8 million, was more than 25 percent above the total value, $12.5 million, of their pre-sale estimate.
Basquiat was also the night’s financial anchor, with a work on paper by the artist selling for $3 million; the lots’ combined sale price of $9.6 million made up more than 18 percent of the auction’s total.
Of the several lots that did see multiple bidders, many went to buyers in the US. A painting by Japanese artist Yu Nishimura, who was recently added to the roster of David Zwirner, was the night’s opening lot. Estimated at $80,000, the piece hammered at more than twice that for $220,000, going to a New York–based specialist’s phone bidder. Kogelnik’s work went to a bidder from New York, beating out others calling in from Florida and Washington, D.C., while Hartigan’s piece was bid on by Meity Heiden, Phillips deputy chairman and private sales head, but ultimately won by an adviser from Los Angeles.
Other bright spots came courtesy of a painting by New York–based Danielle Mckinney, which sold for $120,650, nearly 2.5 times its $50,000 estimate. Barbara Hepworth’s small bronze sculpture from the 1960s outperformed its $250,000 estimate, finding a buyer at $457,200.
Elsewhere, results for pieces with seven-figure values were more mixed, with the lots in the bottom of the top 10 selling for near the low estimate or squarely within the range. A Jeff Koons sculpture sold for an in-range price of $1.1 million, while David Hockney’s The Twenty-Sixth V.N. Painting (1992) sold for $2.7 million, against a $2.5 million–$3.5 million estimate.
Works by Koons, Frank Stella, Richard Prince, Le Corbusier, and George Condo failed to sell, while the withdrawn lots included works by by Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, and Prince. While no work sold for below the low end of its pre-sale estimate, some hammered below it, including a Calder mobile, hammering at $320,000, against a $350,000 estimate; the final sale price, including fees, was $406,400. (Estimates do not include fees, while final sales prices do, unless otherwise noted as the hammer price.)
Despite the records, some advisers see signs of a broader shift to artists of the past known for being safe bets for collectors. This week, adviser Erica Samuels said, works by Roy Lichtenstein and Willem de Kooning have held steady—especially in the late Leonard Riggio’s estate sale at Christie’s, which went to the block on Monday night.
“I was struck by how many collectors are making a flight back to security with older material,” she said. “At its best, auction is trophy hunting. Right now, it’s more of a sport—shuffling, sliding—just to maintain. Consignors have to face reality. It’s sluggish right now.”
