Riding the Wave

NEW YORK—Still electrified from a high-octane Christie’s sale that raced past records on May 16 and a pace-setting auction at Sotheby’s the evening before, a group of eager dealers and collectors packed the floor at Phillips de Pury & Company last night for the first of its postwar and contemporary sales. If prices for big-name postwar artists at the two houses uptown act as a barometer for the overall market, the Phillips sale was poised to show which younger artists are benefiting most from the heat of the current market.

Right out of the gate a 2005 mixed media work by Anselm Reyle sold for $192,000, tripling the 38-year-old Berlin artist’s previous record. It was quickly followed by Mark Grotjahn’s monochrome oil on linen Untitled (Black Butterfly over Lime) (2004). Shows at major museums over the last few years and one at Anton Kern back in January have fueled interest in the artist and steadily driven up prices for his work, but it was a jolt when, from an early overture of $20,000, one bidder leapt to $150,000 for the work, shooting past both the high estimate of $60,000 and the artist’s previous auction record of $96,000. In one of his throaty, shouted-whisper asides, auctioneer Simon de Pury quipped that he would like to see similar increments throughout the night. When he finally brought the hammer down, the lot went for $360,000.

From there records fell like dominoes for Mike Bidlo, John Chamberlain, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, David Hammons, Johannes Kahrs, Richard Phillips, Matthew Ritchie, Rudolf Stingel, Fred Tomaselli, Rosemarie Trockel, Francesco Vezzoli, and Zhan Wang.

A painting by Cecily Brown threatened to bring the artist above the $1 million mark for the second evening in a row. Bidding stopped just short of seven digits, but at $992,000, Brown Painting No. 6 (2003) realized more than twice its high estimate.

After fetching stratospheric figures the night before, it was no surprise that two of the three Andy Warhols on offer, a 1965 soup can and a red and yellow camouflage painting from 1986, rose to the highest prices of the evening. They were among five lots that sold in the seven figures. Buyers were less interested in video work. Bill Viola’s The Quintet of the Silent (2000) and Paul Pfeiffer’s Long Count III (Thrilla in Manila) (2001) both failed to sell.

At the end of the night, 68 of the 74 lots sold, with the grand total reaching $33,326,400, above a high estimate of $30,825,000. “We had a diverse body of bidders and many new bidders participating at higher levels,” said Phillips’ contemporary art director Michael McGinnis. He added that many new buyers from Eastern Europe and Asia, who took part in the sale “were not on our radar a year ago.”

An influx of new buyers kept the phone bank busy and the sale floor energized, as did, if indirectly, a general excitement about the Basel/Venice/Documenta convergence coming up next month. Before the auction began, de Pury announced that one member of the Guggenheim Foundation’s International Directors Council would not be able to make it to Venice and had asked that he take bids on her room at the Hotel Cipriani, with proceeds from the unofficial sale going to the museum. A flurry of bids brought the accommodations up to $45,000, warming up the crowd and prompting de Pury to joke that perhaps he should sell his room next.

Top Five Lots:

1. Andy Warhol, Colored Campbell’s Soup Can (1965), sold for $3,400,000 (est. $3-4 million)

“If you’re going to buy a Warhol, it may as well be a soup can”—this may have been the thought driving bidders on tonight’s top lot. This classic Warhol, a silkscreen on canvas in bright red, blue, yellow, and green, was once in the collection of Leo Castelli. A phone bidder picked up the work for just over its low estimate of $3 million. The lot was followed by a Richard Pettibone copy of another well-known Warhol image Andy Warhol Marilyn Monroe 1964 (1968).

2. Andy Warhol, Camouflage (1986), sold for $1,496,000 (est. $900,000-$1.2 million)

Of the two Warhol camouflage paintings from the same year at tonight’s sale, the larger, brighter canvas fetched the higher price. Begun in the early 1980s as an experiment in the studio, the camouflage works became a pastiche of both militarism and abstraction, and the red and yellow blotches that achieved the second-highest price of the evening are a strong example from the series. So strong, in fact, that it pushed past its high estimate and also sold to a phone bidder.

3. David Hammons, Untitled (2004), sold for $1,496,000 (est. $1.5-$2 million)

This was the lot that left an artist’s previous auction record most thoroughly in the dust. Hammons’s work is a trophy gazelle head of the sort mounted above hunting lodge fireplaces. The wall installation is composed from African masks lashed together with wire and straw. Hoping that buyers would go for the work’s strong mix of form and social critique, Phillips set the estimate well above Hammons’s previous record of $409,500—a figure kept low by the infrequency with which his installation work turns up at auction. But with only one active bidder, de Pury only managed to eek the price up to a few thousand dollars shy of the low estimate.

4. John Chamberlain, Untitled (1962), sold for $1,384,000 (est. $700,000-$900,000)

One of John Chamberlain’s iconic crumpled metal sculptures may have benefited from its prominent placement next to Simon de Pury’s podium. Several bidders in the room drove up the price of the brown and turquoise painted steel construction, which came from a New York collection, past the high estimate—and then past the artist’s previous auction record of just over $1 million. But the work eventually sold to a bidder on the telephone.

5. Gerhard Richter, Drei Grau übereinander (Three greys one upon the other) (1966/84), sold for $1,384,000 (est. $1.2-1.8 million)

A private collection in Cologne gave up the Gerhard Richter that rounded out the top five. A minimal series of gradient shades of gray on a white canvas, the work was among the protean artist’s first monochrome paintings in 1966. It drew several telephone bidders, who ultimately pushed the price into the lot’s estimate range. It sold for just above the $1.2 million low.