A Marathon Evening at Phillips

Courtesy Phillips de Pury & Company

Erik Bulatov’s “Glory to the CPSU” (1975) fetched £1,084,500 (Est. £500–700,000).

Courtesy Phillips de Pury & Company

Ilya Kabakov’s “Zhuk (Beetle)” (1982) sold for a record £2,932,500 (Est. £1.5–2.5 million).

Damien Hirst Andy Warhol Jean-Michel Basquiat Ilya Kabakov Jeff Koons John M Armleder Erik Bulatov Terence Koh

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The Hirst last sold at auction at Sotheby’s London in 2005 for £523,000.

Other million-pound lots included Jeff Koons’s X-rated glass confection from his debauched Cicolina period, Violet Ice (Kama Sutra) (1991), which sold to a telephone bidder for £1,252,500 (est. £800,000–1.2 million), and Andy Warhol’s portrait of the late, great New York art dealer Sidney Janis from 1967, which went to New York trader Alberto Mugrabi for £1,028,500 (est.£1–1.5 million).

Mugrabi had a busy evening, bottom-fishing for relative bargains, among them two works by Jean-Michel Basquiat. He snagged the Xerox-and-paper collage on canvas Joy (1984) for £972,500 (£1–1.5 million) and the late acrylic on canvas Orange, from 1988 (the year of the artist’s death), for £216,500 (est. £200–300,000).

“We’re very pleased with the results,” continued McGinnis moments after the marathon, “it’s about what we anticipated.”

Given the evening’s hefty percentage of underwhelming material and envelope-pushing estimates, Phillips showed the much-hyped middle market is alive and well but hardly booming.