Phillips Contemporary: That Was Then, This Is Now

Damien Hirst Robert Rauschenberg Andy Warhol John Chamberlain Edward Ruscha Jeff Koons Kenneth Noland Vincent van Gogh

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

“It was a great price for a very high-quality work,” enthused Paris-based L&M consultant Eloïse Benzekri, who beat out the competition. “Especially compared to what it would have made last year.” Asked what that price would have been, Benzekri said £300,000.

As the stiff competition for the Grotjahn indicated, there are buyers searching for excellent and fairly priced material. Though this didn’t exactly result in a bidding-war atmosphere, competition at times was fierce, as indicated by (surprise!) Yue Minjun’s large-scale, untitled 2005 composition of his signature smiling men flanked by a flock of birds in formation, which sold to a telephone bidder for £421,250 (est. £250–300,000).

Buttonholed moments after the sale, the underbidder, Swiss collector Ricardo Rossi, who says he owns a half-dozen “important” Yues, noted, “This was a nice one, but it was a bit too expensive. I didn’t expect it to go that high.”

A compatriot work from the once-sizzling contemporary Chinese market, Zhang Xiaogang’s untitled portrait of a young girl in Mao cap and pigtails from 2006, failed to sell at £260,000 (est. £300–400,000).

If there was any notion that Phillips isn’t fighting to the finish for every bid on behalf of its consignors, the literally 10-minute-long battle for Jack Goldstein’s Untitled (1988) proved to be the evening’s poster child for “We’ll take whatever we can get.”

Estimated at £20–30,000, bidding started at £10,000 and crept along in measly £1,000 increments until the final hammer price of £121,250, probably longer than it took to sell van Gogh’s Dr. Gachet (1890) at Christie’s for $82.5 million in 1990. Incredibly, the audience appreciated auctioneer Simon de Pury’s resolve, bursting into applause for the final telephone bid.

“It feels distinctly better than it did a year after June 1990, when the market last crashed,” said a reflective de Pury moments after the sale. “It certainly didn’t feel as good then as it does now.”

That perception sounds accurate. Put another way, “people feel a bit more comfortable today,” according to Phillips’s contemporary head, Michael McGinnis. “The appetite is there, and the depth is there. There’s just a general mood elevation.”

The contemporary-art evening action resumes tomorrow at Christie’s.

Judd Tully is Editor at Large of Art+Auction.