The London evening sales came to a lackluster end Friday with Phillips newly introduced “20th Century to Now” sale, which brought in just over £9 million ($11.4 million).
This sum seems paltry in comparison to similar auctions held by Christie’s and Sotheby’s this week. Then again, the latter’s marquee London auctions, which raked in £199 million ($252 million), were powered by Klimt’s Lady With a Fan (1917–18). That painting spurred a ten-minute bidding war and, at £85.3 million pounds with buyer’s fees ($108.4 million), became the most expensive work to ever sell at a European auction.
Yet Phillips’s sale never contained the same excitement. On Lot 15, Raft on a Siren Sea (2017) by Emily Mae Smith, auctioneer Henry Highley uttered the word “pass” for the first time. It wouldn’t be the last.
By the end of the 111-lot sale (it was originally 116—four lots were withdrawn before the sale began and one was withdrawn halfway though), Highly had said the word “pass” 18 times as lot after lot failed to reach its reserve price. Warhol, Banksy, and Kusama were among the artists whose works didn’t sell on Friday. Meanwhile, top lots like Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale (1966–67), Sean Scully’s Wall Yellow Pale (2016), and Elizabeth Peyton’s Prince Harry, September 1998 (1998) hammered at below their low estimates.
The £9.08 million ($11.5 million) evening had a sell through rate of only 84 percent.
One interesting feature of the sale was a tranche of works that came from the collection of Thomas B. Lemann, a New Orleans–based lawyer, autodidact, and art collector who passed away in February this year. This grouping, which was comprised of over 20 sculptures, stood out because the majority of the works came with no reserve. This made for a series of very unusual events for an evening sale: several of the works actually decreased in price.
After auctioneer Louise Simpson took over the rostrum and works from the Lemann collection went up on the block, the pace began to quicken, with some works getting a surprising amount of attention, given the cool atmosphere during the first half of the sale. Tancredi Parmeggiani’s oil on canvas Quando Il Sole E’ Colorato (1958) inspired a flurry of bids, ultimately hammering for £95,000, or £120,650 with fees, after two Italians tried for over a full minute to outbid each other online. (Converted to dollars, that comes out $120,000, or $153,182 with fees.)
But by the time Bernard Meadows’s Seated Armed Figure (1962) came to the block, a hush had fallen over the sales floor and the phones. The screens announcing online bids went blank. This work, Lot 78, had an estimate of £8,000–£12,000. Bidding started at £4,000. For a time, Simpson’s voice was the only sound in the room. Then she lowered the price to £2,000. Still, no bids. She lowered the price again, to £1,000. Finally, an online bidder in Switzerland decided to bid £1,100. Another online bid came from Germany, and another from London. Seated Armed Figure eventually hammered for £1,700 (£2,159, or, with fees, $2,741).
This scenario repeated a few times, mpst shockingly with another work by Meadows, Two works: (i) Drawing for Sculpture (Fat Seated Figure); (ii) Drawing for Sculpture (Armed Bust Version 2), from 1962, which had an estimate of £700–£1,000. Bidding opened at £350 and dropped to £50 before the work sold for £100 to a bidder in the room. One wonders if Two Drawings could be the literal antithesis of Klimt’s record-breaking Lady with a Fan—the least expensive work ever to sell in a European evening auction.
After the Lemann collection, things on the sales floor normalized, though the last 30 or so lots had their share of passes and low bidding.
The sale did end on a high note, however. The final lot, Albert Willem’s marvelously titled All In All Not Bad For His First Attempt (2021) inspired three minutes of intense bidding headlined by online bidders in Poland and France, each one pushing the other, with the price shooting up in £5,000 increments until the work hammered for an astonishing £180,000 (£228,600, or $290,239 with fees) against an estimate of only £10,000–£15,000.