Phillips Seals the Deal Ahead of London Sales

Phillips held two sales in London during Frieze week, totaling a respectable $28.5m. What didn’t sell at auction was as interesting as the works that found buyers on October 15 and 17, however.

Pieces by artists including Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood, and Austrian émigré Lucie Rie from the Dartington collection were bought privately for $1.1m in a deal announced just before the works were due to go under the hammer.

Even without the Dartington group, Phillips’ evening and day sales still achieved a B- on the HENI Auction Index, albeit a drop from the B rating a year ago, when the overall total was $3m lower.

The evening sale got off to a strong start with two auction records. Joseph Yaeger’s Once, always (2023) fetched $856,200 with fees, a 79% increase on his previous record. Before that, Eva Helene Pade’s Yellow Nights (2020) sold for $222,600 with fees, a 71% increase.

The biggest ticket item was Gerhard Richter’s abstract Mathis (1983), which sold for nearly $7.8m, albeit below its low estimate.

There were 163 lots on offer, including the Dartington group, which is in line with the average of comparable sales.

Works selling above their low estimate were up by 10 percentage points but those selling above their high estimate were down by nearly 16 percentage points, contributing to the B- grade last week.

The HENI Auction Index is based on more than ten metrics, including works backed by a guarantee. There was only one: Banksy’s Keep Ou T (2019). The reclaimed airport customs arch, featuring a signature rodent trying to break in, sold for $2.1m, below its high estimate. In other words, it was a weak guarantee, with the sale price more than 2 percentage points below the average for comparable sales.

Excluding the Dartington group, withdrawals were in line with the historic average as was the share of bought-in works.

The 22 works of art from Dartington's collection purchased with the help of the Art Fund in a private sale brokered by Phillips will now enter the collections of The Box in Plymouth and Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter.

Dartington Hall was a radical experiment in liberal education, avant-garde art, rural regeneration, and historic conservation, founded by the American heiress Dorothy Elmhirst. For a brief moment before World War II, it came close to becoming a continuation of the Bauhaus in Britain. The art school’s founder, Walter Gropius, converted a barn into a theater where in 1964 Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham staged a memorable performance.

Methodology: for how the HENI Auction Index classifies sales, see here.