PHILLIPS CONTEMPORARY EVENING AUCTION BRINGS IN $110.3 MILLION
Phillips’s twentieth-century and contemporary art evening sale in midtown Manhattan on Thursday night netted $110.3 million, more than doubling what it brought in last year. All thirty-seven of the auction’s lots sold.
Leading the sale was Peter Doig’s Rosedale, 1991—a painting of a house in the woods—which was hammered down to Phillips deputy chairman Svetlana Marich, who was bidding for a client on the phone, for $28.8 million. Most of the works reached or surpassed their estimates.
The second highest lot, Willem de Kooning’s Untitled II, 1980, sold for $13.1 million. Among other highlights of the sale were Roy Lichtenstein’s sculpture Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight, 1996, which brought in $10.3 million, and Nicole Eisenman’s Winter Solstice 2012 Dinner Party, 2009, which reached $670,000, exceeding its high estimate of $150,000.
Three lots had been withdrawn from the sale: a Calder, which the house believed would bring in $800,000, a Mark Grotjahn, with an estimate of $1 million, and Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (811-1), 1994, which had been expected to sell for between $15 million and $20 million.
