PHILLIPS DE PURY & CO. AUCTION IN LONDON TOTALS $9.6 MILLION

Collectors snapped up works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Donald Judd at Phillips de Pury & Co. as London’s final evening auction of the week showed stronger demand for better-known contemporary artists, reports Scott Reyburn for Bloomberg. Phillips last night sold $9.6 million, its midestimate figure. Bidders were more measured after purchases at Sotheby’s and Christie’s International, said dealers. Those earlier evening auctions had a higher proportion of older works and achieved above-estimate totals.

“The market is better than I expected,” the London-based collector Amir Shariat, chief executive of Auctor Capital Partners, said in an interview. “It’s clearly part of the general mood, though demand is geared to strong names and good works.”

After a financial crisis that saw auction prices of some fashionable contemporary artists fall up to 50 percent, buyers and sellers have been concentrating on works by established names such as Judd. His two-tier Minimalist wall sculpture Untitled (87-29 Studer), 1987, fetched a top price of $1.15 million with fees.

Five of the forty-three offered works, most of which dated from the past twenty years, sold for more than $783,000 to telephone bids. None achieved this level at Phillips’s crisis-hit auction last February, which raised $6.5 million from fifty-three lots.

An untitled collage by Basquiat depicting a skull, and a dark landscape in oils titled Cash Crop, both 1984, sold for $1.12 million each.