Phillips’ $115.2 Million Evening Sale Shows the Market Still Rewards Surprise
Phillips ended its modern and contemporary art evening sale in New York with a result that outpaced expectations and suggested real momentum at the top of the market. The auction brought in $115.2 million against an $84.2 million estimate, with all 40 lots sold. Two works, by Richard Prince and Albert Oehlen, were withdrawn before the sale began.
The total was nearly twice the house’s November figure of $61.2 million, and more than double the $52 million it recorded in May 2025. On a per-lot basis, the sale averaged $2.9 million, more than twice the $1.4 million average from last May. About 19 of the 40 lots carried third-party guarantees, while roughly half received priority bids through Phillips’s proprietary system, which offers a 4 percent discount on the buyer’s premium for bids placed more than 48 hours in advance.
That system appears to be gaining traction. Phillips said in January that, since introducing priority bidding in July 2025, 40 percent of all sold lots had attracted such bids, with the value of works sold before auction rising eightfold compared with the first half of 2025.
The evening’s most feverish competition centered on Joseph Yaeger’s 2021 watercolor on gessoed linen, “There Is a Light and It Always Goes Out.” Henry Highley opened the lot to immediate phone bidding, and the work drew more than 30 bids from about 10 participants before selling for $477,300, far above its $60,000 estimate. The result set a new record for the artist, surpassing the $320,000 mark Sotheby’s established just last week.
Other strong results followed. Anna Weyant’s 2019 painting sold for $980,400 against a $380,000 estimate, while Salman Toor’s 2020 painting reached $335,400 against a $180,000 estimate. Phillips’s head of sale, Carolyn Kohlberg, said comparable primary market works by Toor are priced around $90,000 to $120,000.
The sale also underscored continued demand for important 20th-century women artists whose markets have lagged behind those of their male peers. Lee Bontecou’s pastel on canvas more than tripled its $1.2 million estimate to reach $4.3 million, setting a record for a two-dimensional work by the artist. Olga de Amaral’s 2015 gold textile work sold for $1.7 million with fees, nearly triple its $600,000 estimate.
Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Maple Leaves and Flowering Cactus” drew five bidders, and P.S. Krøyer’s 1902 self-portrait sold for $1.3 million, topping the artist’s previous record of $1.1 million. Taken together, the results suggest Phillips is finding strength not only in living artists on the secondary market, but also in a broader mix of modern and American works that continue to attract competitive bidding.
