The Evolution of Phillips Photography Auction
© Andreas Gursky São Paulo, Sé, 2002. Photo courtesy Phillips.
By Summer Myatt.
Auctions of any kind conjure up images of crowded rooms, hands waving frantically in the air, and energetic auctioneers spitting out figures almost faster than one can comprehend them. But since mid-March, facing pandemic restrictions and closures, the world’s premier auction houses have had to get creative in order to bring the art sale experience into 2020. Implementing livestream and video technology, eco-friendly catalogues, and hybrid auction formats, Phillips has navigated this year’s challenges with grace, seamlessly adapting its model to fit the art world’s mass relocation to the internet.
© Leonard Freed, The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr being greeted in an open car, Maryland. Photo courtesy Phillips.
Featuring contemporary photography’s foundational giants—artists like Richard Avedon, Sally Mann, Irving Penn, and Robert Mapplethorpe, to name a few—the Phillips online photography auction last week boasted pieces that ran the gamut of photography’s scope: from editorial to documentary, traditional to experimental, still life to action, and everything in between.
With iconic images of historic and cultural significance, works by Lillian Bassman and Leonard Freed hearken back to a glossy, black-and-white, mid-century world. Freed’s Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. being greeted in an open car, Maryland depicts the fervor and urgency of the American civil rights movement with the kind of pure photojournalistic integrity fundamental to his work. On the other side of the world, Bassman’s photographic eye was turned toward dreamy, tender moments of Parisian glamor. In her image, Paris Gala Night, Barbara Mullen, Dress by Patou, Paris, Bassman encapsulates the elegance, simplicity, and romance foundational to the quintessential French lifestyle. All three of Bassman’s photos sold for an average of $6,250.
© Lillian Bassman. Paris Gala Night, Barbara Mullen, Dress by Patou, Paris 1949. Photo courtesy Phillips.
The virtual auction also notably featured colossal, highly detailed works from renowned German photographers Andreas Gursky and Candida Hofer. Gursky’s eight-foot tall work, São Paulo, Sé, was estimated between $400,000 and $600,000 but ultimately failed to sell at the auction. However, Hofer fared much better, as three of her four offerings were sold. Known for her large-scale images of stunningly ornate, empty interior spaces, Hofer creates work that is at once technically precise and hauntingly resonant. Her work, Pierpont Morgan Library New York IV, 2001, a reverent ode to the opulent century-old library, sold last week for over $80,000.
© László Moholy-Nagy, Fotogramm, 1929. Photo courtesy Phillips.
Also sold last week were classic, yet refreshing still life photograms by Christian Marclay and László Moholy-Nagy. A very physically interactive method of image making, the photogram has a unique ability to showcase light and shape in a more honest and nuanced way than a photograph allows for. In Marclay’s Untitled (photogram), there’s an underlying sense of movement and humanity implied in the otherwise ghostly image. In Moholy-Nagy’s dynamic 1920s image, Fotogramm, his command of contrast and composition is prominently displayed through jutting diagonals and the juxtaposition of textures. The highest selling work in the auction by a landslide, Fotogramm sold for a whopping $375,000, almost three times its estimate.
The usual exhilaration and suspense of art sales is not gone; it’s just been transformed. Elegantly shape shifting into a new era of art auctions, Phillips has not only adapted the auctioneering process, but elevated it to an exciting new territory more apt to serve contemporary audiences.
